Never quite enough sleep

As I so often do, I’m once again renewing my efforts to get more sleep.

This is nothing new. It’s a perennial resolution. The kind of perennial resolution that fails. I always tell myself I need to get more sleep, and I always try to design ways to get to bed earlier, but it’s a plan that never really materializes.

I shouldn’t say that so passively. It’s not as if anyone but me can effect this change in my habits. This change won’t magically materialize; I have to make it happen.

Late evening is just such a gold mine of productivity. Once everyone else is settled into bed, I finally have time to give my uninterrupted attention to other things. Paperwork, or article deadlines, or all too often the frivolity of Facebook.

A friend asked me recently why I use one of the newly popular sleep-tracking apps, a technology tool that tells me exactly how long I sleep each night and how soundly. “It’s the same thing as weighing yourself every morning,” I told her. “It’s not that I actually do anything different based on the number; it’s just that keeping track of it makes me feel like I could potentially use the information to make positive changes.”

“Six hours,” she said disapprovingly, checking the latest number on my sleep-tracking app. “You need to try harder.”

It does seem like there’s no better time for improving one’s sleep habits than midwinter. Bed is the warmest and coziest place to be once the sun goes down. Our evening commitments are few these days, and walks after dinner are no great temptation when it’s well below freezing out. If ever there’s a time for getting to bed earlier, cold dreary February must be it.

It takes effort, but I have to try again to improve my sleep habits, and I have to remind myself: all of these little tasks, the paperwork and the household details – not to mention the siren song of social media – will still be there when the sun comes up tomorrow. There’s no reason I have to attend to it right now.

Last week I came across this useful pointer in an article about stress relief: “Allow yourself a brief period of time to fully relax before bedtime each day—even if it’s only taking a relaxing bath or spending 30 minutes with a good book. Remember, you need time to recharge. Don’t spend this time planning tomorrow or doing chores you didn’t get around to during the day. You’ll be much better prepared to face another stressful day if you give yourself a brief reward of some free time.”

Yes, and I’ll be much better prepared to go to sleep, too, if I read or relax rather than trying to maximize the productivity potential of every single minute up to bedtime.

So, once again, I’m resolving to improve in this area. I’m redoubling my efforts to get to bed early. Yes, it’s a perennially broken resolution of mine. But that’s no reason not to keep trying.

Staying up late

I took a late-night trip to the airport to pick up my parents last Saturday. Their flight arrived a few minutes after ten o’clock. By the time I’d dropped them off at their house and gotten home myself, it was past eleven. But when I walked in from the garage, Tim was still in the playroom, playing a computer game.

“Go to bed, Tim,” I said automatically. “It’s really late.”

“I will. Soon,” he told me.

But as I headed upstairs to bed, I realized something unexpected: it didn’t really matter to me if he went to bed soon, because I had a sudden flash of memory of what it was like to be fourteen and staying up late on a Saturday night.

Quite simply, sometimes it was the best part of the week. At fourteen, in eighth grade, you’re still too young to drive anywhere or go out with your friends, but your body is developing a teen’s affinity for staying up late and sleeping late in the morning. On weekdays, you just have to fight it: force yourself out of bed when the alarm goes off, turn off the light at night when your parents tell you to in order to get a decent amount of sleep before school the next day.

But on weekends, you can give free rein to your naturally changing biorhythms. And when I saw Tim still playing computer games at 11 p.m., it reminded me how good that used to feel. I remembered the weighty hush of a house in which everyone else is sleeping. The sense of getting away with something because you’re still awake doing what you want to do. The privacy and solitude that are not necessarily easy to come by when you’re a middle schooler busy with friends, classes, team sports, and family activities.

Sometimes, I confess, I’m still tempted to find that late-night solitude, to stay up really late and wend my way through the wee hours reading or working on a project or watching a movie or writing, the way I used to do at Tim’s age. But, like eating candy every day, it’s one of those things you assume when you’re a kid that you’ll do as soon as no one can tell you not to, and then by the time you could do it without facing any sanctions, you have too many compelling reasons not to want to do it anymore. The house gets cold late at night, and it’s so much harder to think clearly after midnight. Predominantly, of course, is the reality that it’s just so hard to get up in the morning if you’ve stayed up really late. And sleeping late in the morning is unthinkable, with so many plans and duties and responsibilities.

So even though the words came out automatically that night – “Go to bed, Tim; it’s late” – I never followed up to confirm that he did. I just went to bed myself. And part of me hoped he didn’t go to bed for a while yet. For a few moments there, I was living vicariously, remembering the freedom of being a young teen with no weekend bedtime. And it felt good to remember.

Up at night

Thinking of myself as someone who might suffer from insomnia is a reversal of self-perception for me. For my whole adult life, I’ve slept easily, deeply and long. Getting up during the night with a hungry infant never particularly bothered me, since I knew I’d fall back asleep as soon as the baby settled down.

So why did that change in the past month? At least four times in the past four weeks, I’ve been up for ninety minutes or more during the pre-dawn hours: anxious, alert, and unable to fall back asleep, which is so unlike me.

Does it have to do with the weather? The moonlight that comes in through the skylights in our new bedroom? One friend suggested it was hormonal, but I have no supporting reasons to think that’s the case. I suppose it’s not really quite the mystery I’m making it sound. Each time, something specific and external – noises from either dog or child – has initially woken me, and then the internal part takes over and keeps me from falling back to sleep, which used to come so easily to me.

But now my mind races until my pulse does too. One night I attributed it to a difficult conversation about household issues that took place earlier in the day; another night to an email from the parent of one of Holly’s friends raising questions about certain behaviors; and yet another night – Sunday night – astonishment over international events were what churned in my mind when I woke hours after first going to ed.

But I have to admit, I kind of like it, just a little bit. I’m so alone at that time of night. No one needs me for anything, not the slightest little thing, not a glass of orange juice or homework help or counsel regarding weekend plans. I read a while ago, before insomnia was my own issue, that the worst thing to do when you’re having trouble sleeping is lie in bed thinking about how awake you are, so instead I take my laptop to another room and write in my journal. Since that’s how I normally spend the first thirty minutes of my waking hours, I can justify that doing so in the pre-dawn part of the day allows me to sleep a little later.

When I’m done journaling, I read for a little bit. Sheepish as I sometimes feel about all my electronic dependencies, they certainly make it easier to keep busy in the middle of the night: with my laptop and my Kindle, I can stay busy for hours.

But I don’t, because eventually I always get tired again, and then I go back to sleep and fall into the deep, uninterrupted sleep I’ve always come to expect.

It’s possible the novelty will wear off, and being up during the night will stop feeling so efficient, so private, and like such a fine use of time. It could get worse, too: post-midnight creativity sessions more than about once a week would exhaust me.

I know insomnia isn’t something you’re supposed to celebrate, but at the moment, in its own subversive way, it’s working for me. So for the time being, I’ll not only keep my 3 a.m. date with insomnia but even celebrate it, for its wonderful solitude and long uninterrupted bouts of creativity. If it gets worse, I’ll not doubt complain plenty. But for now, I feel like I’ve been let in on a secret: the secret of all you can do if you’re the only one awake during the night (and if you have a full complement of well-charged electronics). Maybe soon I’ll have less to worry about when I wake at night. For now, though I could happily do without the worry, I’m thankful for those quiet post-midnight interludes. So I’ll welcome my occasional rendez-vous with the three o’clock hour. It’s a quiet and useful time, even though I wouldn’t want to get together with it every night.