'The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.' - Ancient Chinese Proverb
We all have to start somewhere. Maybe it doesn't matter where, as long as we start. I've decided that for me, the first step is to get my sleep sorted out.
There are around 6 billion fellow human beings on this planet right now, all of them wanting a gazillion different things. I'm no different - but what I really want, right here and now, is to be able to string together more than just a single night of fulfilling, complete and refreshing sleep.
I'm not an insomniac. I have no problems falling asleep nor even staying asleep (usually - we'll come to that in a moment). But what I do have is a lack of a well-established and regular sleep pattern. Nor have I had one for the last quarter of a century. Sleep as a child didn't seem to be much of an issue. It's at university that things went haywire. New people, new places, new-found independence. Yep - I'd stay up all the hours of the night engaging in stimulating intercourse (social and otherwise) with my new friends. Who cares about lectures the next day? (I didn't - I can safely say I only attended about 55% of them throughout the whole 3 years. Mostly because I'd rather lie in bed than have to get up when I hadn't had enough sleep.) Then came a disaster of monumental proportions. I was a medical student, and when I qualified and started practising I went from a situation where I could manage how much sleep I had but chose not to, to one where I no longer had the freedom to do even the former. 70-90 hour work weeks with sleep interrupted at night if I was on call soon took their toll. Fortunately I quit medicine after about 4 years and moved into investment banking, but things didn't get much better. Long hours plus bad eating habits coupled with an ambition to get ahead (not to mention occasional nights of talking to Tokyo and New York whilst I'm supposed to be asleep in London) meant I sunk into the habits of waking up exhausted during the week and playing catchup on sleep at the weekends.
Now I work for myself from home, so you would think I would have this problem sorted out by now. Nope. Sorry. Complete freedom from an externally imposed schedule has meant increasing reliance upon self-discipline, or more specifically in my case, the lack thereof. I can go to bed whenever I want and get up whenever I want. You'd think this would be paradise for most people but not for me. The result has been an irregular and erratic sleep schedule which has left me chronically fatigued. How on earth did I get into this situation?
Well, I'm not entirely without discipline. But I do have some compounding factors. For me to get a good night's sleep, all I need are two things.
- I have to have about 8 hours sleep.
- There must be NO interruptions.
This doesn't sound too onerous right? Well, it gets a little complicated. If my sleep gets interrupted (which is an easy thing as I'm a fairly light sleeper), then I end up feeling excessively drowsy when I wake up and decide to play Chinese sleep auto-torture. (This means hitting the snooze button every 10 minutes for the next hour.) Result? I wake up even more groggy and disatisfied with my sleep experience, despite the fact that I've had as much as I need (in theory), if not more. A bad sleep experience means not enough motivation and energy to get what I want done. It means going through the day as if there was a grey mist over everything. It means I'm thinking of when I can next have a nap so I can have that clear and refreshed feeling in my head once more (yes, I've experienced enough of those to know they exist).
Now here's the rub. When I've gotten my act together and managed to get a good night's sleep (about 5% of days), I feel so great and I'm filled with so much energy and passion the next day that I can't sleep at night! My head and heart are absolutely buzzing with the wonderfulness of life and its pluripotentiality and all the amazing things (I imagine) that lie ahead of me. This means I am exhausted the next day when it's time to get up. Once more I do the sleep torture thing, making me feel even worse. Even if I do manage to get up, I still feel flat and lacklustre for the rest of the day, unable to put a decent effort into any of my projects. And so the cycle repeats itself.
I've read loads of books on sleep, created a whole set of sleep rules for myself, yet still have to achieve my goal. Not only that, but I seriously believe that my lack of a healthy sleep habit has cost me dearly in terms of my productivity and ability to impact positively on the world. This situation can't be allowed to continue. Something better change. To this end, I have decided to sort out my sleep once and for all. For I know that once I have this sorted out, I will have access to a continuous and abundant source of energy. And with energy, all things become possible.
