Sleep (032)
Sleep used to come easily to me. I could sleep just about anywhere and any time. People used to tell me that when you get older, you don’t need as much sleep. I haven’t found that to be the case, but I have found it much more difficult to get the sleep I do need. My anxious brain lies there on the pillow, processing the day, the endless possibilities of the days to come, driving me absolutely insane while I try to silence it, only to get more upset and further from the sandman.
I once read that people with impairments or chronic illness, including mental illnesses, do need more sleep than their healthier counterparts. I’ll anecdotally back that up. Even the people in my own family who are much more mentally healthy than those who are not require hours less sleep. My personal lower limit for enough consistent sleep is 8 hours, with a couple 10 hour nights per week. Through the pandemic, I have been sleeping 10 hours per night on average with a couple 12 hours nights per week. That may be too much, but if my body wants to sleep, I let it.
Alarms aren’t my friend. They make me even more anxious and I end up getting less sleep. This is why it’s vitally important that I continue on the path of being able to make my own work hours. That being said, I don’t want to sleep my life away, and I’d like to have a regular, healthy sleep schedule.
Last night, my brain would not allow me to shut down until 2am, and then I tossed and turned and woke up many times throughout the night, eventually waking up for good at 8am. I decided maybe today would be the day I push myself to stay awake so that I can get to sleep earlier tonight and begin the more regular schedule that I desire. The idea of being a functioning human was soon thwarted. I helped Mike with some work, we went to Costco to shop for a few items, and in the parking lot I lost my damn mind when I dropped my soda. There was zero fuse to light before my bomb went off. It wasn’t good, and I needed to go home. So we did. Mike made us some food and I relaxed on the couch, half asleep already. By 2pm, I was out cold. The two hour nap completely refreshed me, and I was even able to push myself to work on my book. For 50 minutes, I struggled to maintain focus on writing, and I got 440 new words out of my brain. It wasn’t the three hours I had planned to write, but I’ll take the win.
