The Last Coffee, and the Last Braces

Tonight I put on my last set of invisalign-style braces!

It means wearing them for 2 months straight while I wait for the retainers to come in (they are basically the same thing), and then wearing retainers full-time for a year.  The catch is that when I drink coffee, it somehow sticks around and stains the top tray after about a week, and by week 2 it is definitely noticeable... by week 8 or 30 or 50 it would be disgusting.  And so, I must give up coffee.

The last coffee.  Of course, Torin had to add his special touch.  I had to reheat this cup 4 times and still finished it cold because toddler.

I am so very ready to be done with the "moving" part of braces. 

I'm done with wiggly teeth... considering that loose/missing top front teeth are my biggest paranoia, this has been a trying time!  Wiggly teeth are not calming, fun, or sexy.  Hahaha, I feel like that sums up my last year. 


There's still a year of wearing the aligners.

Wearing braces means having to hold my lips pinched closed strangely (I look snooty and bitchy) and talking with a light lisp and not being able to smile properly, it just makes the social anxiety worse.  I'm really looking forward to eating when I'm hungry instead of waiting until I'm starving and then overeating because I know it's another 6 hours until I take the braces off again.  OMGs it's going to be so awesome to be free of it eventually.



It's been worth it though. 

I have been getting almost no headaches, which I think is partially because I don't have to hold my jaw back a little strangely to get the teeth to fit together.  My teeth are so straight again! 

I gave up coffee for 4 years once (and caffeine for about 5.5-6 years?)... the absence definitely made my heart grow fonder.  I can only imagine that at the end of the year, I will go on a crazy coffee binge.  Put it in your calendars, and avoid me around the summer solstice of 2018!

In the meantime, there's always tea.  

An Average Night

Ever since my Fitbit started tracking sleep stages a little over 3 weeks ago, I've been noticing a MAJOR trend.

The Trends

This is the amount in each stage (Light is stages 1 & 2, Deep is 3&4) for last night, and when compared to my 30-day average, it is spot on!

For comparison, this is where the "benchmarks" are, where women my age experience their sleep state averages.

Light Sleep

I'm always at the top of the range for light sleep.  I would say that half of the time spent in light sleep I actually experience as awake, because I'm calmly laying there but I am fully aware of and remember all the sounds and random itches and joint soreness, and I'm turning/itching/stretching frequently in an attempt to get comfy.


Deep Sleep

I could use some serious improvements here.

If I'm getting half of what "they" say is the minimum for feeling rested the next day, and there is no other medical cause, maybe this is why I am so freaking exhausted.  1.6 hours is theoretically the minimum, and over the last month I have never exceeded 56 minutes (including when I had 8 hours of sleep in a night, which hadn't happened since November!!).

When scouring the internet for how to specifically improve deep sleep stages, a few things really popped out:

1. You get more deep sleep from 11pm-3am, and more REM from 3am-7am, no matter what your usual schedule looks like.  I typically can't fall asleep before 2am, and always feel like my best sleep is after 5 or 6am.
2. Medications/alcohol taken at bedtime can disrupt deep sleep.  I'm good with alcohol, but I do take all my allergy/asthma meds directly at bedtime to attempt to sleep through the buzzy brainfog they give me.  Maybe the buzzy part is hurting sleep!
3. Pain at night.  My hips and knots hurt significantly more at night.

The Plan of Attack

All right, so there are some obvious things I can attempt to improve.

1. Better sleep schedule.  If I'm more consistent with Torin's bedtime, and cut out my only hour of alone/husband time in the day, I could get into bed by 11 instead of midnight.  This would be improved as I fully train Torin to go to sleep by himself... but he just transitioned to a big-boy bed a week ago and I won't mess with what's working for another week or two. 
2. Switch up the medication schedule.  I'll try taking them at dinner instead of bedtime... but if there's no improvement, I'll switch to lunch or breakfast.  I'm already taking the bare minimum.
3. A better strengthening/stretching regimen.  Recovery after exercise has been taking me out of commission, because hypermobility sucks.  I think I need to swallow my pride and open up my yoga/pilates videos for pregnant ladies, since those ones are made for people with loose joints who are prone to injury.  And I definitely need to foam roll more.  I could also lose another 30lbs... still working on that one.

This post is mostly for my own records, my official sleep baseline before I start fiddling with it.  I'll let you know if anything works!