Improving Sleep: A Tip from Revelation

I have sometimes struggled getting decent sleep. One key tip that took me years to fully appreciate comes from Doctrine & Covenants 124:88:

Cease to be idle; cease to be unclean; cease to find fault one with another; cease to sleep longer than is needful; retire to thy bed early, that ye may not be weary; arise early, that your bodies and your minds may be invigorated.

Though this just looks like basic folk wisdom (“early to bed, early to rise”), in my case it proved to be very important wisdom that I was able to take seriously. I am under constant temptation to stay up late to get just one more task done, and then another, and then another – but if I stay up until I am exhausted, the quality of my sleep deteriorates. In fact, I find that with my schedule, staying up much past 11 p.m. results in waking up a lot earlier than I want to, with difficulty in getting back to sleep or having deep sleep after that. And if I stay up a lot later, then it becomes harder to fall asleep.

I’ve also found that physical activity during the day helps. And that I can ruin my sleep by eating much food late at night (after roughly 9 p.m.), and that sugar-rich foods like ice cream are very likely to detract from good sleep. A healthy diet, consistent with the food-pyramid-like nature of the Word of Wisdom, really helps.

I suggest that good sleep is part of the Word of Wisdom blessing of being able to “run and not be weary, and . . . walk and not faint.”

May you all sleep well. And if the above advice doesn’t help, try spending more time with this blog!

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Author: Jeff Lindsay

1 thought on “Improving Sleep: A Tip from Revelation

  1. I think for many of us our sleep deprivation is more related to little ones running about and waking up needing feeding or having tooth aches.

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