Most of my life I’ve found that I’m good with six hours of sleep. I rarely feel the need for more, and in fact I’m not usually able to “sleep in” even when circumstances allow.
More and more frequently though, I am waking up in the wee hours of the morning. Sometimes it’s because I need to pee. Sometimes because my wife has smacked me in her sleep. Sometimes the wind does it. Sometimes it’s a leg cramp. Sometimes someone in a dream taps me on the shoulder and tells me to wake up.
Whatever the reason though, that’s usually it. I’m awake. And when I try to return to sleep my mind fills with little details. Things I need to attend to at the DayJob that morning, or plot complications in a novel I’m writing, or logistical minutia in someone else’s fiction that I’m publishing, or health plans, or dog plans, or travel plans, or weird grammatical constructions in Klingon, or some damn thing or other.
The point is, I don’t fall back to sleep. I’m up, and that’s that, and too bad that it’s 4am. Up is up and that’s all there is.
Today was another such start to the day. Ugh. Not a good way to start the week, but there you go.
Tags: Health
Tim Ferriss has some interesting information on handling various kinds of sleep issues in his book The Four Hour Body. He’s a little bit insane (and has what seems to me a disturbingly cavalier attitude toward drugs and supplements), but for all that, he has some very effective and useful techniques for various things in that book.
02.28.11 at 2:15 pm