Sleep

Sleep, or lack thereof, can have an impact on your weight. If you don’t get at least 7.5 hours of good sleep a night, your metabolism slows down due to an imbalance of two hormones, grehlin and leptin. Guess which one tells you to eat? Yup, that evil sounding grehlin, and when you are sleep deprived, you have more grehlin and less leptin, the hormone that tells you to stop eating. There’s a good explanation of it in the WebMD story, Coping with Excessive Sleepiness.

Even a short stint of sleep deprivation can throw your body into a pre-diabetic funk as well. Studies, such as this one published in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, demonstrate that in as little as two weeks, a person who stops exercising and eats what they want is resilient if they get over 8 hours of sleep, but if they get fewer than 6 hours a night, they start exhibiting symptoms of Type 2 Diabetes. It’s a stress trifecta designed to destroy your health…You’re under stress so you sleep less and skip exercising in order to catch up with your work and in the process, you eat more to try to boost your energy.

Wow, that’s a double whammy! I’ve been affected in both ways. I don’t sleep very well and often not long enough. I’ve also approached the “pre-diabetic” mark which caused me to do some research on Type 2 Diabetes. The bottom line is that if you develop Type 2 Diabetes, there’s no going back. Type 2 Diabetes is one of the most common diseases in the US and it’s also one of the most preventable.

So, how does one go about getting more and higher quality sleep? Turns out I’ve been doing some things already that should help, namely moving non-sleep activities out of my bedroom. But there’s more (a lot more) and here’s a link to a plethora of ideas: How to Sleep Better. One thing I need to work on is making my room darker at night. Mostly that’s under my control, but I don’t have blinds in my windows, so in the summer, when the sun rises before I choose to, I am at a disadvantage.

Before I can put blinds on my windows, however, I need to finish painting the window frames. Sigh. There’s always a task before a task around here! I practiced by painting the mudroom window (recall, that went on my task list while I was de-cluttering) so at least I now have the mechanics down pat…but I have four, larger windows in my bedroom, so this is a bigger task.

Here, I’ve finally finished. The worst of it is actually getting the tape off…it’s not anywhere as simple as the commercials imply. The paint forms a film which extends on top of the tape and if you simply pull off the tape, a portion of the paint will tear right off of the freshly-painted surface. So, I use a razor blade to cut the paint film at the edge of the tape before pulling off the tape. I have an area or two that didn’t turn out 100%, but hopefully I’m the only one who would notice.

Now, I look at the curtains and decide I may as well wash them while they’re down. After all, the whole point of having washable curtains is to help my allergies by eliminating dust from my bedroom through regular washings. (hah!) But once they are washed and re-hung, they are awfully wrinkled. I don’t much feel like ironing them…my whole adulthood has been about avoiding the iron!

So, now I contemplate if I want to measure for blinds, go to the store and have blinds custom cut, buy them, get out a drill and hang the hardware for the blinds…OR…buy new curtains with blackout properties. Well, that’s a no-brainer! I went a bit on the cheap…cheaper than buying blinds. They claim to block 99% of the light, and maybe they do…maybe 99% isn’t enough! But, this picture was taken at 8 o’clock in the morning.  I think this will work fine for sleeping in on occasion because although light does come through, it’s softer, more diffused than with my old curtains. Another bonus is that the curtains are also designed to reduce energy loss through the window. Theoretically, they also block sound, but I clearly heard the train whistle at 4 a.m. this morning when it passed by half a mile away. I’m guessing that the next time my neighbors throw a party, I will hear it just as clearly as ever.

Here is the result:

Sleep well and find the Joy in the Journey!