Would you like to join the 2021 sleep improvement challenge?  With a bit of consistent tweaking of your bedtime routines and lifestyle 2021 can be the year you finally sleep like a BOSS. 

You wouldn’t go out and run a marathon without any training, right? Consider these 2020 challenges pre-training.  Let’s start our training for our 2021 sleep improvement challenge early so we can all rest, heal and be energized for the new year ahead. 

When I owned my two health and nutrition stores, I used to give talks in the community about the top five reasons people would come into a health and nutrition store.  People would come in looking for help with sleep issues, elimination issues, fatigue issues, a desire to lose weight or gain weight.  They came in for many other health and lifestyle reasons as well, but these five issues I discussed with customers daily.

I ranked sleep issues number one.  Because lack of proper sleep has an impact on the other four issues and so many other health conditions.  Sleep is critically important for every process and system in our bodies.  Poor sleep negatively impacts both our mental and physical health.

In these series of blogs, I want to challenge you to a monthly test, to try some of the many tips that can help you develop better sleep. 

There are hundreds of top 5, top 10 or even top 20 ways to fall asleep lists.  If you have poor sleep, you may have read some of them.  Maybe you even tried one or two of the tips.  If the tip or techniques you tried did not work right away, maybe you gave up.  Or maybe it worked just a bit and you did not add another layer and keep working on it.  That is perfectly understandable.  Life gets in the way; we all are super busy these days not to mention stressed out. 

Figuring out your individual routine to solve your sleep problems may take some time.  Sometimes you can get lucky and the first thing you try works and sometimes it’s the layering of multiple things that does the trick.

Before we get started with the first challenge, we should probably do a warm up.  There are a couple of things you may want to check on before you get started with these sleep challenges.  Because if one or both of these are an issue for you, it may slow your progress as you try out some of the tips and techniques thru the challenges.  Being aware of them will make that slower progress less frustrating.

In regards to lack of sleep and poor sleep, we are looking for improvement with these challenges.  We are looking for better not perfect.  It is normal to have nights of poor sleep, it’s just not healthy to have that every night.  The more restful nights of sleep we can string together, the greater the benefit to your overall health.

Are you taking an over the counter or prescription medication that interferes with sleep?  Take a close look at the over the counter and prescription medications, even the supplements you may be taking regularly and make sure that sleep interference is not a side effect.  If you’re not sure how to do that?  Just take them to your pharmacy and ask the technician.  They should be able to help you see if those medications have “may disturb sleep” as a side effect.  Then take that up with your doctor as soon as possible, see if there is an over the counter or prescription medication that helps you and does not have this side effect.

Do you have a condition that has a symptom that interferes with sleep?  Something like chronic pain, sleep apnea, restless legs syndrome, extreme stress or depression.  If you’re not sure how to find if a condition you have interferes with normal sleep.  You can ask your doctor; you will want to discuss with your doctor or naturopathic medical doctor that you have sleep issues that might be related to your condition and work on solving those issue together.  You can also research your illness online and see if sleep disruption is one of the symptoms. 

I will be posting a new monthly sleep challenge the first Friday of every month here on the blog and posting a video about sleep issues on my YouTube channel.  Let’s make 2021 the year we all get the healing rest we need.  Let’s take control over our sleep to the best of our ability and develop new sleep habits that will serve us well for the rest of our lives.

Sleep improvement challenge 2021, sleep is our quest, mental and physical health will be our reward.