Everything Comes At A Cost

When Melanie (not her real name) came to work with me, one of her main goals was fat loss.

What we saw when we looked a bit deeper into her lifestyle habits was that her sleep routines were a big area of opportunity.

Melanie is married, raising two children under the age of 10, and she knows, as many mothers do, that the time you get with your children moves at a rapid pace.

You don’t get those years back.

So, time spent teaching habits, going over homework, feeding, nurturing, cooking, cleaning, etc. in efforts to provide for the household are tasks that feel and often look like a more than full-time job.

And when the end of the night rolls around, there are the bedtime routines of the children, and that precious amount of space where Melanie can decompress, spend time with her husband and drift off to sleep.

Where on Earth is there time to focus on her health?

I won’t go far into the belief that we “all have the same 24 hours” because, while the clock still moves at the same pace for everyone, what that time looks like is very different from one to another.

In Melanie’s case, we needed to zoom out on those 24 hours, specifically, the waking hours, and find out, where can we possibly increase the time spent sleeping, so that not only is she getting longer, more restful sleep, but that the remaining hours in the day are as productive as possible.

What we saw was that, if Melanie slept longer, her cravings for sweets was reduced.

If the cravings were reduced, she was eating in a deficit.

If she was eating in a deficit, she saw better progress on the scale.

If she saw better progress on the scale, she felt better about herself.

If she felt better about herself, she felt she had more mental and physical bandwidth to work out.

And if she worked out, she improved her energy levels for the day.

Nearly everything improved in the span of a day, if and when, she made sleep hygiene her number one focus.

There’s a caveat though…

Focus in one place might mean sacrificing time in another.

It might mean slightly less time with her children getting them to bed, or reading shorter bedtime stories.

It might mean slightly less time with her husband.

It might mean slightly less time decompressing (or doomscrolling) on her own.

10 minutes here, 10 minutes there, 20 minutes elsewhere…just to improve her sleeping time by 30-40 minutes each night.

It wasn’t a plan meant for perfection.

It was a plan that, when it worked, improved the next day by significant measure.

And maybe sleep isn’t YOUR issue.

Maybe it’s fitting in time to exercise.

Maybe it’s finding time to meal prep.

Maybe it’s carving out 30 minutes of peace, meditation, or time otherwise to yourself where you can focus on just you.

Time spent in one area is time taken away from someplace else.

Everything comes at a cost.

And this is not a post telling you what you SHOULD do.

It’s a post to get you to explore what’s missing in your life and how to add it back in.

Because if other areas of your life are going to be compromised, make sure it’s in exchange for something that truly benefits you.

(Photo courtesy of Alexandr Ledogorov)