Wednesday 26 September 2007

I Should Have Known Better (Or, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Office)

(This post accompanied by scenes of the mess in my "office" :-)

What's your pleasure? To "get some me-time" or "get some time to myself" or "feel like a person again" or "feel normal" or "feel like an adult"...and the list goes on. We all use a variation on that theme, usually in reference to why we stay up until the wee hours, past our children's bedtimes, crafting merrily away. Myself, I used "just to get some time to myself". And we are justified. The media tells us so, the magazines tell us so, and our girlfriends enable us ;-) This drive for personal satisfaction will make us happy. And yet the fulfillment of said drive usually doesn't happen until the hours of between, say 9pm and 1am?


Two nights ago I made the conscience decision to stay up past my bedtime. Waaaay past my bedtime, which conflicted with a little experiment that Mr. S. and I had been playing around with. After hearing about segmented sleep a while back and reading about how night-time light interferes with sleep patterns, we started turning down the lights in the evening and going to bed around 9:30pm.........Cra-zy, eh? (And it took some time to start letting go.)


So, still mindful of sleep patterns, I decided to stay up until my next sleep "cycle"; until about 1am. And man, did I have fun. There was that initial wave of sleepiness at about 10:30, but once I got past that I didn't look back. In the middle of it I actually thought "What a waste all this sleeping has been - look at all the stuff I'm getting done!" Which was great, as I have a three day fair rapidly approaching.

Now, the thing I haven't mentioned yet is that the by-product of the past month of early-to-bed has been: better mood, near nil levels of impatience, no PMS (so much so that Mr. S. noticed - ha!), and just general happiness. I mean happiness. Frankly, part of what motivated me to start this creative journey, to start crafting, girl number twenty, and my work, was the belief that it would make me happy. And it is wonderful, and the past month has been even better. The best way to describe it is to say that whereas before I needed "just a little me-time", during the past month all day was me-time. Even though I was tired at the end of the day, I didn't feel that I needed a little escape or to unwind, because I wasn't wound up to begin with, I suppose. And the only thing that had changed was sleep.


Something that has been painfully highlighted the past two days as a result of my folly. Remind me to never, never do that again.

5 comments:

Unknown said...

Sounds very interesting. I did hear before that Leonardo had a special sleeping pattern of if I remember correctly taking several short naps throughout the day and night, leaving him with much more effective hours. The only thing I was wondering, was whether you meant that you slept till 1am instead of stayed awake till 1 am?

Unknown said...

Hi there! nope, worked until 1am, fell asleep at about 1:30am. Maybe I should have slept first and then got up in the middle the night, is what you're saying? maybe i should....wait a minute, no way am i messing around with that again - i've learnt my lesson :-)

Unknown said...

and that's really interesting about Leonardo - thanks!

Anonymous said...

On the weekends we go to sleep with the children and it feels far more natural to all of us but during the week I feel like the house would fall apart if we went to bed that early.

Generally laundry, dishes and the like happen after bed-time and I'm just really not good enough to get it done during the day.

Heather said...

I'd never heard of this before. Perhaps I should give it a go...