It’s Day 17 of the Mykidstime 21 Day Health & Fitness Challenge! If you missed yesterday’s video, catch up with Day 16 here.
Our health and wellbeing expert, Fiona O’Donnell, explains what’s involved for Day 17 in the video below. We want you to tell us during the challenge how you are getting on so tag us on social using #mkt21days and we’ll give you some encouragement!
Mykidstime 21 Day Health & Fitness Challenge: Day 17 – Barriers to Sleep
Today we’re going to bring the conversation back around to sleep and quality of sleep, and we’re going to do that by starting in another space.
If you have kids in the home or if you’re a busy person, we don’t really make time available to ourselves specifically to sit down and do things like read a book or put our feet up.
This can have a major impact on what time we go to bed at night because once kids are in bed, or you’ve emptied the dishwasher, or you’ve finished sending emails, very often we collapse into the couch, Netflix goes on and we fall into that cycle of ‘just one more episode’.
This can be a major barrier towards getting to bed at a reasonable hour and getting some quality sleep.
What I’m going to ask you to do today is to see if you can take out a pocket of time. My example is that I have been guilty of waiting until the kids are in bed, then sitting down with my husband to start watching TV, and before you know it it’s midnight.
What we do now is, when he gets home from work, we get a few jobs done, but we take a pocket of time before anything else happens and while the kids are still running around the place, and we spend some time together. It might only be 30 minutes, and it might only be a lap of the garden to discuss what needs to be done in the coming week, but we’re taking a pocket of time to just be together.
Nothing has to be done, you don’t have to do laundry, you don’t have to send those last few emails that were due to be sent off for work, none of that – no doing, just being.
I found this has really positively contributed to the fact that I no longer feel I need that pocket of time once kids go to bed. I’m not like scrabbling for head space and some identity for myself. And that’s what I’d like you to pay attention to today – what happens before you go to bed? What are the very final things that you say ‘oh I’ll just do this’?
Maybe it’s making school lunches, one last check of social media (we all know how that turns out!) – whatever your barrier to getting to bed is, can you put a cut off time on it? Can you say that at 9.30pm it’s tools down and we don’t look at social media anymore, or TV is watched to 10.30pm and then everything is switched off?
I’m asking you to create a new routine for night-time. When you assessed bedtime the other day when we spoke about sleep, you looked at what time you needed to be in bed in order to get your 7-9 hours of sleep.
Now look at what that time is that you need to go to bed, and build in time before that for switching off devices and TV I want you to write the answer to that down on a piece of paper, because when we see these things written down we are far more likely to engage in the solution.
If you have any questions throughout the Challenge, email Fiona or send her a message on Instagram, Facebook and use hashtag #mkt21days to let us know how you are getting on with the Challenge!
About the Author: Fiona O'Donnell
