Earlier this year I made some big changes to my lifestyle in an attempt to live better and feel better. I wanted to get better sleep and start exercising more, sounds easy right? Just go running and you will feel tired then you can sleep. That’s like telling someone to pull their socks up when they are feeling down!
I found that I needed to approach the sleep problem from a few different angles: diet, exercise, drugs and mindfulness.

CC image courtesy of Janieh on Flickr

Part 1 -Diet
Whilst I eat quite healthily I was missing breakfast most weekdays and as a result of being hungry at work I would drink more black plunger coffee. This meant I was always on edge and had trouble focusing on one thing at a time. Furthermore I had a lot of trouble getting to sleep often staying up very late wandering aimlessly in the interwebs. So I decided to start eating breakfast everyday which is a difficult habit to get into as when you start you generally don’t have an appetite. Starting small worked for me by getting youghurts, liquid breakfasts like ‘Up n Go’ and even using a coffee cup for small amounts of muesli. The trick was to eat small amounts each day to get back in the routine, the same approach used for treating some eating disorders. After several weeks of doing this I began to feel hungry in the mornings again and have managed to maintain this for the last 6 months.

Next week – Drugs