Stress Mastery : Getting Yourself Motivated & Achieving a Restful Night of Sleep

How Much Exercise Do You Need?

It is likely that you are getting more routine exercise than you realize, for activities such as cleaning your house, shopping, carrying bags of groceries, light gardening, and slow walking all qualify. But clearly this is not enough. To maximize your ability to cope with stress, you need to focus on becoming physically fit, which for most of us requires involvement in a regular exercise program. The basic recommendation is that you engage in thirty minutes of physical activity each day. These thirty minutes of exercise need not be performed at one time. You can increase your activity level by climbing the stairs instead of taking the elevator, walking a few blocks to the store instead of driving, taking the dog for a walk instead of letting him roam in the yard, doing yard work, and so on.

Ideally we recommend that you engage in the aerobic activity of your choice at least three times weekly. Begin and end your workout with stretching exercises for warmup and cooldown. On the days between aerobic workouts, engage in weight training. Practice stretching whenever your muscles feel tense, and in between as well. If you are really out of shape due to years of inactivity, obesity, poor diet, smoking, or advanced age, begin slowly with only low-intensity exercises or leisurely walking. If you have any heart problems that you are aware of, or if you are past 40 and have not exercised in years, consult your physician before embarking on any aerobic activity.

An ideal exercise program for a healthy young person that would provide the greatest amount of health and fitness benefits with the least investment in time would be as follows:

Getting Yourself Motivated

You may already be involved in a regular exercise program. If so, we urge you to continue and make sure there is an aerobic component to your regimen. But if you are one of the many who sincerely want to start an exercise program, yet always find reasons to delay getting started, pay careful attention to this next section. Recognize that the reasons you give yourself for avoiding exercise are powerful and must be faced and challenged if you are to graduate from being a couch potato.

The most common excuse people cite for not exercising is lack of time. If this reason is familiar to you, take a moment to figure out how many hours weekly you spend sitting in front of the TV. The average American adult watches thirty hours of TV a week! Of those hours you spend in front of the boob tube, how many are truly essential to your well-being? Many times we fool ourselves and justify TV watching by assuming that we are “relaxing.” But, do not confuse inactivity with relaxation. It is quite possible to be sprawled in front of the TV and maintain high levels of tension. Exercise can release this tension. This is not to say that it is impossible to relax by watching TV, but television viewing is not a particularly effective stress reducer. There is a difference between active and passive relaxation. So if you are opting out of exercise in favor of the TV, it may be time to really look at your priorities. Without exercise, you will become increasingly tense and out of shape and your energy level will diminish. Can you really afford to continue on this path? Could you sacrifice a few of your TV hours to devote to exercise?

Once you begin an exercise program, you can take several steps to help maintain your practice:

By all means, take the necessary precautions to avoid injury:

If you cannot spare thirty minutes daily to exercise, try fifteen or twenty minutes. Some exercise is much better than none. If you have been sedentary for a long time and are very out of shape, start out slowly, perhaps with just a fifteen-minute walk daily. Keep in mind that the worse your fitness level is, the sooner you will see and feel the results.

Achieving a Restful Night of Sleep

Have you ever wondered why we need to sleep? One outdated theory suggested that we sleep in order to rest our brain—but our brain cells are quite active even when we sleep. It appears that we sleep to rejuvenate our tired bodies and to recover from stress. During sleep, or any period of deep relaxation, our body's natural healing mechanisms are accessed and we are able to repair bodily damage and combat illness. That is why we generally need to sleep more when we are ill. Likewise, our need for sleep may increase during periods of change, stress, or depression as our body counteracts the wear and tear from our stressful day. Chronic lack of sleep or irregular sleep can have ill effects. Research suggests that people who sleep more than seven hours nightly live longer. Thus, long-term sleeplessness can subdue your immune system. But for the most part, most people can skip a night's sleep and still be functional the next day. Even people who remain sleepless for several consecutive days show few serious disturbances in functioning. Most often, the effects include temporary lapses in attention and concentration along with occasional confusion or misperception. These cognitive lapses may be episodes of borderline sleep. Oftentimes, the anticipation of the negative effects of a sleepless night is more damaging than the actual effects. That is, many people tend to catastrophize about how horrible it will be if they do not get a good night's sleep. If you expect the worst, that is often what you will get, via self-fulfilling prophecy. The truth is that most people can sustain a night without sleep very easily, with some afternoon fatigue being the main consequence.

One of the most common stress-related emotional problems is insomnia. It is quite common for most people to experience some form of insomnia during stressful periods. For some people, insomnia is a common occurrence and becomes a stressor as well as an effect of stress. There are three varieties of insomnia: (1) sleep-onset insomnia, which refers to difficulties with falling asleep; (2) frequent awakening with difficulty falling back to sleep; and (3) early-morning awakening. Sleep-onset problems are associated with anxiety and high levels of arousal, while early-morning awakening is more related to depression. Over thirty million Americans complain of insomnia; it appears to be a more frequent complaint for women. Poor sleepers are more ruminative, depressed, shy, and concerned with physical complaints are than good sleepers.

Insomniacs often exacerbate their problem by trying to force or will themselves to sleep. All that does is make matters worse, for efforts to will yourself to sleep only lead to further arousal and sleeplessness. Falling asleep is a process of letting go, of getting out of your own way and allowing sleep to happen rather than making it happen. Millions go to bed each night dreading the possibility that sleep will be elusive, and these very worries help create and perpetuate the problem. You cannot force yourself to sleep. What you can do is allow yourself to relax and let your mind wander elsewhere. If falling asleep or staying asleep is problematic for you, use the following suggestions to help ameliorate your difficulty. The key here is to follow the suggestions and let go of the need for any particular result. Trust your body to do the work for you if you make relaxation, rather than sleep, your primary goal.

How to Get to Sleep and Stay Asleep

Above all, remember that it really does not matter if you do not get to sleep early this night. You will survive. Catastrophizing about a poor night of sleep creates more stress than losing a few hours of sleep.