So, remember how we mentioned that Patrick wants us all to get at least 8 hours of sleep every night? One would think that forcing ourselves to get that much rest would allow us to wake up refreshed and jumping out of bed. But what we've been doing is more like crawling out of bed. For some reason, the body just says, "hey, I like sleep! I want to keep doing this." *Emiko hits snooze button* Emiko has actually learned how to hit the snooze button while still in REM sleep.
The bad news (or bad snooze) is that the first hour of the day is spent in a groggy haze. We shuffle around in the morning going through the motions, weighing our veggies and peeling our eggs, etc. The lack of energy might also be because we are not seeing the results yet, and it's hard to keep feeling excited every day when we can't really imagine our bodies looking any different.
The good news (snooze) is that despite this lack of energy, we know it's important to continue going through the motions, and we are. We've been sticking closely to our diets, struggling through the exercises, and pushing on.
Adrian found this proverb in Buddhism, A Very Short Introduction, the text we are reading for our Buddhist philosophy class:
"Sow an act, reap a habit; sow a habit, reap a character; sow a character, reap a destiny."
We both found this quote to be inspiring, and we hope that it's inspiring for the rest of you as well. Every action we're undertaking right now with this new lifestyle is creating better habits, and will eventually strengthen our characters and not just our bodies.
On that note, we are off to bed for another full night of rest! G'night.
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7 comments:
I'm with you on the not wanting to get up bit. And ever since Patrick said sleep eight hours, I seem to be waking up in the moddle of the night (the thunderstorms haven't helped). Takes a bit of time to get used to it, I guess.
middle, although moddle sounds quite cool - I've decided it means the part when it is just getting light but is still too early to get up.
Feeling low is part of the PCP. You're asking a lot of your body right now and it'll be stubborn at first. But once it gets the picture that you're not going to be changing these patterns anytime soon, it gets itself into a better mood pretty quickly.
Sleep is a hard cycle to change. Do some research about sleeping. Trying slightly different lengths of sleep every night. It's best to wake up at the end of a sleep cycle and if you can time it that way do it. It helps.
Yeah, sleep cycles are amazing. If you time it right you can feel more refreshed from a 4 hour sleep than a 10 hour sleep.
Thanks for the inspiring quote! Nate and Patrick are totally right about timing your sleep cycles. I think I have slightly longer ones than the average person. And I hate that groggy, yucky feeling from waking up in the middle of one. Why is that? It's not even physical pain. Weird.
It all has to do with the type of sleep you wake up in. And of course like everything to do with sleep there are no definite answers because we really don't understand it. But when you are in the long-wave repairing part of your sleep your brain doesn't want to wake up. And when you are in the stronger parts of REM it's the same. But as REM wanes and you approach a new cycle you are in a "lighter" form of sleep. When you wake up at night for no reason it is at this stage. I'm sure everyone has had that random awakening at 4:00-am and they feel 100% rested. Weird I know. I wish I could time my sleep cycles better. Sometimes they seem longer, sometimes shorter.
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