There are two things in life that are critical to maintaining a healthy mind and body. Eating good, wholesome and nutritious food on time is one and the other is getting enough sleep.

Believe it or not, eating and sleeping always affect one another. If you overeat, especially close to bedtime, I guarantee you will have a lot of trouble getting to sleep because something won’t feel right in your stomach. Most likely you will have indigestion and severe heaviness.

Moreover, all your senses that should be focused on getting you to sleep are now focused on your digestive system which is now trying to digest the heavy meal you just had. Furthermore, there is a flip side to this eating as well. If you try to sleep feeling very hungry, you will not be able to sleep then either. Chances are your stomach will be growling uncomfortably and your mind will be on every food you can think of.

Plus, did you ever notice that the night before you had little to no sleep, the following morning, and for most of the day, you feel you need to eat as much as you can? It’s almost like your body is out of energy and clamouring to get it by gorging itself on anything it can find in the hope that it might make your body feel better; you actually wake up feeling distinctly unwell. However, eating does not help and the only thing that will is actually getting the sleep you lost the night before.

We are all aware that there should be at least a three to four-hour gap between eating and bedtime to get a good night’s sleep. It’s all about don’t do this, do that or eat this and not that. But, aside from food, there is so much more to a great night’s sleep.

A recent study suggested that there is a direct link between having a good night’s sleep and living a long life. Apparently a poor sleeping pattern such as insomnia or not getting enough sleep significantly reduced a person’s lifespan.

But I’m not writing this article to explain or guide you on how to get a good night’s sleep because, of course, I’m not an expert. But what I can tell you, from personal experience, is the sort of things that have kept me awake at night and, to be honest, not all of them are related to work.

When I was working, I had a terrible sleeping pattern during the week. I’d be waking up every couple of hours or so to check how many more hours I had to sleep before I needed to wake up to get ready for work. This carried on until the day I stopped working. The only days I had a fairly decent night’s sleep were Thursday and Friday nights when it was a day off. In fact, on those days I’d be falling asleep in the middle of watching something and waking up when the show was over. Moreover, if there was a particularly important work event I was preparing for, I often woke up in the middle of the night thinking had I done this or had I forgotten to do that?

But when work is over and done, meaning you’re no longer an employee of a company, there are so many other things that can disturb your sleep. You see, stress is a huge factor to determining the level of sleep you will get, if at all. Stress isn’t just work related. Yes you can be stressed out about work but you can be even more stressed out about not being able to find work. There are so many other stressors out there that can be related to family matters, health matters and not just yours, friends related, like friends being jerks or not having friends to talk to and now we even stresses related to Covid. When we had the lockdown last year and were unable to go out, I was stressed out about being cooped up in a teeny flat with everyone who was then forced to work from home. Sometimes stress can be caused by just one family member who is unable to cope with a job loss or other factors in their lives and is then taking it out on everyone else, almost like the rest of the family is to blame for that loss. That in itself can cause a complete loss of sleep.

Three days ago I slept for perhaps half an hour and woke up feeling very unwell and I can assure you that the stress that caused that occurrence had nothing to do with me.