It's hard to decide what I should do in the middle of the night when I am not sleeping.
When the brain turns on, I wait to see if it's just enough to roll over, or if this is insomnia kicking in. I toss, wait for awhile, I turn, wait again, and shuffle the cat around my legs. After 45 minutes or more and sleep hasn't returned, I start worrying about my schedule. I pray for sleep, and when that prayer isn't answered (though I suspect sometimes it is), I pray for guidance about what I should spend my newfound time doing.
Should I just get up now and start doing something I was going to do anyway today? Or should I try something that might help put me back to sleep? I'm always very reluctant to do the latter, because it feels like wasting time.
I consider looking at twitter or email on my phone. Problem is, that little screen is so bright—even if I quickly dim it to the lowest setting—and brightness tells the eyes and body to wake up, which is the last thing I want to do!
When I finally concede that sleep is evading me and wander out to the living room, invariably the first thing I do is draft a whiny tweet. I tell myself it's so that if there are other insomniacs out there they can take comfort in knowing they are not alone. And maybe so we can play a game or something to pass the time. But I think the real reason is that I want to whine about my sleeplessness publicly and elicit the sympathy of those who will experience my crankiness later.
After I either give in to that temptation, or draft and delete, I flop onto the couch. I consider trying to cheat the big waste of time that is insomnia by writing something, like a blog post. I also consider taking care of the things about which I had lain in bed worrying*** for the last hour (because invariably my mind had turned to listing out things I need to remember to do, or drafting emails I really should have sent already). Gah, but I don't have any energy! Whine! I just want to be sleeping! Third option is court sleepiness with warm milk, boring reading, or reclining with my eyes closed. But I have tried both warm milk and reading legal documents in the past, with no success. And using the microwave to warm milk in the middle of the night is not conducive to my spouse remaining asleep, anyway.
No, the thing that usually happens is that I just have to wait it out, trying not to think or do anything too destructive or panicky as I ride the powerful wave of wakefulness. Sleep always comes before the alarm, even if it's only the 2 minutes prior. Never, to date, have I not gotten back to sleep and had to start the day from here. I just hope I didn't jinx it!
*Altered TMBG lyric
**With a title like this, who do I think I am, Sufjan Stevens?
***What annoyingly pedantic, but hopefully grammatically correct, phrasing! I definitely had to look up how to conjugate "to lay/lie" in English. Grammar Girl to the rescue!
1 comment:
I love your asterisks! Okay, so I want to tell you that after 20 minutes of lying there sleepless, you should get out of bed. Do something boring (which apparently you've tried) but the boring thing should not be on a screen, and you should not look at a screen (actually even for the 1 hour before bed...hard in our day and age I know). And then try bed again, and if in 20 minutes that has worked...repeat. But maybe I shouldn't, maybe then I will have missed the point of the post :) Oh and (cause I can't help myself), waking up at the same time is more helpful to sleep hygiene than going to bed at the same time. okay, done I promise.
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