Sleep Better. Resolve Better.

There is enough pressure picking New Year’s Resolutions in a new year. Well, this is a new decade!

Looking back at the 10s, if you feel like you consistently fell short on your New Year’s Resolutions, maybe it is time to take a close look at your sleep. Most people’s resolutions have something to do with improving. Sleep is literally when you improve, both your body, and your mind. Body, during deep (slow-wave) sleep. Mind, during both deep and REM sleep.

Is your New Year’s resolution the most popular choice of a diet, or losing weight?

Sleep deprivation is known to make you feel hungrier, increases appetite, reduces metabolism, and invites increased portion sizes (due to increase/decrease in ghrelin/leptin hormones), makes you crave and choose foods high in calories, carbs, and fat (increased stress hormone cortisol upregulates food reward centers, coupled with poor decision making due to a dulled out frontal lobe), and makes you store calories as fat in all the wrong places (lack of processing, and responsiveness to, insulin). In short, it means the odds in an already uphill battle are even more unfairly stacked up against you.

Is your New Year’s resolution quitting smoking or reducing alcohol intake?

Similar to the challenges with diets, sleep deprivation dulls activity in the frontal lobe, which is responsible for decision making and self-control. This combined with the brain’s reward centers being revved up searching for the “feels good” for both sleep and withdrawal, makes it increasingly hard to control cravings.

Is your New Year’s resolution spending more time with friends and family, grandkids, kids, finding someone to have kids with?

Personal relationships suffering is one of the highest reported life symptoms of insomnia, and one of people’s biggest goals to fix in the new year. Many people who go through Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia (CBTi) find themselves able to invest more time in their relationships as the therapy progresses. Also, very few people list “someone grumpy and irritable” as their first date turn-ons.

The resolutions above, and other resolutions like finding a better job, or learning a new skill, require positive projection, feeling refreshed and adventurous, and most importantly finding elusive time. Sleep deprivation increases the effort required for daily tasks, tiring everyone out, leaving little precious time, or energy, for self-improvement.

So, if your other resolutions aren’t working out, maybe they are worthy choices, but you (and they) could really benefit from either resolving to prioritize sleep, if you are a healthy sleeper, or finally going through sleep therapy (CBTi) to address your insomnia, if you are an insomniac. If you choose CBTi NOW, you could be sleeping considerably better by the end of February/March, and have 9+ whole months to birth and nurture your other resolutions.

The SLEEP RESOLUTION can be a true friend to all your other resolutions.

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