As a follow-up to the previous article about an effective morning wake-up routine that strategically protects you from negative influences until you are fully awake, a reader pointed out an interest in a similar post about an appropriate regimen for the period before you sleep. I will take the same approach here, describing various elements of a controlled 20-30 minute ending period to the day. A lot of this portion of the day is meant to be dedicated to clearing up issues before the morning that follows.
Spend 2 Minutes Judging The Day’s Success
Connected to the morning point of spending 2 minutes planning or writing out the day’s side goals that are forgotten and remembered at times, is this follow-up point of taking another 2 minutes to assess how it worked out. If you look back at your day and notice that something went unfavorably, and that you could have prevented or circumvented it, this is the time to set that concept in your mind. You have to actively think about the error. This will cause you to either correct the mistake the next day, or if that doesn’t occur as well, you will eventually get frustrated enough with the error to correct it some point, as long as you keep acknowledging it. Our minds don’t like to feel stupid, so reflecting on an error in action daily until it is corrected is a fine way to use built-in ego responses for positive change.
Eat Minimally
It is often said that the biggest meal of the day should be breakfast, followed by a somewhat smaller lunch, and a medium-sized or light dinner, to fit in well with the way the body processes food effectively. In this case, the period of time near when sleep is soon to arrive is mainly left for drinking water, or eating small amounts of food. At the same time, going to sleep hungry is not a preferred case.
Thermal Image During Sleep
According to a short experiment performed by Professor Drew Dawson at the Centre for Sleep Research at the University of Southern Australia, monitoring brain waves, eye movements, and teeth grinding during the sleep of 2 individuals who ate a full meal 3 hours before sleeping and 2 individuals who ate a full meal right before sleeping, it was found that the late meal-eaters missed out on a fair amount of early deep sleep, which is the stage where the body rests and repairs. An added note to this is that eating the same amount of food 3 hours before sleeping or right before sleeping doesn’t have a connection with making the person gain weight. If the amount of kilojoules in the food is the same, the only affect from eating right before sleeping is the negative affects for relaxed sleeping and the deep sleep stage.
Organize Lightly
This attaches to the note about cleaning up quickly in the morning to make for the two periods of the day that you would want to use for making your space inviting to thoughts beyond “There is a mess here.” By performing quick cleaning/organizing after waking up and right before sleeping, that leaves the rest of the day free of a mess for action to occur.
Head To Sleep With Calmness
After you have already thought about the errors of the day, and how they can be improved up on the next day, or within a few days, pack up those thoughts and leave them for later. Once that is done, you have to package it as a completed process, and then head toward sleep with the thought that you have made progress in reflection, and that can only be seen as a positive. Avoid letting yourself go to sleep partially nervous, because that which is keeping you nervous is not worthy of your anguish. To prove this, use hindsight. If you look back on a past time when you slept with nervousness regarding the eventful next day, you will see that it provided no value. In fact, I would relate this to any time of the day, because if something is a cause of worry, it is not worth worrying over, and is worth taking action on when time permits.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
You used my idea! Awesome!
And nice of you to find research on eating before sleeping. From time to time, I’ve heard the notion that “it’s what you eat after dinner that makes you fat” (or word to that effect), and it has always sounded like an old wives tale to me… after all, calories are calories… they don’t become magic-extra-fattening-calories if you eat them after dinner.
I have a couple of sugesstions for “heading to sleep with calmness”:
(1) Make sure the sleeping area is dark… when our bodies are in darkness we actually generate different hormones that help us sleep better. It doesn’t have to be pitch black; “nightlight” dark is good.
(2) If you are a person who tends to have alot on your mind when heading to sleep, keep a notepad by the bed and use it to write down your thoughts, questions, plans, and concerns–getting them off of your mind so you can sleep in peace. This, to me, is a physical method of doing what is suggested in the last paragraph… that is, a physical way to “pack up those thoughts and leave them for later”.
With your thoughts packed, you can then “rest in peace”…. Oh, wait, maybe that’s not the best phrase to use there.
Karl: It certainly was a fine continuation concept that you had provided.
I saw quite a bit of research material that was focused on how people of different occupations that leave them short on sleep are effected by the changes, or how their sleep cycle effects their ability to do their job safely. I’d say it is often the case that we solidify more beneficial routine actions after seeing definitive research explaining the effects of one choice vs. another.
Your added suggestions are useful ones indeed. They might as well be additions to the post.