Increase your energy levels: Sleep and Rest

One of the best ways to increase your energy levels is to ensure you get both adequate sleep and good rest periods during the day. No, one is not synonymous with the other. The average adult needs at least 6-8 hours of quality sleep a night. If you are being totally honest with yourself, how many nights on average do you achieve that number of hours? The number of hours sleep required by the mind and the body has been the subject of many different studies over the years. One of the most interesting ones in recent times focused on deliberately denying a test subject sleep, allowing him only 3 hours sleep per night. The test was supposed to last a week, but the researchers cut it short after 6 days fearing for the health of the subject. (SBS: The Cutting Edge - Dead Tired, Awake is the new Sleep).

Lost Sleep Can't Be Made Up, Study Suggests - Yahoo! News

A new study finds that going long periods without sleep can lead to a sort of "sleep debt" that cannot simply be undone with a little extra snoozing from time to time.

During the sleeping process our bodies secrete a range of hormones allowing us to rebuild muscle tissue (amongst other things). This is also a good reason not to exercise the same group of muscles on consecutive days as the muscle fibres don't get chance to rejuvenate which can lead to damage and injury.

Rest on the other hand allows us to power down, almost like your computer screen moving to screen saver mode. We don't need to "sleep" as such, just "rest" give ourselves a breather. If we have been working out or doing physical work, our muscles can build up a lot of lactic acid. Stopping the activity / exercise for a period of time (sometimes only a very short period of time (seconds and minutes) and "shaking off" the lactic acid build up, allows us and our bodies to recover sufficiently to continue.

Finding the balance between powering down during the day, resting so you can continue on with your activities is a sensible course of action and one that most people don't consciously build into their day. But there are several strategies you can use to good effect.

1. Get away from the office at lunch time. Go for a walk. Give your eyes and your mind a rest from the computer and do something physical, but less demanding. Walking is a good example.
2. Balance hard physical exercise with incidental exercise. Some people feel that if they exercise for 40 minutes a day it will offset the amount they consume - well I doubt it, so balance your "exercise" with other forms of movement to gain this benefit. You use different muscles vacuuming the carpet to the ones you use on the stationery bicycle. One set of exercises rests the others not in use.
3. Stop. Sometimes we forget to stop. We race around all day, rush to the gym, race home again. Cook, clean and generally keep going until it's time for bed. Well stop once in a while - the rest will do you good, and if incorporated into your pre-bedtime routine can help you get to sleep more easily.