Day 15 of 100 Days Muscle Resistance Workout Challenge
Topic: Start with Awareness – Notice what time you went to bed and how long you slept.
Learning Material
Before you can improve your sleep, you first need to notice it. Just like tracking workouts or nutrition, simply observing your bedtime and sleep duration builds awareness. Awareness doesn’t require immediate change—it creates a foundation for making smarter adjustments later.
Key Insights
1. Awareness is the First Rep
In psychology, self-monitoring is one of the most effective tools for habit change1. By writing down when you went to bed and how long you slept, you start seeing patterns: maybe you sleep less after late-night screens, or you recover better with an earlier bedtime. The act of noticing primes your brain for change.
2. Sleep = the Body’s Recovery Mode
During deep sleep, growth hormone is released—critical for muscle repair. REM sleep supports memory and learning, which matters just as much if you’re coding, writing, or problem-solving. Without enough quality sleep, workouts feel heavier, reaction times slow, and fat loss stalls. Sleep isn’t “time off”—it’s part of training.
3. Small Patterns, Big Insights
You don’t need fancy trackers to start. A simple journal entry like “Bed at 11:15, woke at 6:30, 7 hours total” is enough. Over a week, you’ll see whether your body thrives on a consistent schedule or struggles with irregularity. Awareness alone can motivate earlier adjustments, much like seeing your step count motivates you to move more.
Metaphor Example:
Think of sleep like charging your phone. If you only ever plug it in for 30 minutes here and there, the battery never reaches full power. Consistency in bedtime is like plugging into the charger overnight—you wake up with a full charge, ready to perform.
My Reflection
I keep close track of my sleep, and if I had to rate it on a scale of 1 to 10, it usually lands around a 9. My Fitbit regularly shows a sleep score above 90%. I tend to get slightly more REM sleep than the benchmark and enough deep sleep to feel fully restored. On average, I’m awake only about 10–15 minutes during the night.
To support good sleep, I stay active during the day, avoid eating after 6 p.m., and skip late workouts. I also step away from the computer after 8 p.m. because I know how much my sleep quality matters—if I get less than seven hours, I feel sluggish the next day.
Most nights, I fall asleep around 9:30 p.m. and don’t wake up until 3 a.m. or later. Sometimes I sleep straight through without interruption. The only things that disturb me are my cat jumping on the bed or the occasional thunderstorm. Last week’s heavy storms, for example, kept me from sleeping as soundly.
Interestingly, ever since I began eating more adequately, my sleep has noticeably improved. I’m not sure if there’s a direct connection, but it’s something I’d like to explore further.
Biometric data
Change in Weight from Day 1: -1.8 lb.
Skeletal Muscle: 39.10%
Muscle Mass: 94.8 lb.
Adjustment Ideas (Strategic adjustment)
- Sleep: Set a “bedtime reminder” alarm 30 minutes before your ideal sleep time.
- Mindset: Treat sleep as active training—your recovery session, not wasted time.
- Micro-habit: Keep a small bedside notebook to record sleep and wake times in under 1 minute.
Note
- S. Michie et al., “Effective Techniques in Healthy Eating and Physical Activity Interventions: A Meta-Regression,” in Database of Abstracts of Reviews of Effects (DARE): Quality-Assessed Reviews [Internet] (Centre for Reviews and Dissemination (UK), 2009), https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK77075/. ↩︎