That First 30 Seconds

    My alarm goes off at 5:30. I went to bed at 12:00 or so, and counting the time it took me to get to sleep I probably got about 5 hours of sleep. I disable the alarm on my phone and lie back down.

    Today, I have lost.

    That first 30 seconds decides how my day is going to go. I know I only need 5 hours or so of sleep. I lived like that for a few weeks and I felt pretty damn good. But getting up as soon as the alarm goes off is a bad failing on my part.

    I used to compensate for this by immediately snapping up like my house was being bombed by Charlie, but I have since fallen out of this habit.

    My sleep is one of those “rock and a hard place” choices. If I sleep 10 hours, I’ll feel groggy all day. My body will feel great, but my mind will feel dreary. If I sleep 5 hours, I will feel completely bombed out for the first hour or two of the day but I will feel great for the rest of the day.

    I have tried a variety of times from 3 hours to 14 hours (!), and 5 hours seems to work for me. But damned if that alarm doesn’t get so easily defeated.

    The fact that I sleep in the same room as my roommate RocketCock doesn’t help. He tends to work in the afternoons so he gets up at the crack of afternoon. He’s sometimes still awake when I set out to get up in the morning. I’m more worried about waking him up than getting up myself.

    It’s a difficult adjustment to make, but I’m making the effort to do it. I’m at least going to bed at a regular time and getting up at a regular time, which is a huge step up from a few years ago. I just wish I could get that whole “getting up at the right time” thing down.

Shampow,

Ihmhi

The Turn

    It’s amazing. The human body, that is. You can train it to behave a certain way, and once you do it is very hard to untrain it.

    I used to sleep a lot. I was on Men In Black time; 28 hour days. I’d be up for 16 hours and asleep for 12. If there were 28 hours in a day I’d be a happy camper.

    Sadly, there aren’t 28 hours in a day, so I needed to make an adjustment to my life. I found that if I slept that much (or even as little as 8 hours), I would feel like crap for the entire day. Conversely, if I slept 5-6 hours, I’d feel like total junk for an hour or two in the morning but I would feel great for the rest of the day.

    I woke up today definitely feeling like crap. I was up at 9:10 thanks to a fortuitous phone call; I had to be at work in 35 minutes. I managed to get up, get dressed, grab some donuts and coffee at a local Dunkin, and still make it to work on time walking a mile away. (If I learned anything about myself, it that’s I excel under pressure, I excel under a time constraint, and I really excel under pressure and a time constraint!)

    So here I am at work, taking a bit of a break and trying to get my thoughts down on digital paper. I went to sleep last night promising to myself to make some commitments to change my life for the better. Whilst my blog is in exile (something that I will explain in the coming weeks), I will make an effort to chronicle what it is I have going on here.

Lollipops,

Ihmhi