The Aerie
Ah, and here I am at 1:53 in the morning wondering why I'm not asleep.
I get insomnia occasionally. I used to think it was from anxiety, and maybe it was. When I was getting the business off the ground I certainly had enough stress. But nowadays, actually comparatively little stress. My job is easy, the money is good, the remodeling is done and it's over two weeks til we leave for the Big Trip, so that's still far enough away to be an abstraction... if only just far enough away.
Nonetheless I'm awake.
Maybe it's the humidity or the heat. All I know is that I start to doze off, fall about 90% asleep, and then something happens and I start awake. My internal sleep-counter seems to get reset to zero, and for a while my brain things "Well, I slept, and now I'm awake!" Then sleep is useless, and I can toss in turn in bed for an hour.
As the clock advances I start to worry. My minimum amount of sleep for surviving a workday is five hours. Anything less and my jaws get sore from yawning and I'm prone to nod off if I sit still for too long. Optimal sleep is about seven hours, and I can only do five hour nights one at a time - two in a row leaves me miserable on day three.
So I lay there and worry about falling asleep, which as you can guess does not help. Should I get up, I wonder, or will I by so doing condemn myself to another hour awake when maybe I'm about to fall asleep in ten minutes? Can I get anything done (like, I dunno, blogging?) if I get up, or will I sit and watch reruns of the evening news and the Tonight Show? Should I try to do something consructive, or should I play a video game, or would that just wake me up more?
Tonight I got up. Other nights I toss and turn.
This evening has been interesting, because as I sat typing this on my wife's computer an e-mail came in from the family with whom we will be exchanging houses - it's already morning there. So I had a chance to drop a note to our future hosts/guests.
But now I've been up for another half-hour, so I'll head back up and hope that my brain is ready to settle into sleep. If not, tomorrow will be a very long day at work...
Posted by Albatross at July 11, 2006 1:50 AM | TrackBack