Morning routine for sleep
How you wake affects how you sleep and how you spend the day - do you spend your first hour awake in the way that will make the rest of the day easier?
Rachel Cox
Last Update 2 years ago
Have we lost touch with nature so much we don't understand ourselves?
A few months ago, a friend introduced me to a neuroscientist on YouTube who has some amazing podcasts - but he also has some really short exercises and suggestions on how to keep ourselves close to our natural state in order to function through the day ...
I was thinking that this morning as I took my walk with the dog as the sky was starting to get light - with the increasing red of an incoming storm (red sky in the morning and all that!) - and as I returned to along the front hedgerow of my fields, the birds were finally shaking the sleep from their voices and the dawn chorus was starting. (A few more weeks and they'll be lining up on the fence just outside my kitchen window for scraps and food!)
You see, one of his suggestions is that, first thing in the morning, we allow ourselves to get a half hour of natural light - no sunglasses - to enable our body to bring itself to the start of it's waking cycle.
Oh yeah - I'm the first to admit it's way easier this time of year than it is in summer 😆 - as the gentle sunrise and sky awakening can bring you gently to your centre and wake you up.
It shook me though, there's renters in the house next door and sometimes they forget to turn off the outside lights on the front door - and that jars me and puts me into a brief grump! (First thoughts would be the waste of money and electric - but when I contemplate it properly, it's more that it's an unnatural light in my eyes as I walk down the road!)
This gets me thinking - how do people really cope with the false lights in towns and cities? How did I cope with it when I lived in the house my parents live in now with a ruddy light outside my window? (Actually, not too badly because the house also came with full wooden shutters so I just shut them! 😂 )
If a little light can make me grumpy for a few moments at the time that I should be slowly gently and kindly facing the day - then it's no surprise that we're getting further and further away from our human touch and gentleness if we never see the dark and our natural rhythm is taken away from us ... even if we don't think it at the time.....
When you return to nature in it's truest form - not just the surroundings - but deep in your heart, your mind, your soul and your body - through being able to re-touch that cycle of peace and flow that is deep in our psyche to need.