For many Americans, sleep has become somewhat of a taboo to master. We sleep too much then we don’t sleep enough and then we go back and forth and get stressed trying to figure it out. Even if that doesn’t pertain to you it’s a healthy look at recognizing your own body when it needs more sleep.
Signs That You Need More Sleep
You Feel Bloated
Now, this could be a number of factors like dehydration, overeating, not exercising enough but in one of our previous articles we talked about the effects of cortisol. Your body has a stress hormone called cortisol that kicks in when the body is getting too stressed out. This regulates our body from overworking, kicking things into gear when we need to move more, also known as the “fight or flight” hormone.
The number one thing you can do to regulate your stress is to simply do that, regulate. Keep things as consistent and as regular as possible because stress only happens when irregularities enter in your life.
You Wake Up Tired
We all hammer the gym super hard and the next day feel sore from the workout, that’s common. What isn’t normal is waking up from a normal day of the work week and you are feeling dependent upon coffee or literally catching yourself falling back asleep. The sad truth is that undersleeping happens more often than not in our life and as a nation we need to change this.
You can’t make up all of your sleep in one night. Don’t get fooled by the athletes saying they sleep in on the weekend and recover their bodies, it isn’t true. Especially don’t think because you slept on average 1 hour less each day of the week that you can sleep 5 extra hours over the weekend and be safe.
Our bodies are a product of the daily habits we do each day. And over time the extremities get revealed if we encounter imbalance for too long. For example, if you are always eating that midnight snack that exceeds the daily limit of calories you’re supposed to intake, then most likely you will start seeing that stick to your body in fat leading you to gain weight… Obviously we don’t want that, so if you get to the point of waking up exhausted, put the phone down and start going to sleep earlier. Your body will thank you.
When You Work Out You Feel Weaker
Again sharing this knowing the exceptions of lack of diet and weight simply being too heavy, our body gets depleted of energy faster when we haven’t fully recovered. Our body needs to recover and if you aren’t getting the proper sleep and time to recover then it will be costly.
If you feel kind of “cob-webby” in your muscles when you go to the gym and you clearly can’t lift the same weights or run as hard as you want to on the treadmill, you are probably having an inefficient amount of hours to sleep.
Professional athletes sleep on average 10 hours a day to have that extra recovery time. The average American only needs 7 to 9 hours of sleep. If you don’t know where to start on knowing how much sleep you’ve been getting, start creating a schedule for your sleep so you at least have a trajectory of what your sleep will entail.
You Experience Memory Loss
Connecting this to cortisol, our bodies can get so stressed out that we have improper blood flow, especially to the brain because it’s overworking. Our whole bodies are overworking… If we reach a certain limit our bodies can enter survival mode and start storing all of the bad stuff we don’t need that our bodies think we need like extra fat, possibly a certain number of blood cells, water, etc… If you are having a hard time focusing or remembering simple things, there’s a good chance you need to just call it quits and get some sleep.
Some theories argue that whenever you are feeling like you need a nap, you should. But never more than an hour or else you will trigger your body to enter REM sleep. Other theories argue that stress is the key component to irregular sleep so making sure to provide stress reduction and to find activities that you can habitually do to reduce stress.
Takeaways
If you aren’t sure if you are getting enough sleep, start with taking an assessment on your body, your habits and the performance of the things you normally do each day. If you are having a hard time focusing, retaining basic information or are waking up feeling like you just got hit with a truck, then it’s time to get more sleep. If you are so stressed out in life try one of our sleeping supplements to kick start the correction journey and see how things progress from there.
