I’ve been making a considerable effort to tackle the long-time sleeping issues but last night was abysmal. The sheer effort of trying to get to sleep for six hours left me drained. I cannot stress how much I hate sleeping. I have done since my early teens. It’s why I can’t stay in bed in the mornings. As I move through this stage of my life, I constantly hear how important it is and while I accept that, I find it boring and as difficult as my life can be, I just want to get on with tackling each day and making progress by the end of it. I tell myself that Margaret Thatcher famously used to get by on 4 hours sleep every night, but did she? How much evidence is there of that? And if she did, that’s just one person, right? Most people seem to acknowledge you need a good night’s sleep.
My phone management during the day is very good. I’m well-disciplined with screen time. In the evenings, the phone is off for six hours. The problem is it comes on at midnight every night so I can find something to listen to. It’s the only chance I have of falling asleep. But I’m subscribed to so many shows and unlike most, as someone listening to podcasts for almost twenty years now, I don’t subscribe to the view this is the golden age of podcasting. Back in the noughties, there were far fewer shows but I feel the quality of the shows I listened to back then was superior to what we have now. And there were no ads of course. I knew what show came out on what day and every night I would know which of the latest shows I would listen to and in what order. Nowadays, I can’t make a decision for toffee.
What ends up happening is I seriously undermine the six hours I’ve had the phone off and saved my eyes by scrolling endlessly through my list of podcasts to see what I might fancy listening to, and that usually takes a good half hour. I stick my ear phone in (just the one) because I’m a considerate neighbour but the ear bud ends up irritating me. I only ever use them late at night. Then, inevitably, I can’t get comfortable on my pillow and for this time of year, I had too much bedding. I dropped from 80 to around 65 at 0400hrs. Shortly after, I decided to tackle the pillow. I was spoilt for choice. Six pillows on the bed, even though I live on my own. I tried a different pillow for twenty minutes, then added a supporting pillow underneath. It’s possible I was a little more comfortable but if I haven’t finally fallen asleep by the end of the witching hour, I know it’s not happening.
Desperate to get some shut eye, I turned to the last resort, a meditation podcast. Those rarely work for me. After twenty minutes, all this had done was accentuate the chronic aches likely to be aggravated shortly by this morning’s run. The narrator moved on from telling me to ‘breathe through your heart’ to attuning myself to the Archangel Michael and shortly afterwards, as if the first wasn’t unsettling enough, to the personal spirit guide we all apparently have from birth to death. That was really creepy and I ended up almost pulling my right shoulder muscle with the effort of dragging 65 togs worth of bedding over my head. I don’t want a spirit guide. Let me be clear on that.
By 0600, that was it. It was pointless remaining in bed and I got up, hoping that tonight (I’m playing football this evening too) I’ll be feeling tired enough to doze off a bit earlier. The big problem is that despite doing enough exercise six days a week, the 10ks, the football, the home workouts, to feel physically tired, my mind is super hyper right now. I kept going over several creative projects in my head through the night and I just couldn’t stop. It almost felt like a mania. I was just desperate for the day to start.
I feel like I tried to do the right things. Change the pillow. Meditation. There was a concerted attempt to sleep, albeit in two very boring blocks of two hours (in-between I was trying to find a budget vapo rub online).
The damage was almost certainly done before bed. I hadn’t switched off mentally. I’d had a productive afternoon editing my script in the back-up-back-up café and picked up some more gigs, including one this Friday night on home turf in Brixton. I was dealing with bookings long after the cut-off point I set myself daily of 1800hrs. That was one mistake. It got the mind too active at a late hour.
Hopefully tonight I feel as tired as I do right now and tomorrow I wake up a little more refreshed.
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