Interesting side effect

Tonight, my husband and I had an interesting conversation over dinner. We talked about a variety of typical husband and wife things…our days at work, how my eye appointment went, general topics. I brought up the fact that I had woken up last night with a terribly upset stomach. Something I ate did not sit well and I ended up laying awake for a couple hours while the nausea subsided. The Mounjaro injections I take once a week have made food a gamble in terms of what will and will not cause my stomach to be upset. My husband pointed out that I haven’t been sleeping well lately. It’s true. I have been getting up earlier on the weekends when I don’t have to and I tend to wake up in the middle of the night and not be able to fall back asleep for a while. The nice thing when that happens though is that the next day, I’m not overly tired from a lack of sleep. When he pointed this out to me, he asked if I was feeling stress or anxiety and perhaps couldn’t sleep because of it. Surprisingly, it is exactly the opposite. The past two years have been such an odyssey of the very stress and anxiety he mentioned that my body suffered the consequences. My blood sugar and blood pressure both rose to such high levels that the Mounjaro became necessary to bring my A1C down (loving the weight loss as a result), among other medications. Starting all of the new medicine in March and of course, making the decision to quit the job that caused the stress and anxiety in the first place, has helped my physical health improve significantly. I realized tonight, that where I used to be tired all of the time and could sleep in until the late morning every weekend, that was my body’s way of processing the stress. Now that grad school is finished and my job as school principal is about to be over, I am reveling in the feeling of freedom and the joy of not feeling anxiety as much as I used to. For that reason, I don’t need as much sleep. And I’m here for it! There are so many fun things I can do when I don’t feel like I need to sleep so much. Yet another interesting side effect of prioritizing myself and both my physical and mental health.