Health
The Importance of Stable Sleep
The best indicator of how well your day is going to go is how well you slept last night. Sleep is the biggest contributor to your overall health, your happiness, your energy to make it through the day, and your emotional health. For such a big deal, we don’t spend enough time working to improve our sleep.
I’ve written on sleep a number of times, including on sleep hygiene and bedtime routines. I know that good sleep is important in my life because it’s the best way for me to manage my chronic migraines. Deviating from my sleep schedule, taking too many naps, or getting poor quality sleep is a recipe for a migraine that will knock me out for days.
The single biggest challenge facing anyone who’s attempting to improve their quality of sleep is bringing stability into the equation. The best thing that you can do for your body is to go to sleep at the same time and wake up at the same time, every day. This will not only help your body adjust it’s processes to produce enough melatonin at the right time in the evening so that you’ll fall asleep fast, but it will help wake you up at the right time in the morning without the need for an alarm clock.
Getting into this habit of stable sleep is a challenge for two reasons. First, we love to sleep in on the weekends. Second, our schedule precludes us from having a convenient schedule.
Let’s look at the weekends. We know that going to bed at the same time and waking up at the same time is an important factor in good sleep, but we’ve come to see the weekends as cheat days. There usually isn’t anything prompting you to get out of bed as early as you’d need to in order to get ready for work. In fact, during the week you may have “lost” some sleep and are trying to make some of it up. The problem is that when you disrupt your sleep pattern, it’s hard to get back into it. This just ends up making Monday morning absolutely dreadful.
Instead of pushing back your wake-up time on Saturday and Sunday, look at that time as bonus “you time.” If you’re getting up at 5 and your family doesn’t start stirring until 8, that’s three hours for you to do whatever you want. You could read the paper, watch a movie, get ahead on chores, or play a game. You can literally do anything you want without the guilt of stealing time from your family.
The other big challenge is when life keeps you from having an ideal schedule. In a perfect world, your day would have nice boundaries that would allow you to go to bed around 10 or 11 and wake up between 6 or 7. In reality, your job demands might have you starting at various times and your evenings are full of shuttling kids around, meetings, activities, projects, and even shows that you want to watch. If you’re in some career fields, you might even work in the evenings.
My best advice is to look at the past couple of months and find times that have consistently been safe. For Alison and I, we’ve found that 9pm to 5am is generally “safe.” A 5am wakeup for her will get her anywhere she needs to be on time. A 9pm bedtime is guaranteed, except for when she has night call. Is going to bed at 9pm convenient? No. I’d rather stay up a bit later, especially when Benedict goes to bed around 7:30pm. However, I want stability in my sleep, and I want to go to sleep with her, so that’s what we’ve done.
Stable sleep can be challenging to achieve and it certainly requires no small effort. However, achieving and continuing to achieve stable sleep pays off day after day.
Eat for Success
As a husband, your health takes on a new importance. As a single man, it didn’t matter much whether you were at the top of your game or slacking off. As a married man, you have people depending on you. Your health is tied to the length of days that you get to spend with your family. While exercise is a big part of your overall health picture, one thing that can’t be neglected is your diet.
We have a pretty unhealthy view of the word “diet.” It either means pain, hunger, or desperation, depending on whom you ask. The fact is, we’re all on a diet. Your diet is the total of all that you eat. It can be a very healthy diet or a very unhealthy one. It could be high in this, low in that, or perfectly balanced.
The fact remains, no matter how much exercise you do, if you don’t control your intake, you’ll never reach your goals.
The best way to get started with a healthier diet is by menu planning. Having a plan for the week, and a list when you go grocery shopping, can significantly help you get back and stay on track. When you have a list, you’re not at the mercy of sudden whims. Grocery shopping becomes a destination, instead of a journey.
Another really successful tactic is to use a food diary. It can be a pain, but research shows that those who use a food diary meet their goals more quickly and more consistently. There are even plenty of apps out there, if that’s your thing. I personally use MyFitnessPal. Their database is huge, so the actual keeping of the diary isn’t too big of an inconvenience.
Finally, if you really need to get moving on your goals, the absolute best thing you can do is to get a friend (or your spouse!) involved. Just like having a gym buddy can keep you on track, the accountability of a friend can be the difference between success and defeat.
If you keep eating junk, you’ll end up with no energy. So hit the Internet, grab some fresh new recipes, and reach your health goals!
Family Walks
One of the best things that your family can do together is take an evening walk. Not only is a walk in the evening a great stress reliever, it can significantly increase the amount of time that you spend together each day.
When I was in high school, we lived in a neighborhood that had quite a few walkers. Each evening, almost without fail, a family would walk by. The group was a man, his two sons, and their dog. If we’d catch each other, we would exchange a polite wave. I could see how intently they were talking. For them, it was a time to regroup, to share the experiences of the day, and to connect.
Alison’s hometown is very much an exercise community. On any day, and really at any time, you’ll see people out jogging, friends power walking, and families on a stroll.
Lately Alison and I have begun to take up the practice of an evening family walk.
Health professionals will tell you that 30 minutes of brisk walking each day is the right amount of exercise that we all need. There are a few specific reasons why I think family walks are the perfect idea for you and your family.
• Regular exercise increases the length of productive life together. We all want to be healthy and, if you’re like me, you want to be healthy enough to enjoy the golden years! By taking the time to exercise and maintain your body now, you’ll increase the time that you can be active in retirement. Injury and illness can stop anyone in their tracks. I want to keep them at bay for as long as possible.
• Spouses encouraging each other to exercise is a loving act. When you and your wife work out together, you’re communicating something very special. You’re mutually taking care of yourselves so that you can be more able to take care of one another.
• Walks are another opportunity to talk. You and your wife spend most of your days apart. If you count the hours from when you’re both home in the evening to bedtime, you spend very little of your days together during the week. By adopting the practice of a family walk, you can decrease the idle time in front of the TV and increase the amount of communication.
• Walks can give you better sleep. When you exercise, you sleep better. There’s nothing like the feeling of crawling into bed when your body is tired in a good way.
In order for the practice of a family walk to be successful, it needs to be part of the routine. There should be few exceptions.
The more opportunity you give yourself to have meaningful conversation with your wife, the more opportunity you give your marriage to grow.
Why You Should Meditate
I think one of the most devastating things in our modern era is that we’ve stopped being a reflective people. Instead of taking time to think about past actions or how we can improve as people, we run from one thing to the next. The consequence is that we keep making the same mistakes over and over again. This is why our confessions sound eerily familiar and we keep getting into the same fights with our spouses.
One of the techniques that have been recommended to me for migraine management is taking time to meditate daily. I don’t do it very faithfully, but when I have taken the time to meditate, I’ve gained tremendous benefit. Stress is an ugly thing. When you have a stressful event in your life, it’s a distraction. It grows. Your mind inflates it to unreasonable levels.
When we meditate, we combat stress. Things get put back into perspective, into their proper place in our lives. We consider our recent actions and evaluate ourselves based on a set of standards. Am I loving my wife well? Am I giving good example to those around me? Am I being the person I want to be?
We need to take time each day in silence. We need to keep our live in balance and perspective. We need physical space to free up our consciousness. Our brains need some down time each day that doesn’t involve mindlessly watching TV.
I’ve found meditation to be an excellent form of prayer. We all seek a sense of peace in our lives. During mediation, when you give yourself permission to relax, you get a glimpse into that peace. When you bring everything back to the center, you can physically feel weight coming off of your shoulders.
Practicing meditation is a lot like going to confession. You unload that which is bringing you down, you gain a better understanding of who you are as a person. It’s not as good as confession, but both are necessary.
Getting started is simple. Carve out 10 minutes of your day and find a quiet place. I like to use the iOS app “Simply Being” to help me through this time. During these 10 minutes, take a look at your life. Things will come up to the surface. Deal with them and then let them go. This is a time to be vulnerable, this is a time to be realistic.
We all need permission to let go of past mistakes, hurts, and stresses. Give yourself that permission today.
Take Control of Your Health
There are some things in the world that we have absolute control over. Your health is one of them.
We all have soft spots in our health. We have factors that we acquired genetically. The human body is a complex machine, and complex machines break. The great thing is that for almost any ailment, there are choices we can make that can significantly improve our medical conditions and overall quality of life.
At the end of the day, it’s up to you to be in control of your health. Staying in good health requires work, and work is sometimes the hard choice. You can either do the hard work and reap the benefits, or you can just float down the river and deal with the consequences.
We’re incredibly lucky to live in the information era. Most of the information that we can access is garbage, but there are still a good number of websites and publications that have high quality resources. No matter how obscure or rare a condition, you can find someone else who has it and a physician who’s having success in treating it. We can find information on the benefits of exercise, different forms of exercise, and raw data that proves that a 30 minute walk once a day can make a world of difference.
Benedict and I take a morning walk each day and then come back to the house for a 7 minute workout. It gets me the energy and exercise I need, it gives us a great time together, it gets fresh air in his lungs, and it helps him explore the world. For those keeping score, that’s a win-win-win-win-win.
You have access to a care team of medical professionals. While they have a tremendous amount of experience and knowledge, they can’t help you if you don’t take an active role in your health. Ask questions, understand what’s going on, and help plan out your path to health.
Be involved with your wife! Be an active participant in her healthcare, and rely on her wisdom in your own. Sometimes you’ll both be in the same appointment and walk out with two completely different impressions of what just happened.
The point is this, and it’s very simple. Our health is a gift and it’s up to us to preserve and improve it. No matter what’s going wrong, you can always make it better.
Your health isn’t just for your benefit, it’s for your family.
Dedicate Yourself to Wellness
We have just one chance to take care of our bodies. Are you maximizing your physical wellbeing?
Finding time to exercise can be a challenge. It’s not so much that there isn’t enough time in the day, it’s that we have other things that we’d rather be doing. So, when it’s between sleeping in an extra hour or getting up and going for a walk, the decision is often all too easy.
I’ve found a great time for Benedict and I to go grab some fresh air. Each morning we go for a walk after Alison goes to work. It’s still (mostly) cool and it just seems like the right time. Plus, I hate taking multiple showers the same day, so exercising before getting ready for the day is perfect for me.
Having good health is something that we take for granted. Unfortunately for us, health, once lost, can’t be easily regained.
So what does that mean for us and our families? We need to be proactive instead of reactive!
A lifestyle of wellness has many benefits:
• Fewer illnesses
• Better resilience to stress
• Better attitude
• More energy
I used the word “ lifestyle” for a reason. All of our decisions (activities, food, etc) add up to our overall wellness. So eat that ice cream, just maybe two scoops this time. Get that extra sleep in, just make sure you go for a 30 minute walk at some point during the day.
Our health is cause and effect. If you make good choices, you’ll reap the benefits.
Fatigue is the Worst
Fatigue is the worst, especially when you have a family depending on you.
One of the many changes that I experienced as a new Dad was the virtual end of sick days. This will be even more true when Alison begins her residency next month. It’s not even just the regular sickness that can get you down. Fatigue of any kind is killer. All you want to do is lay around, but you can’t because people are depending on you.
Fatigue is hard to overcome when it starts. Your bed calls to you all day long as your spouse, your children and your to do list call you to action. So how can you beat this killer?
• Regular exercise. Exercise solves many of our bodily and mental problems. A great thing that I’ve found is the simple act of taking a walk can do the trick. Not only will you have more energy and be more alert, you’ll physically feel better!
• Go to bed on time and wake up on time. Our bodies are really cool. They have something called the Circadian rhythm. Basically it’s your internal clock. If you go to bed at generally the same time and wake up generally at the same time you’ll have better sleep and wake up more energized.
• Keep your routines going. The more you can stick to your routine, the more resistant to fatigue you’ll be. Fatigue tries to lure you into laziness. When you miss your routine, you feel “off.” So rob fatigue of this effective weapon!
Fatigue will ruin your day. So stick to a routine, stay on top of your sleep, and exercise and you’ll have a much more pleasant tomorrow.
Mutual Wellness
One of the best things you can do for your wife is to take care of your own health. Once you lose it, it’s extremely difficult to get it back.
One of my favorite activities to do with Alison is taking an evening walk. It’s generally a nice pace with Benedict in his stroller. We don’t do it often, but there’s something extremely relaxing about it. Not only are we connecting about our day and lives, we’re also helping each other care for our physical health.
As husbands, we have the responsibility to care for our family. One of the dimensions that we especially need to monitor is our family’s health. We should all strive to maintain each other’s health and wellness.
The great thing about marriage is that you have a partner for everything! Spouses should support each other in making healthy lifestyle choices.
• Eating right. Dieting isn’t a temporary thing, it’s a daily thing. Enjoy everything in moderation. You and your wife can work together on eating right by limiting the meals that you eat out, planning fresh meals to cook at home, and avoiding over-indulgence.
• Exercising together. Working out with your wife can be thrilling. Not only do you feel good from the physical act of exercising, you get the added mental benefit that you’re both taking care of yourselves. There’s nothing more loving or caring than encouraging each other to stay in good health.
• Managing illness. Illness will happen in your marriage, especially later in life. You’re also your wife’s partner in managing illness. When it happens, you’ll work together to manage it as best you can.
Our health is a precious gift. By working with your spouse, you can both ensure that you’ll have many more happy, healthy years together.
Sleep Hygiene
Sleep. We all need it and many of us don’t get enough of it. It affects every area of our daily life and yet we don’t spend much time trying to improve it.
I am a very process driven person. If I have a routine, I can set goals and make sure everything that I need to do gets done. For a long time, I didn’t have a good sleep routine. I’d run, run, run and then jump into bed and wonder why I couldn’t fall asleep. The problem was that I didn’t tell my body that it should get ready for sleep. Our bodies have a biological process for restful sleep, but that process can only start if we give ourselves subtle cues. So I developed a bedtime routine that now involves serious quality time with my wife, Alison.
When I don’t get a good night sleep, I drag. I get grouchy. I’m very irritable. So getting a solid night sleep is very important.
Light is a major cue for our bodies. In the evening, low light causes our brains to release melatonin, which promotes good sleep. Things like TVs, computers, and mobile phones produce a blue hue that turns off the melatonin release. Planning to avoid those devices can help you get a great night sleep.
I start getting ready about an hour before bed. I finish up most of what I need to do on my phone, I go into the bathroom and brush my teeth. I then get into bed and turn on only a bedside lamp. I then pray for 15 minutes and read for 30 minutes. About 20 minutes into my reading, my eyes are getting pretty heavy.
After the 45 minutes of reading and prayer, I turn off the lights and cuddle with Alison until it’s time to roll over and drift off to sleep.
What is really great is that Alison has started to join me with the prayer and reading time. After a day apart, we have quality time together. The pre-sleep cuddle time fills that particular want of hers and makes the perfect end to the day.
A sleep routine is good. A sleep routine that builds your marriage? Well, that’s even better.
Plateaus
Over the past year or so, I’ve been on a mission to lose weight. To date, I’m down about 26 lbs with 10 more to go.
One of the difficult things about weight loss is that you will get some really good momentum going, but then you’ll plateau. Your body will hold steady at a certain weight and only fluctuate a pound or two.
These plateaus separate the men from the boys. The boys get frustrated, give up, and go back to their old habits. Six months later, they’re back to where they started, if not further. The men persevere. They understand the cycle of weight loss has some lulls, but that’s the time to dig in, not quit.
The same thing can be said about marriage.
You’ll have those “springtimes” where you and your wife are in sync and everything is moving on smoothly. You’ll also have “winters” that are long and difficult.
The winters are like the plateaus. They’re temporary, but in the moment they seem like they will never end.
So what are you. A boy or a man?