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The Shortened Version Of What You’re Here For
Daytime Prevention For Nighttime Success:
- When you first wake up —> Make your bed! It takes less than 10 minutes and it makes a universe of difference when you’re ending your day.
- Establish a schedule with boundaries. Set goals and deadlines and stick to them!
- Keep your workspace apart from your sleep space. Teach your brain that bed means sleep and nothing else.
- Define rules with your clients, friends and family. You have specific working hours and specific home-life hours. Stay within those confines.
- Move your body enough to tire yourself out. Exhaust your muscles or else they’ll be wide awake no matter how tired your brain and eyes are.
Evening Preparations:
- Wind-down routine checklist. Mine usually involves a snack, music and sometimes I will stretch or partake in a brief yoga session.
- Set your lighting, set your thermostat (if applicable to you), turn off your music or turn on your ambient/ocean soundscapes. Shoot for quiet, cool and dark.
- Self-care and personal hygieine. This is where you shower, you wash your face and brush your teeth and floss and moisturize and take. care. of. you.
The Actual Sleeping Portion:
- I call this “cozying up” because this is where I get comfortable and focus on slowing down wholly and breathing easy for the sake of sleeping soundly.
- There is no shame in a proper sleep mask.
- Reflect on the day behind you. Try not to think too much about tomorrow; an overwhelming task list can keep you awake stressing about things that can have your attention tomorrow.
The LONG form of the above information: AKA the actual blog post
This whole blogging thing? Exhausting.
Don’t get me wrong, I love it. I love that I have to wear all the hats. Every hat that I get to wear is one less hat that I’m permitting someone wear while they tell me what to do AND collect more money than me as a result.
Absolutely not. Bump all of that.
However.
Entrepreneurship in any form – blogging, a coffee shop, a montage in pursuit of the perfect artisinal soda, perhaps? – ANY FORM, is tiring. It’s so exhausting. It requires a level of self-discipline not intended for everyone.
Ever since I decided to get a blog up and running full-time, I’m so mentally drained at the end of the day. Taking care of myself as a whole is a struggle and always has been, but nighttime is a special kind of struggle because honestly? I’d be satisfied collapsing into bed with no dinner and no shower.
The sucky part about choosing a directly-to-bed method, though, is this:
I REGRET IT IN THE MORNING EACH & EVERY TIME I DO IT.
If it isn’t that I feel crusty from not brushing my teeth or washing my body, it’s that I didn’t do those things and as a result I tossed and turned all night from being physically uncomfortable so my quality of sleep was trash.
I’m rambling at this point and I’m getting a little off topic.
My utlimate end goal here is to make you, dear reader, understand one thing:
You NEED to treat sleep as an essential. Especially if you work from home in any capacity.
Working from home establishes a difficult barrier between ourselves and a sustainable work-life balance. When we work a standard 9-5 in an office or retail setting or factory, we get to clock out and come home.
We get to, for lack of better phrasing, turn work mode off completely.
When we work from home, when do we turn it off?
How do we even flip that switch?
The following answer(s) to those questions need not be taken to heart. This is my personal routine and recommendations. It isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution.
Proceed with self-love, your results may vary.
PREVENTING THE STRUGGLE BEFORE IT’S A STRUGGLE:
- When the day begins, make your bed. Before you check your phone, before you make your coffee, before you do anything else – make you freaking bed! It’s a minimal effort task that makes your nighttime routine much more enjoyable. Look at it like a gift to your future self.
- Establish a schedule, goals and deadlines. Now here’s the important part, please pay attention: STICK to these outlines. Set your finishing point somewhere tangible and when you get to it, put it down.
- Tell everyone around you (clients, friends, family, the dogs) when you’re working, when you aren’t, and make sure they understand that you’re serious. Your work-related brain clocks out at X time and clocks back in at X time. Outside of those hours, don’t be bothered with work related questions or concerns.
- Your work area and your sleep area have to be different. Even if you live in a studio or studio-sized space (like myself), you have to have some sort of distict separation for where you work and where you rest.
- Focus on your physical well-being. What I mean by this is: move more! If you work from home, chances are it’s likely to be computer work or craft work and for the most part you’re in one spot. Amirite? So, get out of that bubble a few times. Go for a walk, do a workout video, do squats and jumping jacks while your food is heating up in the microwave. Your muscles need to be as tired as your eyeballs when you get into bed.
pre-bedttime preparations:
- At some point prior to this moment, I outlined a nighttime checklist. This is list I go over when I’m too scrambled to focus on myself or what needs to be done in order to set myself up for success in any aspect of my life.
- The above mentioned checklist is what I refer to as my pre-game checklist for bedtime. It’s my ‘wind-down routine’ and it exists for the sake of ensuring I do the things I need to do to sleep soundly.
- In my wind-down routine, I will turn on some music (if I don’t already have any going. I usually do), I will grab or prepare my favorite small snack. As of lately, I enjoy green apple slices and those little caramel packets. Or chocolate teddy bear crackers. If I’m going to read, I do it at this point in the evening.
- I will stretch if I feel too tense from a day of sitting and clickity-clacking on my keyboard all day. Maybe a short yoga session to center my body around my breathing.
- I set the scene for my sleep. I lower my thermostat, make sure it’s nice and cool. I turn off overbearing lights and leave the dimmer, warmer lights on. My music goes off completely because I sleep best in silence but if you need low music or ocean/ambient soundscapes, this is where you’d add those into the mix.
- Self-care and hygiene! Shower, brush and floss your teeth, brush your hair, moisturize your skin and apply any and all leave-in conditioners. Make yourself soft and delicately scented.
- Fun fact about showers: I spent a lot of time waffling over which one was better for you, a cold or a hot shower. As it turns out, they’re both good for different things. A hot shower will improve cardiovascular health and aid in soothing stiff joints, whereas a cold shower is better for anxiety/stress management and lowering blood pressure. All that in mind, I choose to shower in cold water because hot water dries out the skin.
this is the part where you actually get to sleep:
- Cozy-up! Grab your favorite cozy thing(s). Blankets or stuffed animals or a favorite body pillow or human being. Maybe you have a cat or three dogs and you all pile together at night. No judgement, just make it happen.
- If you encounter troubles when it comes to getting your eyes to shut completely at night, I have two pieces of advice from anecdotal (not professional) experience. 1. Double check that you have any interferent lighting turned off. 2. Invest in a solid sleep mask. This helped me for years. There’s no shame in it, be a princess. You’re still a bad bitch.
- Congrats, you’ve made it all the way to the end of another day! That means you get to breathe easy and slow your heart rate and reflect on the self and the time behind you. I want to emphasize that it’s important not to hone in too hard on the day ahead of you.
- You don’t want to make your to-do list in your head, you’re likely to stress yourself and elevate your pulse and blood pressure and all of those things will drive you to pick up your phone or your computer. Now look at you, not sleeping. Put it down.