Sleep

So for no particular reason, my sleep schedule has been a little messed up lately. I won’t really be able to sleep until 2 or 2:30am, and then I’ll get up around 10. So I mean I’m getting normal amounts of sleep, it’s just not at the usual time. This is something of self-perpetuating cycle – if you get up at 10am, you’re not going to be particularly tired at 11pm or whenever normal people go to sleep, so you stay up later, which causes you to sleep in longer, and the cycle repeats itself the next day.

There’s a couple of ways to sort of reset a sleep schedule. One way is to stay up as long as feasible, like until 6 or 7 am, and then sleep for maybe 3 hours and get up at 9 or 10. Then, because you didn’t get enough sleep the “night” before, you’ll be tired enough to go to bed at a normal time, and then you’ll wake up at a normalish time as well. I’ve employed this method with some success. The trick is to find something moderately interesting to do during the hours between 3 and 6, which are normally pretty terrible times to be awake. One time I did this by watching several games of Australian rules football, which is kind of bemusing at the best of times, but even more so when you’re really tired. It was entertaining enough to keep me awake, but confusing enough to keep me from being all excited, so that when 6am rolled around, I felt plenty sleepy. The problem with this method is that you tend to be a little discombobulated the next day; if you’re going to do it, I would recommend doing this on like a Friday night when you aren’t doing anything in particular on Saturday.

The slightly saner way to reset your sleep schedule is to just go to bed early one night, preferably after a good amount of physical exertion. For instance, I got back from playing ultimate about 90 minutes ago, and I’m feeling plenty tired to go to sleep nowish. (The problem tonight is that I have to wake up early to take a friend to the airport, so we’ll see if I actually manage to fix my sleep schedule.) The more general problem with this method is that

 

especially when one is conscious of trying to fall asleep and reset one’s sleep schedule. But anyway, that’s the method I’m choosing tonight – wish me luck!