Sleep
Sunrise this morning - worth getting up and out for.
I’ve been round the houses with my sleep pattern - I’m guessing this is a general Lockdown thing and would love to hear about other people’s random sleep habits. I’ve been reading Matthew Edlund’s The Power of Rest intermittently - it’s about much more than just sleep - and though (like most things I read) I’ll only apply a portion of it myself, I do find people’s experiences around sleep fascinating.
I’ve never been an amazing sleeper, I always notice when I’ve slept through the night because it happens very rarely (maybe a couple of times a year) and it’s always taken me a long time to fall asleep, though this improves with a tonne of exercise and anything I do to address background anxiety. I have given up caffeine in the past and I don’t believe it plays a major role (not enough to be worth giving it up!) and I’m extremely undisciplined about electronics in the bedroom although I have all the bluelight filters on now. I also currently have a significant distance relationship where our only currently available chat time is sometime between 11pm - half-midnight - so these are the parameters I’ve been working within.
These are the Lockdown-specific factors:
the ability to conduct almost all my activities around any chosen schedule and lack of daytime scheduling. There are restrictions on shop opening hours but even that is only overnight between 10pm and 6am here.
wanting to sleep more or finding it harder to wake up because there’s not enough to do, the days feel long (I get lonely and would rather be asleep) or there aren’t enough plans
it’s very difficult to wear myself out completely; I’ll get emotionally weary but not physically exhausted
general mood issues affecting sleep
it’s also quite hard to justify getting overly tired when being home all the time (bed is right there!) - whereas outside of home I would have mostly just kept on pushing through if I got tired, it’s harder to do this at home
I basically never have to wake up to an alarm - I do set them occasionally if there’s something I’ve got to match schedules with but because I tend to wake between sleep cycles anyway I just get up at the nearest one to the alarm time rather than letting it wake me
Mostly I have slept as much as I’ve wanted to and when I’ve wanted to and after years of a packed schedule and feeling pretty much universally under-slept, I finally came out the other side of this luxurious sleep allowance to where I only wanted (physically wanted) to sleep for a normal amount - somewhere between 7 and 9 hours of actual sleep.
Over the winter I did chase my sleep around the clock once; for some reason I do seem to sleep better (more contentedly) during the day and having to try to sleep at night is something I grow a bit resentful about - but I have to balance this off against missing the daytimes and the light, especially in the winter here where it’s easily possible to sleep through entire days and never get any daylight. For a while I was going to sleep around 3-4am and then one day it was 6am and it just kept going from there. After that I settled on an extended bedtime starting from around 1am until late morning, give or take, during which I’d try to get the right amount of total sleep but sometimes with a break in the middle.
The spanner in the works now is that this is my favourite time of year and I love to see the spring dawns - in the past when I’ve had office hours I’ve been known to get up at 4am across the summer (not daily but at least a couple of times a week) and I’m not willing to miss out on that completely; it’s also my favourite time to exercise. It’s not compatible with the post-chat 1am bedtime so I have to choose - ideally I’d like one shorter night followed by a longer one where I sleep in and then I’d get the best of both worlds, if my body could adapt to this.
What I’ve learned about my own preferences:
I’m not a fan of naps any more - I used to love them and you’d often find me curled up peacefully on the sofa during the day, but now I’d rather go to sleep properly, in bed, for a good chunk of time and then have clear awake times. Maybe it is worth thinking about your Awake Pattern more than Sleep Pattern?
I get naturally sleepy about 3am - I am both an owl and a lark, in fact at some times of year my ideal sleeping and waking times would only be an hour or two apart!
I am OK waking up in the dark if it’s pre-dawn but hate it in the evening.
There’s nothing I dislike more than trying to force myself to sleep at specific times; the most relaxing thing is to allow myself to sleep when I’m ready to and then work around it within reason.
I want to be awake! I am enjoying life more and there are things about the daytimes (especially mornings) that I really want to get up for.
If I’ve got a particular time in mind to be awake for I will generally naturally wake up around that time, without an alarm.
So for this week I have been trying a bi-phase (split sleep) schedule that goes something like this:
Sleep when I’m sleepy at night (between 2:30-4am) but don’t make myself go to bed until I’m ready
Get up when my sleep splits (around 6-7am) and enjoy the dawn, take a walk
Stay up until I’m sleepy again - this part can be hazy as I’m “under”-slept but nice for reading, writing, pottering around.
Sleep another 3-4 hours in the middle of the day
Wake up and start what would have been my normal day (so maybe 12-14 hours between lunchtime and the next sleep)
This has knock-on effects with other daily routines, mealtimes in particular - I’ll come back to that later
I don’t think I can split-sleep in the long-term but I’m comfortable with it for now. That alternating short/long sleep pattern is still the ideal I’m working towards but my quality of life is much better for getting my mornings back and hopefully I’m building a bit of discipline around getting up (and having things worth getting up for - twice a day!)
Re-emergence
I’ve been contemplating a return to blogging for a couple of months and finally I’m here! with lots to say on various topics; I have a Hundred Helpful Thoughts project I’m working on, and various thoughts about lockdown life which we’re still one-foot-in here. Like most people, it’s been a year since I was office-bound, socialising and travelling as a norm and I am trying to separate the ways that year has shaped me for the future into distinct threads - which I think writing will help with.
I live alone and lockdown has been a combination of getting insanely comfortable within my four-wall-fortress, and confronting the internal landscape of my mind. This mental world expanded to fill the space left by events, socialising, roaming, exploring, commuting, and all the outside-home things we’ve no longer been able to do - even when I’ve been outside walking I’ve been further into my head having conversations about what’s happening (or not). There has been nowhere to hide from parts of my own persona that I’d previously tried to muffle with my busy life, and like it or not I have had to face down discomforting trains of thought and self-conceptualisation that have dogged me most of my life. Regardless of how lonely and unforgiving that’s felt at times, I feel much stronger in terms of not hiding from myself (and no longer needing to), having a good think about how I want to combine what I’ve got inside and honour what I am with the life that I’m living, and settling on some pretty big changes in what I’m actually doing with my time. I would sum this up as a massive formative process and a shift in fundamental values and it turns out that what’s important to me is different from what was important when I was engaged in this cover-up web of a lifestyle. Many things have become vastly clearer.
My biggest takeaways have been:
Values-wise, my priority is freedom, especially the freedom to live each day as it comes, let it unfold as it will and embrace the unexpected.
Ironically, social distancing has given me back the power to determine how I choose to interact with the world and those around me.
I have to take responsibility for myself, and I’ve learnt that I can trust myself to do the things that matter - this is a huge relief. Independence and freedom go hand in hand and I’m less anxious the less reliant I need to be on others.
Overall I see this as a tale of empowerment.
Things I’m still working on:
Courage
Self-expression
Contributing, sense of purpose
Balance
If my driving force is no longer (or decreasingly) fear and anxiety, what is my life built on now?