Let’s talk more about burnout, sleep, and how the hell I can do better with both. I’m pretty sure the lack of the middle one is causing the first one, but I feel helpless to do anything about it. My sleep is wild these days. I had to get up before noon for my class, and I went to bed fairly early for me (5 a.m.), and I planned on getting up a quarter to twelve. Instead, I fell asleep, snoozed, and got up several times. At eleven or so, I woke up and just could not go back to sleep.
I have a weird thing in which if I have to get up at a certain time, then I’ll wake up early and keep on waking up until I give up and get up for good. It’s so frustrating because I could get an extra hour of sleep if Iwould just stay asleep, but my anxiety does me in every time.
When I used to fly frequently, I would often get an early morning flight because it was the cheapest. If i had to be at the airport at, say, four in the morning, I just was not going to sleep that night. Even as I’m writing this, I’m struggling to keep my eyes open. I’ve nodded off, slept for a few minutes, started awake, and repeated the cycle.
There’s no reason I couldn’t just go to bed now, but I won’t for whatever reason. I know what will happen, though. If I stay awake for ten more minutes, I’ll be up until five or six. This is just the way my brain works for whatever reason.
I’m exhausted, and then I can’t sleep. This cycle is the worst, and I know that I don’t help myself. I think the thing I need to do if I can is take out the self-judgment. I was talking to A about how hard it is not to be negative about oneself in addition to the actual problem. After all, we’ve been told all our lives that we’re lazy; that our brains were broken; that we just needed to try harder.
I can’t tell you how many different things I have tried to get better sleep. In fact, I listed several ways I tried to get better sleep in my post from yesterday. Every time, I had hope in my heart that this would be the answer, it wasn’t. There is nothing that has worked–except Taiji. And that took several years before it helped in the sleep department. Before I studied Taiji, I got four to five hours of sleep a night. Afterwards, I pushed it up to six, maybe six-and-a-half, inch by inch. Now, I get six to eight, depending, and it’s mostly on me if it’s less because I set my alarm for the same time no matter when I go to sleep (unless I have to get up earlier).
Why? Because I’m hoping in vain that it’ll spur me to go to bed earlier. I have mentioned that I would like to go to bed by 3 a.m. Now, it’s more than half hour past that. 3 a.m. to 11 a.m. is my ideal schedule, but I have rarely been able to stay on that schedule. After I got out of the hospital (after my medical crisis), I was sleeping 10 p.m. to 6 p.m. I never did that even when I was a kid. I have never gone to bed before midnight–even when I had a 7:45 a.m. class in college. In fact, during that time, I rarely went to bed before 3:30 a.m.
When I went home for any break, I would crash for fifteen hours the first night. And I would have a horrible cold or bronchitis. I made it known not to wake me up for the first day because I desperately needed the sleep.
One of my most memorable sleep-related incidents was during my first semester at college. Yes, that semester when I was getting three hours of sleep a night, if that. I had a portable alarm clock (lilac-colored) that I kept on my desk beside me. One morning, I could not find it no matter how much I searched. I gave up after five minutes and opened my mini-fridge so I could grab a Diet Pepsi (I didn’t drink coffee at that time). To my bemusement, there was the alarm clock. For whatever reason, I had put it in the mini-fridge after turning it off.
Recently, my sleep was so bad, I decided to do something rash. My therapist a few decades ago suggested that I not sleep for 72 hours to reset my sleep schedule. There was some evidence back then that it may jumpstart your sleep cycle. Well, of course, we learn a lot of new things over time, and that’s been pretty well refuted.
When I was up to roughhly 43 hours, I messaged Ian about it, and he messaged back asking if that wasn’t dangerous. I looked it up, and it was, indeed, dangerous. That made sense, really. Sleep deprivation is listed in the Geneva Convention as a form of torture, and it’s not allowed.
I do know that it didn’t help, anyway. The staying up, I mean. The sleep? Well, I crashed for ten hours, and that felt good. This is what happens when I’m constantly depriving myself of sleep. I push myself until I go over the edge and then I crash hard.
This is not good. I know it isn’t good. I just don’t know what to do about it that I haven’t tried before. I do know that after my medical crisis, I managed to have a steady sleep schedule, but that was because I was already wiped out physically. I mean, dying (twice!) does that to you. It was a miracle that nothing was damage (mostly), but I was so exhausted for the week I was conscious in the hospital.
I mostly slept, hallucinated, and had my vitals checked. Oh, and got tested to make sure my body (and mind) was functioning properly. I passed all the tests with flying colors, and I went from “Most people take a year to recover” to getting kicked out of the hospital in less than a week. It’s funny, but it was also wild to go through at the time.
Well. I said a whole lot about nothing. I’ll try to get more to the point tomorrow.