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October 31, 2007
On Not Sleeping
You know how sometimes you do something, even though you know it's a bad idea, and even the knowledge that it's a bad idea somehow feeds the whole need to do whatever it is?
I'm having this issue with staying up past midnight. I need to not do it. I need to get up in the morning. I need to get eight hours of sleep in order to stay healthy. And yet, every night I do something mindless & boring until well-past 11 and then I climb into bed and do puzzles until almost 1am. Sometimes I'm so tired I fall asleep sitting up, yet still I feel this compulsion to stay awake.
I have no idea why I feel this need so strongly. I mean, nothing happens in our house after about 10:30pm. Nothing. Except snoring. Or the quiet turning of a page. Or frantic typing from Dave's office as he tries for the third year in a row to successfully balance full-time job and full-time graduate school. (So far, he's still sane and relatively cheerful, so I'm going to assume he's still succeeding.) So I'm not going to miss anything if I go to bed and sleep.
(Moscow's not exactly a hotbed of late night activity either, given that the only two places you can eat out after 10pm are Applebees and the hot dog stand on the corner of 6th & Main. The bars are open, but I wouldn't suggest they're hopping. At least, not on a Monday night.)
And it's not that I can't sleep. It's not like it was a couple of years ago when I was so wound up and so stressed that I couldn't actually sleep and would stay awake and try to will myself to unconsciousness. When I finally did drift off, it was only for a little while. I would wake up a couple of hours later, wide awake in the wee hours, often falling asleep again about 20 minutes before my alarm went off.
This is not like that. This is just me not wanting to go to bed, not wanting to lie down and sleep. I'm guessing I need to just make myself go to bed early, but I wish I wasn't having to deal with it at all.
Of course, tonight I can't go to bed early. Tonight is the night NaNoWriMo begins, and I have to start writing. Maybe a nap... Though I must admit, I'm even worse at naps than I am at going to bed. It's all about guilt. Sleeping in the middle of the day when I could be doing something Important. My brain just gets all uptight about napping, and even if I'm about to fall over from exhaustion, I will still lie in bed and stare at the ceiling instead of actually taking a snooze. Maybe the trick is to not go to bed for a nap, but to catch 20 on the couch instead. I'm fairly decent at the sneaky couch nap. I think I may try that this afternoon.
Posted by sally at October 31, 2007 08:16 AM
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