Progress on the Sleep Issues Front
Jan. 5th, 2011 08:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hrjSo in my last five days of holiday vacation I decided to take the plunge and try to get back into "normal" sleep habits. Specifically, I did without running the audio books all night. I re-committed myself to being in bed by 10pm and lights out by 10:30. (This is now reinforced by setting the laptop to auto-sleep at 10pm.) And I determined that I would refrain from falling back on the audio even if I woke up multiple times during the night.
And it worked. I may not be getting great sleep, but I'm getting just as good (and just about as much) sleep as I do with the audio (and with being bad about bedtimes). And I'm making good use of the falling-asleep period for plotting scenes for the novel. And I'm waking up right around when the alarm goes off at 7am and not demanding another 30 winks.
Last night I got the real test of the system when I got some texts a little after midnight (i.e., over an hour after I'd gone to sleep) of the sort that make one prone to lying awake worrying. And after briefly considering reaching for the audio, I turned my brain back to the interior monologue Barbara has while ambushing her erstwhile stalker wherein she enumerates the good and bad points of simply knifing him and dumping his body in the river, versus taking the effort and hazard of subduing him sufficiently for an interrogation. And the next thing I knew, it was morning.
So maybe I've broken the cycle for a while. Part of the problem has been the pacifier-like certainty of being able to put myself to sleep with the audio. It's a crutch, but it's a very sturdy and dependable crutch.
And it worked. I may not be getting great sleep, but I'm getting just as good (and just about as much) sleep as I do with the audio (and with being bad about bedtimes). And I'm making good use of the falling-asleep period for plotting scenes for the novel. And I'm waking up right around when the alarm goes off at 7am and not demanding another 30 winks.
Last night I got the real test of the system when I got some texts a little after midnight (i.e., over an hour after I'd gone to sleep) of the sort that make one prone to lying awake worrying. And after briefly considering reaching for the audio, I turned my brain back to the interior monologue Barbara has while ambushing her erstwhile stalker wherein she enumerates the good and bad points of simply knifing him and dumping his body in the river, versus taking the effort and hazard of subduing him sufficiently for an interrogation. And the next thing I knew, it was morning.
So maybe I've broken the cycle for a while. Part of the problem has been the pacifier-like certainty of being able to put myself to sleep with the audio. It's a crutch, but it's a very sturdy and dependable crutch.
