Tag Archives: sleep

Broken sleep cycle

I just had a long afternoon nap. Long enough that I’m going to struggle sleeping tonight. It’s a vicious cycle when my sleep patterns get messed up. It never starts intentionally, a late night where I can’t fall asleep is all it takes to start me off. Then suddenly everything goes out of whack.

This afternoon I set an alarm to stop me from sleeping too long, but I turned it off and didn’t get up. That’s not like me, and so it tells me that I needed it. But now what? What happens tonight when I try to get a decent night’s sleep?

I’m someone who used to do well on 5-6 hours a night, but as I’ve gotten older, I’ve needed more. I fought it for a while, but realized I was less productive and so let myself sleep longer. Over the summer I was getting closer to 7 hours and very frequently waking up before my alarm. Now the alarm is essential, and my time in bed is much longer than my time actually sleeping.

It’s hard to battle because part of it is insomnia that I seem to have no control over, and part of it is the patterns I end up following that promotes rather than reduces my insomnia… so I don’t help myself.

Workouts help, routines help, and discipline helps. I’m sharing this because I’ve learned that if I want to change something, making it public is more effective than trying to quietly convince myself that I’ll change. I need to share that I’m going to work at building consistency into my schedule, and therefore help rather than hinder my sleep struggles.

Changing routines on weekends, (like writing this so late, and still not having had my workout), doesn’t help. Late night scrolling on my phone when I can’t sleep doesn’t help. Long naps do not help. Sharing this with you now does. Wish me luck fighting this recent bout of insomnia.

Weird dreams

I have this weird thing about my dreams that I don’t think I’ve known to be true for anyone else. I almost never dream of people that I see on a regular basis in my waking hours. It is very rare for my wife, or kids, or my current coworkers to be in any of my dreams that I remember having.

That’s kind of weird. I often dream of friends and family members I have not seen in years. But if I have a rare dream of someone close to me, it’s usually a shallow, not quite awake dream about something I’m thinking/worried about. Beyond these rare occasions, the people that are usually in my dreams are almost always from my past, or strangers.

The other thing about my dreams is that when I wake up in the middle of the night, I tend to go back to my dream even if I don’t like the situation I’m in. I might feel relief that it was only a dream, and think that I’m glad I’m up and can forget the dream, but then I go back to it anyway. Last night was one of those nights.

I was dreaming that this man and woman were spying on me. I knew they were spies, and that they had guns, and I spent most of the dream trying to lose them. At least three times last night I woke up from within this dream and the stress of being (slowly) chased by armed spies was something that made me feel relieved that I could stop. But each time I went back to sleep I was thrust into this same dream again. The spies followed me, they pretended they were not, I tried to lose them. At one point I double backed and spied on them. At another point I booby trapped their weapons stash to blow up if they tried to get to their weapons, but they never triggered my trap. Even after waking up with resolve to end the dream, I’d go back into it again,

Those are my silly stress dreams. Dumb plots, unrelated to any real stresses, with people I don’t know, or people who visit me from my distant past.

I know dreams are supposed to be weird. But does anyone else dream void of people regularly in their lives? Does anyone else keep going back to dreams even after they wake up relieved that they were only dreaming? Or maybe it’s just me and my dreams that are this weird?

Sleep

I’ve never needed a lot of sleep. I can’t lay in bed beyond 8 hours without developing a head ache. I thrive on 6-7 hours sleep, and can operate on 5 hours sleep for several days in a row… although if I do this too many days in a row, it does affect my productivity and focus. I know others have noticed this, when I have abused my minimum sleep patterns.

When I’m going to get less that 6 hours, I do a breathing exercise before falling asleep to help get a boost of oxygen into me. I don’t care if it is physiological or placebo, the fact is that I wake up feeling like I’ve had more sleep when I do this with intention.

When I was starting out as a teacher, a buddy of mine told me that I was going to die 10 years early because of my lack of sleep. That night at about 1:30am I sent him an email that essentially said, ‘I’ve done the math… if you live to 85 and I live to 75, in my lifetime I will have been awake longer than you.’ 🤣

I’m fascinated by people’s interest in sleep. For some, extra sleep time is treasured. For me, it is lost time. I don’t consider unconscious time as time well spent.

That said, I love short naps. My perfect schedule would be sleeping between midnight and 6, with a 20-45 min nap between 1 and 2pm. I think I was designed for a siesta culture.

Does wanting only 6-7 hours of sleep a night make me an anomaly? I’m I fooling myself into thinking I need less sleep than I should get? Have I convinced myself that some unhealthy habits are ‘good enough for me’?

I’d say, ‘let me sleep on it’… but I won’t. I’m happy to delude myself at this point, and spend more time awake.