One of my favorite pastimes is sleeping (and that also explains an awful lot). Unfortunately, for the past couple of years, I have suffered bouts of fairly severe insomnia. Part of it is menopause (and to think I couldn’t wait for menopause because I was so done with having my period – well, you know what they say: be careful what you wish for…) and part of it is depression. I’ve suffered from depression off and on for close to twenty years, but nothing bad enough to put me on meds for extended periods of time (until now, that is). However, I lost my mother and brother, on the same day, in August of 2016 and it’s kind of been all downhill from there. I am now suffering from clinical depression and PTSD (I was there when the police found them dead) and my sleep patterns are complete crap. I’ll have a couple or three weeks of normalcy where I’ll go to bed after my son leaves for work – he’s on the graveyard shift – and I’ll sleep through the night, waking around 7:00 or 8:00 a.m., just before Chris walks in. But then, for some mysterious reason, I’ll start feeling sleepy later and later until I’m usually awake to greet Chris when he comes home.
According to my handy dandy Fitbit, my son’s Christmas gift to me, for the week ending January 20, I slept a grand total of 36 hours; that was a combination of daytime naps and a few hours here and there that I managed to snatch at night. If you take into consideration that a person who sleeps 8 hours a night, seven nights a week, clocks in at 56 hours, I’m sorely lacking in my zzzzzzz’s. And, as if that wasn’t bad enough, not getting proper sleep screws with your weight loss. Yay.
I never realized until this go around with Weight Watchers how important sleep is to your weight loss progress. Of course, sleep is important for your health, both physical and mental, but getting a decent amount of sleep every night helps move the needle on the scale downward. The numbers on my scale have not been going anywhere very often these days, particularly since the end of November, when I was briefly hospitalized for my pulmonary hypertension. I had been on a pretty decent (drug induced) sleep schedule but the hospital stay blew all that right out of the water. I haven’t been sleeping much since then, even with the anti-depressants I was put on in early November to try to help me sleep. Talk about crazy-making!
I know that sleep helps your body heal from the beating you give it in your day to day life and that it helps you brain recharge, but I don’t know exactly what magic it does to help you lose weight (and, right now, I’m too wiped to do the research. It’s 7:16 a.m. and I spent most of the night washing dishes and cleaning up my kitchen. My mind, she is tired – I’m surprised I’m coherent enough to write this blog post. The spelling errors are plentiful, however; I guess that speaks to how fried my brain is. Good thing I proofread and ruthlessly edit everything I write). So, to whatever the mechanics are that allows sleep to help you lose weight, I say bravo! When you’re fighting the battle of the bulge, anything that lowers those numbers on the scale is an ally.
So, I’m going to keep taking my anti-depressants but I’m going to look into natural remedies that I can take to see if I can start sleeping like a (semi) normal person again. It’s not just the weight loss that concerns me, although that’s number one on the list, but I generally feel like shit and I sometimes have trouble remembering things, like what day it is or what I had to eat in the morning or the day before. Lack of sleep is a bitch, my people. It can screw with you in so many ways, both big and little. It’s also a bit scary when you haven’t slept for many hours and you can almost feel your body shutting down on you. Not fun. It also makes you lethargic and you don’t feel like going downstairs to get the mail, let alone take a hike with your trusty little Walking Dude. That certainly impedes any weight loss. So, you’re basically screwed coming and going when you can’t sleep.
If anyone has any non-pharmaceutical ways of helping them get to sleep, please share with me. I’m reaching the end of my rope. I was kind of crazy to begin with (in a good way) but now I’m approaching crazy of the not good kind because I can’t sleep. Lord knows we don’t need that!
Until next time, remember: every day is a chance to hit that reset button…
The Reset Button: A WW Journey 