The Magic of Putting Myself to Bed
My Predicament
I have long been afflicted by what is often referred to as "time blindness". I cannot easily tell you how long I've been doing something, and the thought rarely even crosses my mind when I'm doing it. Nor could I easily tell you how long a task or series of tasks will take me to complete except that the correct answer will be at least 50% longer than whatever I would tell you. Getting ready in the morning is a protracted headache in which tasks seem to multiply in a fractal of mounting panic. If you give me any kind of head start, I will find a way to blow it and then some ten times out of ten.
Even more agonizing, historically, is the process of going to bed. While the flexibility of my working schedule helps to accommodate my particular dysfunction, it also leaves very few extrinsic "landmarks" by which to calibrate my daily schedule. So, when I would get home, I would see my free time as practically infinite because I had no real sense of when the day could be considered "over" besides the fact that I would eventually be too tired to go on any longer. This further multiplied my morning misery. I would sleep in until what felt like — at least by the wider culture's metrics — a shamefully late hour.
All the while, I was still dead tired from insufficient sleep after staying up until two or three in the morning not even doing anything I particularly like! I have always preferred the morning hours, all else being equal. If anything, my opportunities for effective leisure or productivity plummet right alongside the sun every night. Still, I'd suffer through those lonely hours after basically everyone I love has gone to bed again and again because, for example, I kept forgetting what it was I'd gone into the bathroom to do.
My Epiphany
After entering a desperate, helpless plea to the search bar — something along the lines of how to establish a bedtime routine — I came across some guidelines from the Sleep Foundation. And, yeah, a lot of this is the sort of obvious stuff I've probably heard a lot. I don't know whether it was the perceived authority of the source or some kind of revelation, but I suddenly felt empowered to approach this thing with discipline. I found particularly resonant the recommendation to keep a consistent bedtime and wake-up time every single day. That night, I devised a system to be put into place immediately the following day:
- At 10:00PM (22:00), I try to stop looking at any bright screens. Over the course of the next hour, I will brush my teeth, wash my face, and do whatever else I need to do to wind down for bed as the situation necessitates.
- My bedtime is 11:00PM (23:00) every day, including weekends. I should be in bed by this time, even if I stay up a little later to read.
- My alarm goes off at 7:00AM every day, including weekends, and auto-plays local public radio.
- A second alarm goes off at 7:15AM.
The Results
To my shock, I found myself in bed the next evening at my bedtime. Then it was a week, and, pretty soon, a whole month had gone by with very few deviations from my bedtime or wake-up time greater than an hour or so.
My greatest fear going into this was actually that the system would fall apart after my first slip-up, but I think that even the idea of having a bedtime makes it easier to regulate overall. If I stay up past my bedtime, I can tell you precisely how late I'm staying up relative to that time and make a sort of "risk" or "harm" calculation based on that. Having developed the habit also lends my system some robustness, as does the fact that my alarms go off every morning automatically.
Reflections and Repercussions
There's a sort of meme about how annoying it is when stock mental health advice about, like, taking a walk or eating well actually ends up helping. On reflection, maybe it was my own reflexive dismissal of that sort of advice that kept me from getting my sleep in check for so long. Either way, just as the meme goes, the positive effects of my improved sleep hygiene cannot be denied.
Besides the obvious improvements to my energy levels and mood throughout the day, I've also noticed that my overall sense of time has seen some slight improvements. That's not to say I've suddenly gained the ability to get ready in the morning like a normal functioning adult or anything like that, but developing a concrete sense of the limited amount of time in each day has actually helped me be more efficient in getting stuff done (while also conceding that certain tasks will simply have to wait for some other time).
Admittedly, understanding the limitations on my time has been a little depressing. When I was first establishing my bedtime, I was annoyed that I could not go to bed later than 10:00PM, get eight hours of sleep, and wake up at 6:00. It seemed somehow unfair that I had to sacrifice those valuable hours either at night or in the morning to accommodate a full night's result. Perhaps what's truly unfair is the way certain activities, like work and commuting, can sometimes dominate the hours of our lives we'd rather spend entertaining childlike curiosity, creativity, and that sweet indispensible sensation of true boredom. As a result, we (especially those of us who struggle with time management anyway) go to sometimes unhealthy lengths to make up for wasted hours, weeks, and years that seem to ceaselessly slip through our fingers like the proverbial sands of time themselves.
Oops! I stayed up past my bedtime to write and publish this. Hopefully this doesn't undermine the point too much. Anyway, do you have a bedtime? If so, what is it? Send some electronic mail my way at asksycamore [at] mailbox [dot] org and let me know!