Everybody get excited…the weekend is upon us! For most of us, the work week is over and it’s time for a few days of rest and relaxation. Some of us are probably hitting some long training sessions while others may be ramping down or recovering from injuries. Whatever the case is, we would like to encourage you to think about sleep this weekend. Yes, sleep. You know…the thing we all want more of but can’t figure out a way to get it. Most of us would probably fall in the category of getting less sleep than we would like to have. What are we going to do about it? Well, we have started to attack this problem and have a few tips that we want to share.

First of all, did you know that not getting enough sleep is bad for you? I know, there’s one tough guy/girl out in the interwebs saying, “Ahh, I don’t need sleep. All I need is 15 cups of joe and I’m good.” Yeah right. How much are you sleeping? Are you getting 8-9.5 hours of sleep? Well, you should be. Why? We thought you would never ask…

Cortisol, a.k.a. the “stress hormone”. The less and less amounts of quality sleep you get, the higher and higher your level of cortisol will get. So what? Let’s see what cortisol can do:

• Important to susceptibility to disease and how we respond to illness
• Leads to an increase in sodium = higher blood pressure and more taxation on the kidneys
• Weakens connective tissue in our skin and elsewhere (think wrinkles for you ladies out there)
• Releases glucose and fatty acids from the liver and blunts insulin sensitivity
• Effects memory and your ability to handle stress

Holy snack packs Batman! What can we do? The answer to that is get more sleep…and high quality sleep at that. Check out the book Lights Out: Sleep, Sugar, and Survival. It may not be the best written book out there, but there is some great information in there. Here’s a few things we are going to implement:

• A pitch dark bedroom. That’s right…there will be no light at all. No electronics. We’re even covering the light on the smoke alarm. Problem with ambient light sneaking in the window? Buy some blackout drapes. You may be asking why you need a pitch black bedroom. Well, the porphyrin proteins that make up your red blood cells register light and blocks a very important antioxidant hormone/neurotransmitter called melatonin. This process is at the heart of your problem with cortisol.
• Better air quality. We live in an apartment and are constantly having to dust. Throw in two dogs and we probably have a few contaminants swimming around in the air. We have just purchased two air purifiers to help nip this situation in the bud. We’re trying the Oreck and Rabbit Air models.
• Humidity. Colder air is finally arriving in Texas and with it comes dry air. Isis and I are already feeling the effects. Since we’re making the air so fresh and so clean with our purifiers…why not add a little moisture! We could never really find any good reviews on humidifiers, so we went with a basic one from Crane.

Are you sleep-deprived? Here are some questions out of Robb Wolf’s book, The Paleo Solution, that you should ask yourself:

• Do you have problems falling asleep or staying asleep?
• Do you wake up more exhausted than when you went to bed?
• Do you get a second wind in the evening and really only feel awake about the time you should go to bed?
• Are you tired and achy all the time?
• Do you suffer frequent upper-respiratory infections?
• Do you live and die by stimulants such as coffee?
• Have you gained fat in your midsection, despite watching food intake?
• Have you experienced memory problems?
• Do you have problems with depression or seasonal affective disorder?

Get a handle on sleep and you’ll reduce stress, recover faster from exercise, have better memory, have fewer allergies and significantly less inflammation. What are you waiting for?

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