Throwing off my winter funk

You ever feel like this?

All winter I feel like I’ve been in a funk.  I get between 7.5 and 8 hours of sleep every night, but I wake up tired every morning.  By noon my head feels heavy and hazy.  It is a hard feeling to explain, but I feel as though I’m walking through a dimly lit tunnel.  I feel like my body is confined, like I’m not free to move about or think as clearly and easily as I ought to be.  I’m not depressed, no it is not that.  I’m not generally prone to sadness.

About a month ago I won a Zeo mobile sleep monitor.  I occasionally wear it to bed at night and it tracks my sleep.  It tells me how much deep sleep, REM, light sleep, and awake time I have at night.  I’ve always known that, in general, I don’t sleep comfortably.  According to “Zeo”, as I lovingly call him,  I was getting fewer than 40 minutes of deep sleep each night (the average deep sleep for a woman my age being 1-2 hours).  Since deep sleep is the most restorative of the sleep levels, and I wasn’t getting much of it, I awoke every morning feeling hungover (I think…I’ve never had a real hangover :)).

Poor sleep quality.  Blah.  It catches you in a vicious cycle.  Not the kind of cycle you want to be caught in.  No, most people don’t enjoy feeling like their head has been slammed into by a truck on a daily basis. It is a difficult cycle to break though because it can be hard to pinpoint the cause/causes to your depressed sleep cycle.

I found mine solution, though!  I immediately went from getting fewer than 40 minutes of deep sleep each night to getting just over an hour!  The solution was easy, but takes constant motivation and commitment. Exercise!!!

Since we moved here I’ve been at a loss about a good way to exercise. I didn’t have a bike, didn’t have a jogging stroller, the nearest gym is too far for me to justify driving to workout; what to do??? Then about 3 weeks ago I got a new jogging stroller/bike trailer (review coming tomorrow!!!)!!  I was so excited! From the first day of exercise my sleep quality improved!

It was a miracle!!!!

Exercise!!! Who knew, right?  I mean how many times a day do we hear that exercise affects our mood, can actually give us more energy, and will help our bodies be healthier, and, still, we just sit on our rear all day and do whatever we’re doing.  I’m going from being very sedentary so I’m taking it pretty easy. I run for about 2 minutes and then walk 1 minute with a 40 minute workout total.

I think one of the tricks is not to over do it.  I used to overexercise and then I’d feel like crap the rest of the day. Since I’ve started doing these easy runs I have more energy throughout the day, I sleep better, I am more patient with my kids (who’d have thought that would be a benefit), and have an overall more positive attitude.