Observations on exhaustion cont’d
c. If you wake up feeling tired, it could be because you don’t sleep enough, or that you’re not warm enough when you sleep (and so the body spends energy the whole night-long struggling to maintain a good body temperature and consequently doesn’t get to rest). For most youth today however, it is usually because we don’t sleep enough – and that is popularly because of uncontrolled entertainment or social media.
d. Your sleep should also be regular, meaning you get into bed and out of bed more or less at the same time every day. If the deviation in the time you sleep or wake up is too wild, then your body effectively loses track of when to begin the repair and detox processes that naturally happen when you sleep. This is why poor sleeping habits eventually harm both your mental and physical health.
e. Keeping all things constant, if you need a nap or siesta during the day, then it is probably because you don’t sleep well enough or long enough at night, because you over-eat (or perhaps have poor digestion), or even because you’re simply lazy.
f. In cases of insomnia, look systematically into eating habits, physical exercise, mental activity and moral habits.
g. The purpose of sleep, as mentioned earlier, is rest. The purpose of rest is to repair and detox the body (and the mind). Because the manliness we’re after is a manliness not only of body and mind, but of soul as well, then it does well to note that even the soul needs a time-out for repair and for detox. Of the options available for this, I’d recommend the monthly recollection and the yearly retreat: time spent away from the usual hustle and bustle of your ordinary workaday life, to spot leaks, breaks, cracks and rust in your spiritual life and to attend to them. And in the same way shallow, short and irregular sleep is harmful to your physical and mental health, shallow, short or irregular recollections and retreats are also harmful to your spiritual health.
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