Health Concerns: Lack of Sleep and Too Much of a Good Thing

Editor's note: Americans may be living longer and even exercising a tad more, but they're not necessarily healthier, a study released Wednesday shows. Myriad reasons exist: too much bad food, too little good food, a sedentary lifestyle, smoking, drinking and just plain living in the wrong area of the country. Yahoo asked readers: What is your biggest obstacle in the way of a healthier you? Here's one response.

Tell us in the comments about your biggest health hurdle.

FIRST PERSON | It's always worst when my husband is deployed. I see the evidence etched into my face in wrinkles, thickening my waistline, and evidenced by the wicked bathroom scale as it inches ever upward away from what I consider a good healthy weight to, well, what it is now.

When my husband's deployed, I get way too little sleep. I don't have much of a choice. There's no one else around to help out, and once you lose a good sleep pattern, it's very hard to find it again (if anyone sees mine running loose in the neighborhood, please call immediately...).

Here's the rotten pattern the way it most recently played out:

Husband deploys in January. Kim immediately launches into a flurry of activity to keep herself mentally and physically occupied. This includes doing things like playing Words With Friends until she passes out from exhaustion or reading way beyond that. She reads in bed, so this helps.

By February, she's all funned out.

She makes a fresh pot of coffee at daybreak -- that's 10 cups of high-octane awake by most folks' standards, but just barely makes our intrepid mom lucid. Should she have a headache nor not sleep well the night before, she heads to Starbucks where she gets the sweetest, largest, most bad-for-her pick-me-up on the menu (venti white mocha, and sometimes with whipped cream, because, as she tells the barrista, "You only live once, honey"). Six bazillion calories later, she's functioning on a normal level, able to do things like speak coherently and drive a car. By dinner, she's crashing, but Kim cannot afford to do this, because she has three kids and a whole night of homework, baths, jammies and bedtime stories to deal with, plus the laundry that didn't get folded when she crashed last night at 2 a.m.

Do you see a pattern? If not, let me illuminate: I wake up the next morning with a raging headache (again) and the cycle repeats.

Four months later, her husband comes home from Afghanistan and his wife is 15 pounds heavier and has nothing even remotely resembling a normal sleeping pattern.

Break out the beans... again.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/health-concerns-lack-sleep-too-much-good-thing-203300766.html

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