Most people don’t know about the connection between sleeping and eating. They think they do, and there are many tales of how eating one thing produced this or that kind of dream, or not sleeping on full or empty stomachs and the like. As it turns out, there are a few lessons one can learn about these two things, and how they’re related to blogging. Don’t think I can do it? Let’s find out.

my favorite kind of eating 🙂

1. Did you know that you could survive more than 60 days without food if you at least have something legitimate to drink? That doesn’t mean it’s great living, but it’s survival. That means you’d have a chance to overcome whatever problems you might have if that’s the reason why you can’t or don’t have food to eat.

It’s like blogging. Your blog can survive if you decide to write only once a month or even once every 2 to 3 months, but is it really blogging? Will your blog or website get much benefit out of it without more output? If you can’t put out enough content to feed your visitors on a consistent basis, will you always have to count on new visitors to keep your site relevant?

2. Did you know that you wouldn’t survive more than a week without sleeping (although there have been some anomalies, but it’s very rare)? For most people, even if you tried not to sleep for more than 72 hours your body and mind will overcome you and you’ll doze here and there. My record is 81 1/2 hours, I was a lot younger than I am now, and I can honestly say it was miserable, but I got through it.

This is like blogging once you get into it. For a while at least you’ll find yourself having more things to say and feeling a need to write, even if you’re not in the mood to do so. Of course this presupposes that you’ve fully embraced blogging and all that comes with it.

There’s also the other side, the sleeping side of blogging. Over the past year I’ve run into that here and there on one of my other blogs. The passion hasn’t always been there so the content’s been sporadic. I’ve been sleeping a long time where it’s concerned, to the extent that I composed an article there for the first time in five months just a month ago. You know what happened? Pretty much nothing. That audience left, and even though I wrote a follow up article last week, the first one got one visit, the second none. I not only put my audience to sleep, but I put them in a coma; do you want that happening on your blog?

Shhhhh…

3. Did you know that when you get older you’d rather sleep than eat, but how dangerous that is? From around the age of 45 or so people actually do start eating less, even if their weight doesn’t always show it. Inactivity has more to do with weight gain at that point than how much one eats.

When there’s the choice between sleeping and eating, most people will choose to sleep, and the older you get, the less energy doing that gives you as far as waking up or wanting to do anything else. The act of sleeping stems the act of being hungry, which is fine when we’re younger, but not so much as we get older. Most times, when a person in a nursing home starts sleeping and won’t eat, it’s pretty much known that they won’t be alive much longer… which happened to my mother.

If you don’t love blogging, and you have the choice between blogging and doing something else, you’re going to do something else if blogging isn’t a passion. After a while, you’re not going to want to blog anymore. You probably won’t expire, but if you thought blogging was necessary for your business you’re going to find reasons not to do it and your blog will die out. This is why some people recommend having publishing schedules or hiring someone else to create content for you if you’re blogging more out of necessity than enjoyment. Of course, the real idea of blogging is to find something you enjoy talking about so that you don’t tire of it.

4. Eating can help you sleep, but what you eat will definitely affect how you sleep (like those donuts). All of us have different types of food that affect us positively or negatively, and how close we eat these things to when we go to sleep or fall asleep can mess us up.

For instance, eating a high amount of carbs will put me to sleep during the day within 30 to 60 minutes, no matter what it is. If I eat it late in the evening, close to when I’m going to bed, there’s no effect at all in falling asleep, but I might wake up during the night in the process of crashing because of my diabetes. If I eat something with acidic sauce, like tomato sauce, and go to bed within 3 hours I’m going to be sick all night, probably wake up sick, and sleep horribly. If I eat a salad (which is rare) I tend to sleep well, but I hate salads that late at night (and in general) so it’s not something I do all that often.

How you decide to write your blog will have a major effect on how much you enjoy writing on it. If you tend to write long, boring posts that are more like textbooks than prose, you’re going to hate it. If you niche yourself so finitely that it’s a chore trying to figure out what to write, you’re not going to be encouraged to write.

This is why so many people recommend finding something you enjoy talking about and why I recommend that if you’re going to write on a certain niche not to make it so tight that it limits what you can write about. Most people should be able to figure out what they like to write or talk about without needing someone else to tell them how to do it. Don’t steal other people’s content; don’t copy and paste. If you find something you enjoy it won’t give you stomach aches and make you do drastic changes, such as giving up blogging for good.

I think that’s enough for now; time for a sandwich, then a nap. 😉