Sleep update ……. Experiment failed

Following the plan to get my sleep sorted and the drastic action of staying up all night to deliberately exhaust myself. (as detailed here)

The results are in…….

Sunday 29 / Monday 30 – that was the up all night session.
Monday 30th – asleep by 1:30am
Tuesday 1st – felt pretty good all day and most importantly didn’t feel washed out and exhausted early evening. – asleep by 2:00am
Wednesday 2nd – asleep by 1:30am
Thursday 3rd- asleep by 1am
Friday 4th – asleep by 2:15am
Saturday 5th -asleep by 1am
Sunday 6th – asleep by 2:30am
Monday 7th – asleep by ….

Screw it. You get the idea. Must Try Harder.

The sleep chronicles …….. curing this sleep problem one night at a time.

When last we spoke last night I’d decided that it was time to have a good crack at this shitty sleeping thing I have going on.
To summarise, I have the big problem that my mind works best late at night and my natural state is for me to turn day into night, get up late and go to bed in the early hours of the morning. Obviously if I were a famous writer with no wife, child or life beyond writing this would not be a problem. But as I am not and I would dearly like to be thought of kindly when it comes the time for Molly to decide whether to ship me off to the really cheap nursing home or have me at home with her and her family I reckon I need to change.

Over the last few weeks / months I’ve noticed that I’ve been getting tired later and later at night and instead of 1 / 1:30 being the normal time for me, I found myself heading for bed at 2am, 2:30am and then, in the last few days 3am. This is obviously just going to go very wrong soon.

So last night I decided that the best way to do it would be to force myself into sleep. I needed to make myself absolutely exhausted and then get to bed at a decent time to make sure I had a fighting chance of a proper, normal sleep pattern.
The best way to do this – pull an all nighter.

So I did, last night.
I was fine until about 6am when I started with a few stomach cramps. These went away with breakfast. As did the tiredness headache.
Work was fine as well, although by mid afternoon I was getting the headache, cramps and general washed out feelings all over again. As expected the worst time was early evening where I felt completely zombied.

Ironically it’s now just coming up to midnight and I’m actually feeling pretty good. The plan is to do this post and head for bed. Who knows, this might actually work?

Is this really the best time to be doing sleep experiments?

After a few weeks now of seeing my sleep patterns get even more fucked up than they usually are I have decided to take action.
Now, seeing as it’s only a few weeks to the end of term (3 weeks, 2 days – not that we keep count or anything), I’m not entirely convinced that this is a clever move and we shall obviously see, just so long as I don’t run the car into a tree on the way to work through sleep dep.

One thing this is useful for is explaining to Louise what the hell I was doing still up at half 5 this morning when she got up to get ready for work. Instead of trying to explain myself at that time of the morning I can just tell her to read the blog at work and then ask questions later. Those questions will presumably be “what the hell do you think you’re doing? are you mad or just stupid? That sort of thing.)

I’ve found myself, in the last few weeks finding it increasingly difficult to go to bed. My brain annoyingly wants to stay active into the early hours. This is nothing new. But whereas before it was active from 11pm through to 1am, now it seems to want to stay up even later, 2am became the norm. Now it seems that 3am is becoming a normal point. Of course, this staying up late and getting up to drop molly off at school and take me to work has to has some payback somewhere. I can’t just function on 4 hours a night so I find that on at least one day over the weekend I shall be incapable of getting up before 11am. This is not a good situation.

Yet it was one I seemed powerless to change, despite my best intentions. So I hatched my dastardly plan. If I don’t feel sleepy at 3am tonight why not go with it and stay up all night? That way you could properly tire yourself out so that getting through Monday would be a struggle, and then all you have to do is stay awake until 10pm or so. THEN go to bed at a normal hour like normal folks do.
I’m thinking it’s my equivalent of a sleep reset button.
It may work. It may not.
All I know is that it’s 3:43am. I finished writing a review 15 minutes ago. Made the decision 10 minutes ago and have just written this to put it down on virtual paper (what phrase can we use now to replace getting it down on paper? putting it on screen doesn’t really work?)

So the plan now is to stay awake, see Louise, point her towards this post (hi Louise x), get Molly up, have a normal morning, get her to school, get me to school, have a good day, get home and then don’t allow myself to go to sleep before 10pm.
If all goes well, this will reset the system.
Or it may fuck me up even more.
Time will tell.
Let the great experiment commence. I need a coffee and more Gin.