Dear Mom, You Really Need More Sleep. Create a Character Blueprint to Get More of It.
What is a Character Blueprint and how will it help you get more sleep? Well, listen or read to find out.
As moms and working ladies, many of us knowingly compromise our sleep. If you are anything like me, there is a significant chance you THINK you will do something great for yourself or the household from 7:30 pm-10:00 pm. In theory, this is our time to shine. The kids are in bed, and you can take some time to catch up on emails, finish that project, or start a 3-hour baking project for a school event I just found out about.
But the truth is that I (and most of us) typically get very little done besides scrolling social media or getting caught up in a text messaging marathon, eating chocolate, and then going to bed later than we intended.
In the whirlwind of modern life, we often treat sleep like a savings account we plan to contribute to but never actually do. We let the kids, work, social media scrolling, or the siren call of just one more episode on Netflix keep us tired and way too behind to get in something good for ourselves tomorrow.
About 35% of the world's adult population is not getting enough sleep, making sleep deprivation more popular than pumpkin spice lattes in the fall.
Choosing to binge-watch your favorite series or doomscroll through social media at bedtime is essentially like handing the keys to your well-being to a two-year-old and saying, "Here, you drive." Skimping on sleep:
makes it easier for us to believe cake is a food group
makes it easier for us to get cranky and irritable
makes it harder to have the mental energy for good choices because our brain is not rested and ready for business
creates a pattern that continues on into later life (i.e. menopause). There is no known reason for sleep disturbances that are reported during menopause. The odds are that our bad sleep habits start in motherhood.
Want to Lose Weight? Try Sleeping Eight Hours….Seriously
It turns out there's a definite relationship between how much you snooze and the numbers that make you groan when you step on the scale. Skimping on sleep could be why your jeans suddenly play hard to get. Science has crunched the numbers and found that cutting your Zs from a luxurious 8 hours to a mere 4 hours could pack on an extra 8 pounds in as little as three months because sleeping less changes your eating patterns and hormones in charge of eating. Now, most of us are getting more than four hours of sleep a night, but cutting down to less than 6 hours of actual sleep is going to push those numbers up on the scale.
Lack of sleep affects eating patterns and the amount you want to move your body. When our bodies get the sleep they need, the amount we move and hormones that regulate eating and feeling full function well. If you aim to understand why you can’t lose those pesky 8, 10, or 80 pounds, maybe the first place to start is breaking up with late-night Netflix binges and rekindling your relationship with your bed.
Mental Health and Emotional Well-being
Chronic sleep deprivation can transform a temporary grumpiness into a full-blown mood disorder. Rest is crucial for the part of the brain responsible for regulating emotions, and lack of sleep leads to heightened emotional responses and negativity. Emotions go haywire when someone is tired, which is very easy to see in small children. They are real jerks when they are tired. The truth is that the same goes for adults. We can’t see it because we think everyone else is the jerk when we are sleep-deprived. If you find yourself in a grumpy mood or feel that everyone is being unreasonable, maybe you need to make time for more sleep tonight…and every night.
Regardless of What You Think, Your Brain Needs More than 6 Hours Sleep
Ultimately, it is not all just about losing extra weight, being a more understanding mom and less angry at the people we interact with day to day. The truth is that sleep is essential for brain health. It's the only time the brain can fully restore its functions and perform critical cleaning processes. Still, we believe we don’t need to waste all that time in bed because we are different and not like all those ordinary people who need at least 7-8 hours in bed.
Regardless of what we think, our brain needs to get to the deep sleep stage at least twice each night to get our brain swept clean of harmful proteins like Amyloid-β, which is linked to Alzheimer's disease. Getting at least two cycles of deep sleep requires you to get more than 6 hours of sleep in a row. If you are only in bed for 6 hours, you don’t get 6 hours of sleep.
If you don’t give your brain more than six hours of sleep, it is the equivalent of stopping your washing machine halfway through and then trying to dry your clothes, sopping wet. Will it work? Kind of, but your clothes will be crazy damp and not dry in the dryer with just one cycle. It will take multiple cycles to get the clothes dry. It will also take your brain multiple attempts to get into good work and rhythm when you don’t give it the time it needs to get the cleaning and rest it requires. After about a week of stopping your washer halfway through, you will start to feel normal just walking out in those wet clothes—but everyone else will be able to tell your brain is only half as great as it usually is.
There is No Perfect Time to Start
“My kids are just really hard at this age.” Me, regardless of my kids’ age, because it is always true.
Friend now is the time to set up the evening pattern regardless of whatever else is going on in your life. If you are a single parent or a special needs parent (Jenn, you are a f’ing rock star), this is even more important as you are your kids' only support mentally and maybe financially. I can’t imagine all the extra things you have to deal with daily. Valuing your sleep will allow you to bring your A-game to work and home life more often than not.
I wish I could say that I get a bunch of patients who just sent their kids off to college and are now devoting all their time to themselves. It doesn’t happen. The gyms are not full of 50-year-old mothers with nothing to do at home. We have to start small and start now because the odds of us doing it during some magical right time is basically as likely as a hippo fitting into skinny jeans. I know hippos did ballet in the old Fantasia (where are my old school Disney fans at?), but skinny jeans are not happening.
How to Start Getting More Sleep
Create a Character Blueprint, Write a New Narrative, and Get More Sleep
We cannot make sense of what we DO or DON’T DO unless we have a broader reference point in a narrative. What do I mean by this? What does it have to do with creating a Character Blueprint, and why am I even talking about this? Isn’t this article about sleep?
Why yes, it is. But if I tell you to get more sleep, you might try for a few days, and then you will return to normal. Telling you to do something, even if I give you some research on WHY, doesn’t matter. You must understand why something is emotionally significant for you, not why it is important to researchers or me, in order for you to change.
Thought Experiment
Alasdair MacIntyre, a Scottish-American philosopher, has a thought experiment in his book After Virtue that illustrates the need to understand what we do or don’t do in relation to a narrative very well.
Imagine This
You are standing at a bus stop, and the person next to you suddenly says to you, “The common name of a wild duck is histrionicus histrionicus.” You would stand there dumbfounded. You understand the meaning of the words in the sentence, but you are both puzzled by why he said it and why he said it to you. To understand the point of what was said, you will need to put what the person said within a story framework so you can understand.
Three narratives that will frame this story
The person next to you at the bus stop might have mistaken you for someone who approached him in the library yesterday and asked him if he knew the scientific name for the common wild duck.
The person next to you at the bus stop might have just come from a session with a psychotherapist who urged him to break down his shyness by talking to strangers.
The person next to you at the bus stop is a spy, and he is looking for the person he should report to by uttering a code word.
What the person says becomes understandable in each of these narratives or stories. Now let’s frame how this helps us get more sleep.
Your Character Blueprint Writes the Narrative of why you do or don’t do something
Whether you know it or not, you have a Character Blueprint, and it is writing your story.
John Mark Comer, in his book Practicing the Way, says this about each of our own Character Blueprint which he describes as a Rule of Life:
It may be written or unwritten, conscious or subconscious, wise or foolish, based on a long-term vision or a short-term instant gratification. It might move you towards your desired destination or sabotage your very best intentions, but even if you've never heard of a Rule of Life (Character Blueprint) until 2 minutes ago you have one. You have a way in which you live a morning routine, a typical work day, a network of relationships, a budget, activities you spend your free time on and so on so the question isn't do you have a rule of life it is do you know what your rule of life is and is it giving you the life you want. Is it working for you or against you?
In adulthood (the part of life where you have to figure out what is for dinner EVERY NIGHT), it often becomes difficult to keep making good choices we want for ourselves.
We have to make sure all the other people in our lives are making good choices and signed up for classes, and there might be work obligations as well. We have completed the script familiar to most people we know—graduate from high school, go to college or get a job, get a significant other, or maybe have kids. Where do you go from there? What is your storyline after that? Where is the six-pack we were hoping for without exercise? Mine still haven’t shown up, those jerks.
If we are not intentionally living by our Character Blueprint, which guides our storyline, we instead revert to reliving patterns and routines formed by comfort and the ever-constant digital presence of our phones and TVs. These patterns and routines are comfortable, like the stretchy pants we wear after eating at Applebee’s on a date night. Those repeating storylines get us through the day-to-day, but comfortable rhythms of nothingness drive our plot line into the ground.
A Character Blueprint is a set of slowly established practices and patterns that create space for us to live into the story we want to write for our lives. It is a way of intentionally organizing our lives around what matters most.
My Character Blueprint Examples
These are some of the guardrails that keep me writing my story with intention. These might sound like rules to you, but the heart behind them isn't for me to make specific actions illegal and create more guilt in my life. I try to be aware of the things in my life that make it hard for me to write the story I want. Left unchecked, these things consume my time and shape me into a person who doesn’t pursue the story I want. I want to write chapters about how I can keep up with my grandkids because I made time for time for myself to move my body (exercise). I want to write chapters about how I change the tone for the morning when my kids get up cranky. I want chapters about how I made time weekly for writing and making videos to make an impact in 500,000+ moms’ lives.
I parent my phone. My phone goes to bed at 8:30 p.m. and isn't allowed up until after the kids are on the bus and I have gone for a 15-minute walk or run to clear my head before starting my work day.
I practice a day of rest. During my 24 hours of rest, I don't have to cook or get out of bed until 7:00. The focus is fun family activities. We enjoy a day outside doing activities or having a family movie day and making memories together without me pressuring myself to come up with a plan for the day and worrying about getting back to the house to take care of tasks.
I limit my social media use to two days a week, and I only use it on my computer. Social media, for me, is a little bit like taking a tiny bit of poison. While we know from The Princess Bride that if you take a small amount of poison for long enough, you can then become immune. However, when I get on sociaI media I often realize I have just spent over an hour “being entertained” without noticing. There went my workout time. I will never be immune to social media, and it keeps me from going to bed early and making time for writing in the morning.
The Character Blueprint is NOT
One more thing to feel guilty about in your life. Guilt and shame DO NOT help us create a life-giving Character Blueprint. Shame and guilt cause us to sink back onto the couch with cookies for another episode.
The Character Blueprint IS
A framework to understand why you actually want to make different decisions. The Character Blueprint is an invitation to embrace guardrails that will get you to your next chapter.
Your Character Blueprint Guards Your Ability to Live to Your Potential.
I recently went to Georiga (the country vs the state in the southern United States). We were taking a family trip up to a ski hill with just a ridiculous amount of twisty mountain driving and large drop-offs. Along the road were guardrails protecting drivers from going off the side of a mountain. Your Character Blueprint is a guardrail that helps you stay on the road to becoming the awesome mom or working mom you want to become. Your Character Blueprint needs to both guard and guide you as you get to those parts of the road where it is easy to take an exit.
What Will Push Us to Give Up Our Character Blueprint
The world's most influential corporations tirelessly harness the most advanced algorithms imaginable to fuel your fears, amplify your outrage, and captivate you at all costs. Adopting a Character Blueprint becomes a bold rebellion against the digital titans: Netflix, Instagram, Facebook, and all the rest.
Without intervention, my phone and yours aim to mold us into someone we scarcely recognize—detached, scatterbrained, perpetually distracted, riddled with anxiety, and lacking rest.
Seven Things to Consider When Writing Your Character Blueprint
Start where you are, not where you “should be.” If you have a newborn, maybe you can just try taking one nap a day. Maybe you can have your spouse or significant other do a 7:30 feeding, and you can go to bed at 6:00 and sleep until the 10:00 feeding. You can’t get 8 hours right now, but look at what you can get.
Think subtraction, not addition. What can you take away that is not helping you get where you want your story to go? What is holding you back from getting more sleep?
Find a community of people -your power posse- who are working towards the same goals or living them out.
Take into account your season of life and the amount of discipline you have available. When you have little kids running around asking you to get them spoons while they stand 2 inches from the spoon drawer, you might not have the time or ability to add extra discipline during the day. You are running from when the kids are up until they are in bed. Getting up before the kids and going to bed earlier to allow for this will be your focus until life shifts again. Understand where you are and write your Character Blueprint accordingly.
Follow the pain and feel the joy. I try to let my patients and clients know that some amount of discomfort is a sign of growth. There is a term called eustress, a fancy term for a good type of stress. The truth is that your body doesn’t improve unless you stress it. We all need to embrace the stress that grows us while also feeling the joy from small wins that happen at the moment.
You will get worse before you get better. When you attempt to grow in a new skill, it will be a struggle, and life will get harder as you try to find the best way to do the new skill you are working on. This is normal.
Repeat and tweak. When we start a new skill it often gets worse before it gets better. This is because the brain is adapting and growing (yes literally). It takes mental effort for small changes, but don’t be afraid to find different ways to do the same thing. If your cell phone is keeping you up, for example, maybe plugging in your cell phone by your bed is too tempting, and it needs to be in the office or even downstairs in the kitchen.
When you Fail
You will fail. Last week was a big failure for me. I let my phone and random micro-urgent things cloud my mind from what matters most. But throughout the week, I had small time frames where I made a space like I needed to get good work done. I didn’t let a slip become a slide each and every day. I didn’t give up halfway through the week because I am no longer a perfectionist. I am a recovering good enoughist.
When you fail, don’t get sucked into self-recrimination or shame.
In Conclusion (YES this is mini book is finally done…almost)
Steve Jobs, said, “People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully.”
So, pick carefully what you will include this week so you can get the rest your body needs. Write a Character Blueprint so you understand what you want your main character (you) to do and what will drive their plotline into the ground. Say no to those things that sound good if they are not what matters most, and when you fail, don’t let a slip be a slide.
The best is yet to come when you get more sleep😪😴💤
DIG (Get Deliberate, Get Inspired, Get Going) Deep Action Steps:
Get Deliberate: Get yourself started on some sleep hygiene techniques to get to sleep. The 10, 3, 2, 1, 0 Good Sleep Guide can help give you a starting point for where to focus first to get good sleep.
Follow the 10, 3, 2, 1, 0 Good Sleep Guide
10 hours before sleep, stop caffeine
3 hours before you go to sleep, have your last meal of the day
2 hours before you sleep, stop all work and destress
1 hour before you go to sleep, stop your blue-screen devices
0 is the number of times you hit the snooze button in the morning. If you are hitting the snooze, you are sleep-deprived.
Get Inspired: Write down why getting more sleep will help you find to get more or better sleep. Grab some sticky notes, write down an abbreviated portion of your Character Blueprint to help you sleep more, and put them up on your mirror or fridge.
Get Going: Find a sleep meditation or breathwork app by trying them for a few nights to decrease stress before bedtime. I have used several apps such as Peloton, Centr, Headspace, Abide, Breathwrk, and 10 Percent Happier. A few of these have free portions of the app, but all of them will try to get you to sign up for a year. I have been able to try all of them and only purchase a couple that I felt were worth the money for a year. I try to use one a few times a week on days when I know I am rolling into bedtime with a racing mind about tomorrow or today.