I have two things I want to talk about, so because it’s my blog and I can do what I want to, I’m going to write about both. Or one until I run out of steam and decide to write about the other one tomorrow. They aren’t directly related, but there are tendrils that grow out of each that entwine and become merged together.
Let’s starct with sleep. It sucks. The end.
Of course, that’s not all I have to say about it; I’m just getting started.
I have written about sleep so often, I’m begin to bore myself. But it’s getting worse, so I’m going to keep writing about it. About twenty years ago, my therapist at the time told me of a solution that was getting some attention. It’s to stay awake for three days (and nights) straight–72 hours in order to jumpstart your brain. (That’s a very grossly simple explanation of what it was supopsed to do.) When I tried it at the time, I made it roughly 62 hours before my bestie called me to say she had her baby–prematurely.
Follishly, I went to the hospital to visit them. I was out of my mind as I talked to K. I don’t remember what I said or if I even saw the baby through the glass. I think maybe not? As I was driving home, which was the same as if I was driving home from her house, I forgot how to get on the last freeway I needed to travel to get home. When I got home, I went to sleep immediately. (I really, really, REALLY should not have been driving).
Did it jumpstart my brain? Not really. Do I think it’ll do it this time? Not really. But! I think it might interrupt the slide I’m experiencing as far as my struggle to get to bed at a reasonable time.
Side note: I do think there’s too much pressure to go to bed at a ‘good’ hour (which means before midnight I guess?) and to say that anyone who goes to bed after that time has a mental health problem. Yes, there are studies that show that people who go to bed ‘late’ suffer more from depression, but correlation is not causation, and I would wager it’s the other way around. (People who cannot go to bed before midnight get depression from trying to force their natural biorhythms to fit those of the world around them.)
That said, I would like to go to bed before the sun rises. I want to aim for 3 a.m. I think that’s reasonable for me (but not tonight).
Side note deux: I was watching a show in which the participants were talking about when do you conside the next day to have begun. These were night owls, and none of them thought of a new day beginning at midnight. I was excited by this because I have long given up that metric as the start of a new day. For me, it’s when I wake up–that’s the new day. Anything before I go to sleep is the same day. In the show I was watching, one person answered that anything until the sun rose was one day. Another said that if he was called anytime before going to bed to set up a meeting at any time after he woke up, that would be the next day, regardless of what time it actually was.