I’ve found that it doesn’t matter how long or short a time you’re awake, your best days are when you have some time for conscious relaxation.
Each day and each person is different. Some days you might only need 5 minutes. Other days you might need an hour or more.
By “conscious relaxation” I mean taking time to regenerate, reinvigorate and revitalize. You can’t keep going 24/7 without a break to refresh your mind. Believe me, I’ve tried.
Not having that conscious relaxation time is a recipe for burnout. Sleeping isn’t enough. You have to be awake for it to be effective.
How do you reset? Do you listen to upbeat music? Read a chapter of an inspiring book? Meditate/pray? Play with your children? Spend time with your significant other?
What do you do to keep the spark alight?
I kept a perfect sleeping record from Wednesday night (midnight) to Sunday night (midnight). On Sunday night, I had a really bad headache and was feeling sick, so I slept from 2am to 7:30am. I’m pretty sure the headache and feeling sick was due to a combination of wine, rice (we had Chinese for dinner – yum!) and general dehydration, rather than to “sleep deprivation”. I wasn’t feeling unusually tired and the sleep was a conscious decision I made, especially given I knew both my 8am and 4pm scheduled sleeps were going to be massively interupted.
It meant I was over the not feeling so good by the morning and was able to devote time to family and friends that I may have struggled to do otherwise.
I completely agree! There have been many days when I’ve been pretty tired to exhausted, but because I work in a job where I don’t get any real breaks or times when I’m not ‘on’ (almost always in a one-on-one situation), I found that I couldn’t go to bed until I’d had some conscious alone/relaxation time. If I just went to sleep, I quickly became disillusioned and unhappy with life in general as it felt like my days consisted of work and nothing more.
Couldn’t agree more. Especially when I’m at work, I just need a few minutes to take a deep breath so that I can deal with customers calmly because otherwise I find myself getting easily frustrated and annoyed by things that wouldn’t usually bother me.