7 reasons why sleeping is a better new year’s resolution than going to the gym.
3 min readJan 5, 2017
by Amrit Bandyopadhyay, Awarables
Today is a good day to think about your New Year’s resolutions. Your hangover is probably gone. The shock of being back at work is hopefully easing out. Instead of having a laundry list of resolutions, maybe it is better to resolve to give priority, every chance you get, to one or two new things. If you are looking for a candidate, Sleep is hard to beat. Even the Department of Defense has Sleep in its performance triad for the armed forces, along with activity and nutrition. “I’ll sleep when I die” is very 1990s.
Here are 7 reasons why sleeping well may be a better new year priority than the much more popular going to the gym resolution:
- It is much more fun: Picture yourself doing lunges till you drop. Now picture yourself sleeping till 7, maybe 7:30am, buried underneath a comforter, for a sweet 8 hours. Both are excellent candidates. But when it feels more right when you picture yourself with one of them, she’s the one!
- It takes less pain: Pain-gain ratio is one of the biggest factors in seeing a big resolution through. If you are a normal sleeper who just doesn’t find enough time to sleep, the fix may revolve around adjusting a few bad practices, and learning to compromise a bit more. These are less about pain, and more a matter of powering through the discomfort of changing an old habit. On the other hand, if you have insomnia, some of the steps you go through for sleep therapy can be challenging. They can range from going to bed later at fixed times for a few weeks via Sleep Restriction, or leaving the bed when you are awake for more than 20 minutes via Stimulus Control. None of these compare to doing 4 sets of 10 lunges, 3 times a week, for the rest of your life.
- It takes less time: The typical “fix your sleep” program for a raging insomniac is around 6 weeks in a CBTi program with a trained behavioral therapist. If you are an insomniac, you have probably suffered for many years, hundreds of nights, and feel tired all the time. 6 weeks to improve this, where most of the pain is in the first two weeks, is really not that much. If your sleep problems revolve more around priorities and bad practices, 21 days is the magic number of days it can take to adjust to and power through a new habit.
- More instant gratification: The millennial insta-results mantra is definitely not the way to think about life-improving changes. However, it’s what we do, and what we like! Even a raging insomniac may start seeing results within, or after, the first two weeks, and may notice that they are feeling a little better. I wonder how long it takes to look the way you want to look?
- It is lower maintenance: Remember that low-maintenance college significant other you had, who just wanted to spend some time with you? Improved sleep is low maintenance. Once your bad habits and sleep drive are improved and stable, keeping it going involves not abusing your sleep practices, and reverting to the skills you learned if, and when, you have a relapse. Compare that to the reward of doing lunges with weights in your hands once you master regular lunges!
- New year, new you, why not a new resolution? Didn’t you try the going to the gym 3–4 times a week thing last year? How did that work out for you? Maybe, try something different this year, so that the epic FAIL memory doesn’t pull you down!
- Sleep products allow immediate cancellation unlike you-know-who: You might be able to pull this off on your own. If not, there are several products with wearables, apps, cognitive behavioral therapy, etc, competing to help you, including Awarables. Irrespective of which one you choose, I am pretty sure all of us will let you cancel your subscription immediately, instead of taking a month to process the cancellation after an in-person visit!
- BONUS: You might just feel rested enough to make it to the gym more than you did last year and do ’em lunges!
