I’m far from Type A. Type Z, really. I love spontaneity, change, variety, surprise, and living a different life every day. I don’t make plans with my free time. I don’t live by structure or routine. I loathe sameness and prefer to see what life offers over what I demand of it.
Some days I feel like writing a book, some days I feel like doing big art, and other days I want to walk across countries.
I’ve also always been a night person. As the fifth of five children, I think my parents surrendered all disciplining once I came along. They were ready to relax and have fun. I had nothing to rebel against, no rules were hammered into me, I had no curfews, and there were no bedtimes.
Every night of high school, I stayed up doing homework, art, and creative projects I dreamed up until I got tired. (I love that I grew up pre-Internet so I could enjoy what came out of my mind.) I usually got tired and went to sleep around midnight, which means I was always tired getting up for school in the morning. On weekends, I reveled in sleeping until 11:00 o’clock. My latest ever was 3 PM.
I’ve been a night owl ever since. When the sun goes down, my creativity doubles. I’m more awake than ever. My internal list of enjoyable things to do buzzes with endlessness. I’m ready to go!
My mom’s the same way – I always know I can call her in the middle of the night because she’ll be up.
Now that I’m older and there are exponentially more creative outlets available online, I’ve found that about once a week I get caught up in either writing or graphics work that takes me deeper into the night, until somewhere between 1 and 3 AM. I never even did that in college. And I’m the one who’s wondering if my someday college kids will ever get enough sleep!
There’s just something about the glow of a screen that keeps me from feeling tired. (In the daytime if I’m on the computer, I never know I’m hungry. I’ve found from experience that executive skills vanish with computer use.)
My husband and I are the type of people who like to grow in new areas all the time. Lately, he’s been listening to audiobooks on his bike rides about the topic of sleep. He just started a new, very intriguing one, and he’s shared a few interesting snippets with us.
I used to suggest to him that he was staying up too late after work in order to have down time, and now he’s the early bedtime fanatic and I’m the one overdoing it here and there.
I don’t have to get any deeper into his book about sleep to know what the lack of it does to me. When I go to sleep too late, the next day I inevitably experience:
- blurrier vision
- a notch down in happiness
- a rough voice and constant throat-clearing
- a proneness to mild injury
- an inability to remember recent memories and people’s names
- an inability to concentrate deeply for long periods
- an inability to warm up – I’m chilly all day
- less patience and more emotional reactivity in family life
- an older-looking face and skin
- a slightly bloated tummy
- markedly less energy and endurance for athletic pursuits
- less interest in physical intimacy
- a tendency to eat goodies for immediate energy
If all of that is happening, then I’m sure that a lack of sleep is taking quite a toll on all of my cells, organs, and systems.
It’s such a pull to stay up late now and then, especially as a parent. It’s dark, quiet, and I’m alone. The world of creativity is my oyster. I hum with productivity. The time feels deceivingly endless and I can take it too far. It doesn’t help that my writing seems more interesting when I’m a little strung out on sleep lack.
Thanks to doing the ultra-late-night blunder more than a few times, I know now that sleep is a priority for me above everything else. I’ve awakened one too many times the next day disappointed that I sacrificed a new day for the sake of the previous night’s creative enjoyment. Thanks to blowing it, I know that sleep is more important than me time. Actually, it’s the most valuable me time I could ask for; I’m just not conscious while it’s happening.
I’ve learned a lot of things I don’t want to do vicariously from siblings, parents, friends, roommates, and strangers. I hate drugs, I hate alcohol, I hate peer pressure, I hate diets, I hate addiction, I think new year’s resolutions are a joke, and I can’t stand unhappy zombies who are employed in customer service roles. I know who I would fire this very minute here in town. Wait a minute, stick to the subject, Edee.
I guess I had to learn this one on my own: Sleep is more important than getting all of the things done that I’m always wanting to do because it handicaps me the next day, it takes a week to feel normal again, and I’m destroying miraculous processes inside of me for the sake of relative frivolity.
Ah, the basic staple of sleep that man has welcomed – cherished – through the millenia, until the advent of electricity. Then we modern folk go flippantly trading all kinds of health aspects in order to buy more hours of nighttime.
I’ve decided to take on a new kind of life before I even have to hear about all of the things I could be permanently ruining in myself from this author my husband is listening to.
I never would have imagined I’d do this, because it’s always been a defining quality of me, but the time is now, not later. I told my husband I decided to make an early-to-bed pact for a year. He reminded me that I don’t believe in temporary fixes like diets; I believe in life changes. Right! Thank you, husband, for nudging me away from a temporary and ultimately noncommittal sleep diet.
I’m making a pact for life.
I don’t do pacts often. Marriage was one. Baptism as an adult was another. The internal decision I made when selling books door-to-door was another. I hated the job I was doing, so I promised myself I would do my very best so that failure would never cause me to feel the need to do it all over again to redeem myself. I made a promise not to give myself away in relationships anymore when I realized that intimacy had gotten me no closer to finding a lifelong companion. And the only other one I can think of was a promise I wrote to myself years ago while working in an office. Coworkers brought in goodies every single day, and I found myself walking in and out of the break room a little too often for a handful. ‘Enough!,’ I thought. Before I saw any effects taking their toll on me, I sat down and wrote a formal vow to myself that I would never again eat a single thing that was in that room. I wrote the two reasons for eating the junk (because it tasted good and was free) and the many reasons for resisting it.
The result of those pacts? Finding a life companion with whom I’ve now shared fifteen years of marriage and two wondrous children; daily life growth in the areas of love, patience, hope, etc.; earning $10,000 in two-and-a-half-months of book-selling; and no more goodies ever eaten in the break room.
I’ve realized the empowering nature of pacts, vows, or whatever you want to call them. When you know you want something for your life and you stick to it, you find out you actually are capable of living the life you want to live.
I’ve now done the same thing with sleep. I am excited about stopping a lifelong pattern before it changes me for the worse. Actually, I wonder if I’ll reverse a few things that have already begun to change, like eyesight and memory. I look forward to becoming my own new experiment – I’ve never gone to sleep at a reasonable, consistent hour every night, and I’ve never been a morning person. This will be interesting!
I began about four nights ago…
- 9:30 – on or in bed to read, stretch, think, enjoy husband’s company before sleeping around 10:00
- computer stays downstairs on desk
- drink plenty of fluids earlier in the day so as not to be awakened in the night to go to the bathroom
(I was teaching my son how to write in cursive in that moment.)
I look forward to learning things I never knew about myself.
If you’re interested in the book I mentioned, it’s called Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker, PhD. I haven’t read it myself, but my husband has shown us TED Talks, Talks at Google, and documentaries featuring the author that are fascinatingly compelling. Thank you, husband, for again altering my life for the good.
PACT UPDATE: Now that it’s been a few months, I see that it is unreasonable to make a pact I can’t always keep due to children, ferry schedules, family get-togethers, personal deadlines, vacations, etc. From now on, I think it’s better to state that I aim to prioritize sleep above staying awake for any of various reasons, and to practice self-control and go to bed as early as possible each night without a computer around. I also have to acknowledge that some of my best creative juices flow at night, once everyone is asleep and I can concentrate in the quiet. Especially during COVID times, when everyone is home all day and I’m making sure they finish their school-away-from-school-work. COVID or not, nighttime is sometimes my only time to myself, and I want to give myself a chance to enjoy it now and then. Just not too often.
