Ideas for Lockdown – Blog 9: Catch up on Sleep?

Sleep – Something in life we all wish that we could get a little bit more of, so why don’t we? Lockdown, to many, has resulted in an increase in the time on our hands , time that a lot of people struggle to fill effectively. Today’s “Ideas for Lockdown blog is going to take a look at our sleeping patterns and how we can use the Lockdown to correct them and catch up on sleep!

Hello and Welcome to Sweeney’s Blogs!

Today’s blog is the ninth blog in the “Ideas for Lockdown” series and is all about using the Lockdown to catch up on Sleep. As I mentioned in the introduction, sleep is something that we all wish we had a little more of in our day to day lives. Sleep allows us to rest, relax and recuperate after a long day at work and gives us a chance to really switch off from the outside world and get some well deserved me time!

Dreams carried out a study last year into the top 10 benefits of a good night sleep. The study found that sleep can have a lot of great effects for both our Physical and Mental Health and Wellbeing, some of which we will be looking at in this blog.

One of the main things that sleep helps us with is reducing our stress levels. Having a good night sleep allows you to go into work with a clear mind, ready for a productive day of work. When we are tired and have not had enough sleep, it is very common for people to be less patient and to be more agitated in general, increasing the stress levels for everybody significantly.

Stress is one of the major factors that also stops people from sleeping well in the first place. The interesting thing with the two is that they do have a two-way relationship. If you are stressed a lot in the day, you will find it a lot harder to switch off and sleep in the night which will result in you being tired and even more stressed during the following day. Trying to relax before bed can make a big change to this and if sleep can truly help lower stress, why don’t we use the extra time on our hands now to catch up on it?

I’m not saying that we have to stay in bed sleeping all day, in fact I would highly encourage against that. What if all it would take was just a slight change to your usual schedule? What if instead of going to bed at your usual time, you go an hour earlier? That can’t be that bad, can it?

If you do not want to go to sleep earlier, maybe try having a lie-in instead? Wake up at 9 o’clock instead of 10 o’clock maybe? You don’t even need to do it everyday to start to see a little difference. What I would recommend is using this time to fix your sleeping pattern. Pick a time you want to go to bed and a time you want to wake up and try and stick to it. You may find it difficult at first, but aren’t the things worth doing in life, difficult at first?

Obviously it is up to you if you use the time to catch up on sleep, I am not telling you what you have to do, simply giving you different Ideas that you can do during Lockdown, hence the name of the series! If using the time to sleep more doesn’t sit well with you, that is completely fine. I’ll be covering a lot more topics in this series so if there is one that you want me to talk about, let me know!

That’s all I want to talk about in today’s blog! Thank you all for reading! What do you think? Do you think using Lockdown to catch up on sleep is a good thing? What are you doing with your time in Lockdown? Are there any different topics you want to see me cover on the page for this series or a different one? Let me know in the comments below or through our Facebook page and I will see what I can do!

Hope you all liked all of the gifs in today’s post too! When I was writing the post, I felt like trying something different and thought, why not add gifs! They just add something different to the blog which I enjoyed for today’s post anyways!

Thanks for reading and I hope you have a great day!