Your life speaks louder than your words.

This was the last sentence to a recent post I saw on Facebook. It wasn’t in quotes, so I don’t know if anyone said other than the Facebook user.

Right now, my life speaks volumes about the importance of sleep. Not just a quick nap, but the importance of good, old-fashion rest and recovery.

My time in bed according to Apple Health. I’ve been averaging about 3-4 hours of sleep a night, and my body hates my mind right now.

For a while now, my sleep schedule has consisted of aiming to go to bed around 9 p.m., but really going to bed around 11. It’s the summer, the sun and kids are still up. Then around 1 or 2 a.m., I get up because of something usually dog related. Most nights, I can’t get back to sleep until around 4:30 or 5. Then I get up at 6 a.m. because my dogs are crazy and bark at everyone and everything on the street.

The past two nights, while I still haven’t nailed my bedtimes, my sleep had been dead on. I’m awake and feel awesome.

But those other days, I have a hard time doing much of anything. My work suffers as well as things at home.

I had this problem when my kids where smaller. I’d get home around midnight, but really couldn’t settle my brain down until 2 a.m., then I’d get up around 6, so I could get the kids ready for school. I did this for about six years, rather horribly.

Why didn’t I ask my husband for help? I’m more of a morning person that he is. I’m awake in the morning, not matter what. But when I loose sleep, my battery drains by lunchtime.

When my kids were little, I had a particularly demanding boss who thought I could be more, achieve more than what I was. What I was, was tired. Some days, I had a decent night’s sleep and could do great things. But most days, I was too tired, too unwilling to put in the effort.

I am into the final stretch of a training plan for an upcoming 8k. To be honest, my lack of sleep has hurt the exercise routine the most. My muscles are overly tired, my brain isn’t paying attention.

I’ve done this before, but then I had little kids who were driving me nuts. They’re still driving me nuts, but in a different way. I needed to be alert because they were too young to fend for themselves. Exercise was a way for all of us to get outside and to wear the little minions out, hopefully before I wore out.

Now, I’m just wore out. And my kids understand. When I say I don’t want to clean up, my youngest kid give me a nod and says, “Yeah, I agree. I hate cleaning.”

So where to do from here? I’m trying to do what the first line of this post says and let my life speak louder than my words.

I am doing what I can, when I can. I do what I can when I can, which sometimes means missing other obligations (sorry about that conference call, guys) in order of taking care of my own needs. I do my workouts without setting on a time or distance expectation. Just do something, get moving.

I’m also addressing the lack of sleep and really trying to do it without sleep aids. If I can create a clean, sleepy environment and use some mental sleep aids, I can put more quality hours on my bed.

If I can deal with certain problems that are bugging me, I can put one less thing in the worry jar that seems to open every night flooding my mind with wandering, scary thoughts.

To sleep, so I can do — that’s the goal right now. Everything else will fall into place.