Recovery is meant to help you establish a sense of balance within each state of your existence. While sobriety maintenance is the main focus, we also want to help you manage each aspect of your life from a healthy perspective. This includes maintaining a healthy diet, engaging in physical activity, and ensuring your sleep habits are healthy.
Sleep habits are often overlooked during recovery, as it likely is not your top priority. Even if sleep is not your main focus, ensuring you are engaging in healthy sleep habits is greatly important to your overall success in recovery and life overall.
Why Is Sleep Important?
Sleep is necessary to allow your body to properly function. It is easy to overlook the strength that sleep can bring you during the day. However, the amount and quality of sleep that you get throughout the night can play a large role in how you feel throughout the day. If you tend to feel low on energy or encounter high levels of mental fog throughout the day, you may not be achieving quality sleep throughout the night.
Despite your age, sleep does a great deal to assist in your development. Especially at a younger age, sleep helps to set your body up for success in growth and mental development. As you age, sleep may not assist drastically in physical growth; however, it still plays a large role in mental growth. Sleep also helps to regulate your cardiovascular system, hormone levels, metabolism, respiratory system, immune system, and cognitive functioning. Review the benefits within each of these systems to develop a further understanding of the importance of sleep:
- Cardiovascular System
- Healthy sleep habits help to avoid the risk of developing coronary heart disease, having a stroke, or experiencing low blood pressure. During sleep, your heart rate lowers, allowing your cardiovascular system to rest. This is essential, as your cardiovascular system never stops working. Giving this system a moment of rest each night allows it to function at its best throughout the day.
- Hormone Levels
- Some hormones are created during a state of rest. Lacking proper sleep habits can lead to these hormones not being created at the desired amount, leading to potential hormone imbalance.
- Metabolism
- Your circadian rhythm plays a large role in your metabolism. The sleep habits you engage in affect how your circadian rhythm flows. If this is drastically offset, your metabolism may be affected. The body’s ability to regulate hormones, process the food you eat, and respond to insulin levels is diminished, disrupting your metabolism.
- Respiratory System
- In the sleep state, your body does not need as much oxygen to properly function. Sleep allows your respiratory system to relax, just as it does with other systems within your body. A lack of sleep can lead to breathing and respiratory problems that may be long-lasting.
- Immune System
- Your immune system is another physiological system that works consistently throughout the day. Certain antibodies work specifically during the sleep state. If you do not have an efficient amount of sleep, you may be more susceptible to illnesses.
- Cognitive Functioning
- The ability of your mind to function properly is one of the most prominent effects of sleep. Retaining information and processing new thoughts are drastically affected by your sleep. During the sleep state, your memories are stored and processed, allowing you to remember information. A lack of sleep can lead to memory loss and a lack of ability to engage in new thought processes.
Reviewing each of these body systems and the ways that sleep interacts with your body’s functioning, you can see how important healthy sleep habits are to your overall functioning. Sleep is important for everyone, but each of these effects is also important to consider in your journey of recovery.
How Does Sleep Effect Recovery?
Sleep is important throughout your recovery because many aspects of sleep contribute to the onset of substance use disorder (SUD). Sleeping and the use of substances act together. If your sleep habits are lacking, the potential for negative effects from substance use occurring is increased. When you use substances, your sleep cycle is also affected and disrupted.
Some substances may help you sleep. Alcohol is a depressant and often induces feelings of tiredness. You may find that you are struggling to sleep each night without drinking alcohol or using some other form of a downer.
Relying upon substances to evoke sleep creates a habit within your body, reinforcing the need for you to engage in substance use in order to sleep. This can be problematic when substances are used regularly to promote sleep. When you are no longer using substances, your sleeping patterns will likely be severely disrupted.
The time you can fall asleep, the duration of REM sleep you can acquire, and the length of sleep you obtain throughout the night can all be affected by the use of substances. Long-term use of substances can also increase the potential for developing insomnia or other sleep disorders. Encountering sleep disorders can also negatively affect your recovery and increase cravings and the potential for relapse.
Sleep Disorders
Understanding the different sleep disorders that can develop from the use of substances or lack of sleep is essential. Sleep disorders take time to develop and create a noticeable difference in your body’s functioning. Learning about these sleep disorders can help you recognize if you are experiencing similar symptoms and help you to determine what changes may need to be made to your current sleeping habits.
Insomnia
Insomnia is a well-known sleep disorder. You likely have heard of insomnia and have an overall understanding of it. However, this disorder is often misdiagnosed or misrepresented by society. Insomnia causes individuals to have difficulty falling asleep, staying asleep, or reaching a state of REM sleep.
Many people struggle with some of these aspects and think that they have insomnia; however, this is not necessarily true. With insomnia, these problems are consistent. You can have a long day, feel exhausted, have perfect sleeping conditions, and still notice each of these symptoms with this disorder. Insomnia can be experienced short-term due to high levels of stress or change in patterns.
Chronic insomnia occurs from having over three weeks of consistent issues with your sleep as previously discussed. Having high levels of stress, dealing with the consequences of SUD, and consistently altering your sleeping patterns can lead to chronic insomnia. Once chronic insomnia is present, it may take consistent alterations in your daily habits and professional help to overcome them.
Sleep Apnea
The disorder of sleep apnea causes a disruption in the circulatory and respiratory systems during sleep. Having sleep apnea may cause snoring or irregular breathing during sleep, often waking you up multiple times throughout the night. Professional help is usually needed to overcome sleep apnea. You may need to use a CPAP machine or other medical technology to assist in your breath regulation during sleep.
Improve Your Sleep Habits
Improving your sleep habits can be extremely beneficial to your overall recovery. Using these techniques, you can work to improve your sleep habits to benefit your body’s functioning through your recovery journey and make your treatment success ongoing.
Set a Schedule
One of the best ways to establish a healthy sleeping routine is to set a bedtime and wake-up time for yourself each day. Try to keep this consistent each day. You may choose to sleep in a little extra over the weekends, but the times should still be similar to your weekday scheduled times. Ensure you are scheduling yourself at least a full eight hours of sleep, accounting for the time it takes to fall asleep.
It may sound childish to set a bedtime for yourself, but as an adult, it can be easy to get distracted with other responsibilities and stay up later than planned, disrupting your sleep for the night. Having a set time or an alarm on your phone to remind you to get ready for bed is a great way to get yourself into the habit of having a stable sleep schedule. If you are in the middle of working on something when you get notified to go to bed, quickly get to a good stopping point and begin your nighttime routine.
Have a Nighttime Routine
Having a nighttime routine is also a great way to improve your sleep. As your set bedtime comes around, plan a nightly routine to get yourself prepared for bed. This may be 30 minutes or an hour to let yourself wind down. When the time comes, engage in your nighttime hygiene routines. Wash your face, shower if necessary, drink some water, brush your teeth, and get comfortable. After physically getting ready for bed, it is time to get your mind prepared for sleep.
Spending some time reading at the end of the night is a great way to keep your mind activated while still winding down from the day. Ensure that you have a set time to stop reading so you don’t stay up all night engaging in this activity.
Try to avoid screen time and eating food within a few hours before going to bed. Set your alarm for the morning and then put your phone down for the night, taking away the distractions of electronics. When you are actively trying to fall asleep, practice breathing and meditation to bring yourself to a sleep state.
Waking Up
Some people are great in the mornings and others have a difficult time getting out of bed and starting the day. If waking up is a challenge for you, try to set one alarm and wake up immediately. As enticing as it may be to set multiple alarms and continue sleeping for just a few more minutes, it makes it harder for your body to wake up.
If you jump out of bed and begin your day right as your alarm goes off, your body releases adrenaline and helps get you moving for the day. Avoid going to bed and lying down, as that will increase the chances of falling back to sleep accidentally and further disrupt your sleep patterns.
Using these tips can allow you to set up a healthy routine for sleeping that will help your body function properly. Your curfew rules are in place to help you establish a time to engage in your nightly routine and get to sleep at a reasonable time. These tips may not work instantly and may take a few weeks to adjust to. Hang in there and allow your body to adjust to this new pattern.
Sleep is a normal state for the body to allow our systems to rest and reset for the day ahead of us. While we can go a while with disrupted sleep patterns, this can cause long-term health issues. While engaging in recovery, ensuring your body is functioning at its best is essential. To do this, you have to make sure your body is getting the rest that it needs. Learn more about the health effects of poor sleep habits and the disorders that can occur. Use these tips and techniques to help you improve your sleep schedule and set yourself up for success in sober living. Reach out to Real Recovery Sober Living at (727) 290-9156.
