I am truly affected by my sleep.

Like all toddler parents, I have had periods of minimal if any sleep, you end up drained of energy all day. I remember the first time my firstborn slept for 6 hours straight  - I remember the feeling very clearly. I woke up looking around thinking, oh is this what the world can look like, felt like I had gone from black and white to color screen - do you remember that feeling?

Now my children are a little older and usually sleep the whole night.  However, there are still nights I have to wake up, or the nights I eat late or drink a little too much wine, or the nights I get no rest in my body and wake up at 0500… the next day I do not feel in the top or more correctly drained of energy.

The interesting thing, as the person I am, I  have been activating a lot of social jetlags - ie dinners that end far too late with friends. But in the last few years, I have consciously tried to adapt to the body. I have tried to work more WITH the body than against it.

Now, this weekend I ate a little too much and a little too late - what happened in the morning, I clearly felt tired - a little bit hangover in some way. I checked my sleep measurement - yep my REM sleep had gone down from the usual 2 hours to 1 hour. During REM we detox the organs. No wonder I woke up "hangover" the body was not ready and needed a little more recovery.

When I had a five-day fast last week (spring detox), during one of the days I woke up 0510 AM. The following fasting day was much tougher, I felt low, hard to motivate me to keep fasting the last day. It was completely different from the other days.

Normally what I have realized,  MY body needs that I go to bed around 22-2230 and get up around 6 then I get 2 hours deep sleep and 2 hours REM sleep. I wake up by myself and ready to receive the day clear and strong mind.

The interesting thing is that there is research that studies this. Here is a very interesting study that shows that even after one bad night's sleep, our innovative thinking and flexible decision making are affected. This study tested ten healthy, highly motivated, and trained participants who underwent the study during 36 hours of study, one group got to sleep the other got no sleep. Then they were exposed to play a realistic test around critical decision making. To succeed, one had to reason critically and perform a number of steps in order for it to be a successful game. The ability to critically reason was not affected by sleep loss, while the performance of the game was significantly weakened after 32-36 hours of sleep loss when sleep deprivation led to inflexible thinking, an increase of the mistakes, and indicated difficulties in adopting to a changed situations. Although those who had a lack of sleep really tried to make an effort, their play failed, unlike those who did not have sleep deprivation.

How do you feel? Have you tested and seen what your body prefers?