Oh how my mind races at night. When the darkness surrounds me, my head is filled with ideas. There are fewer distractions from the outside world, so I can really focus on all the research, writing, learning, brainstorming, planning, organizing, and doing. For whatever reason, my energy levels and alertness start to pick up around 10. It doesn’t matter if I’ve eaten or not, had any sort of caffeine all day (usually not), gotten enough sleep the night before, or what I was doing leading up to that time. Naturally, I start to work better, even think better (and certainly focus better). I can write my blog posts and clean out my email and read those articles and prepare my eBay listings so much better.
Why? I have no idea. All I do know is that if I try to sleeping around 11 or midnight, I’m doomed. Doomed to lay in bed tossing and turning, unable to shut off the river of thoughts flowing in my head. Eventually, I’d have to give up and get up so I could write down all those ideas before I had to come up with them again. When I was young, I never understood how people could just fall asleep. It took me a minimum of an hour of laying there, staring into the darkness, trying to calm down my mind before I could drift off. Then I went to college and learned what some intense sleep deprivation can do! Suddenly I was packing my life with so much activity that I could finally sleep soon after laying down. But then again, that pretty much only happened after midnight anyway.
Nowadays, I don’t have a strict sleeping schedule and I’ve found myself on a shifted schedule from the norm. I still get 6-8 hours of sleep a night, but umm… well, my “nights” are actually days. I don’t know how it started to shift so drastically, but I found myself sleeping around 4 or 5 am, then 6 or 7, and even a couple of days past 8. I tried to deprive myself of sleep so I would be tired earlier in the day, but that didn’t work out. Apparently 4 hours of sleep is still plenty enough to sustain me. Alas, the only thing that really worked was going to China. Whether it was being on the opposite side of the world or in a completely different cultural atmosphere, I was able to wake up naturally around 7 or 8 in the morning and become tired around 10 or 11 at night. Unfortunately the same doesn’t hold true when I shift from PST to EST and back (which I do every 2-3 months).
This week, I was miraculously feeling somewhat tired around 2:30 one night, so I turned off my computer and settled in with a book. I probably read for half an hour before starting to drift off to sleep – amazing! It worked a second time but then I fell off the wagon… I’m going to try that again tonight. Wish me luck!
