I’ve only been in Toronto for a little under a year, and with a city so big, it’s difficult to not want to explore it all the time. I already spend every day of the week downtown for work that you’d think that my weekends are saved for uptown – but that’s not the case. I love the calmness of the uptown atmosphere, and it gives me all of my suburban needs that I miss from Ottawa, but besides that, there isn’t much else to do. When I have a craving to go exploring and walk around all day in nice weather, downtown is the destination of choice.
I don’t get a lot of sleep, so I often substitute my rest for caffeine (which is not a good idea). I used to begin all of my days with a cup of coffee and then load up on a second one halfway through the afternoon. It’s gotten to the point where I can’t start my day without a quick dose of caffeine, and if I even try to, headaches rule my day.
But ever since realizing that I’ve become addicted to coffee and that I’ve let it pretend that I don’t need sleep, I’ve already realize that it isn’t the healthiest solution for my body. Your body does a lot for you during the day, and the only down time that it has to repair itself is at night while you’re asleep. Without enough rest, your body fails to stay healthy, and you wind up becoming more susceptible to colds and sicknesses (not to mention that you’re constantly fatigued).
Believe it or not, there once was a time when I wasn’t addicted to coffee. And surprisingly enough, that was only a couple years ago. I remember how it felt on the days that I’d be able to catch up on my lack of sleep and wake up feeling refreshed as if I’d been given a new life. It’s been awhile since I’ve had that feeling, and I’ve been chasing it since.
In hopes of changing my lifestyle to get back the much important me-time, one of the first things that I promised myself was that I’d slowly cut down on the amount of coffee that I drink everyday – with hopes that one day I’ll no longer rely on coffee to keep myself alert.
One of the first steps to my caffeine detox is to replace my second cup of the day with tea. Although caffeine can still be found in tea, it exists at a fraction of what you’d expect from a whole cup of coffee. That small amount is enough to get me through the rest of my afternoon before I go home and take a quick nap to recharge. But even though napping in the afternoon may add up to a full 8 hours of sleep for a day, it doesn’t have the same effects as a full night’s rest.
It’s important to have 7-8 hours of sleep each night to guarantee that your body has enough time to heal itself. When you don’t reach those goals, your body starts to develop a sleep debt, which you get up to two weeks to pay-off before those hours of sleep are lost forever. And we all know by now that lack of sleep ages us. So on weekends, I use my free-time to sleep in and catch up on whatever missing hours that I’ve racked up throughout the week.
Besides just getting a couple extra hours of sleep, I shift my daily coffee to the afternoon in order to match my market explorations so that I can kill two birds with one stone and adjust my body’s necessity for coffee. Without drinking coffee the instant that I wake up, I can hopefully train my body to rely less on it and to value the importance of sleep more.
But since I can now rely less on coffee for it’s caffeine effects, I’ve recently developed an appreciation for taste – which means weekly weekend strolls to different cafes. I’ve made my way through a handful of the West-side ones, but the East-end has yet to be explored. Hopefully with enough time to come, I’ll be able to completely cross off my list of places to hit up (psst! I smell a cafe guide coming along the way!).
Top – H&M | Vest – Dynamite | Jeans – Urban Outfitters | Boots – Forever 21 | Jacket – Aritzia (similar here) | Scarf – Aritzia | Hat – Aritzia
