Week 11, Day 7: Back to my old ways...

So I did NOT follow through with a seventh night of early-to-bed. Fun times presented themselves, including a Titus Andronicus show in a loft apartment somewhere in the heart of Bushwick. But, perhaps as a sign that my week of sleep has helped, I was at least able to stay asleep for seven hours--over the past few months, I've been getting up at 10 even when going to bed at 6.

The official Night 7 Sleep Report
--Went to bed: approx. 4:30 am (hazy--sometime before 5 though when Doorknobs arrived home)
--Sleep music: David Bowie, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars
--Fell asleep: see above
--First wakeup: 8:28 am
--Subsequent wakeups: 8:53 am, 11:23
--Wide-awake: 11:31 am
--Out of bed: 12:19 pm
--Total sleep period (counting brief wake-ups): 7 hrs, 1 min

Week 11, Day 6: Early Weekend Nights

The official Night 6 Sleep Report
--Went to bed: 12:31 pm
--Sleep music: Leonard Cohen, Songs from A Room
--Fell asleep: approx. 1:03 am
--First wakeup: 2:08 am
--Subsequent wakeups: 5:16 am, a few more non-identified times
--Out of bed/wide-awake: 9:21 am
--Total sleep period (counting brief wake-ups): 8 hrs, 18 min

Planned to go to sleep at midnight but stayed up a little later than that. Went out earlier for a birthday party but came home in time to turn into a pumpkin.

I was surprised how tired I felt all day considering how much rest I've gotten this week, and the few beers I had in the evening turned me into a slow-moving slime creature. Of course, I've been going to bed between 3-6 am on weekends for the past few months, so going to bed at 12:30 (asleep by 1) meant I had a full 8 hours of sleep even waking up at 9:20. Which I guess is good so i can "seize the day" today, though it honestly feels a little ridiculous too... but then, part of the reason I've done this project at all is that I wasn't even sleeping on weekends before (still waking up at 9 or 10 am even if going to bed at 6).

One more night of subjugated sleep (if I don't take tonight off) and then I get to see how well my "lessons learned" this week work out in the days and weeks going forward.

Week 11, Day 5: Continued restlessness

The official Night 5 Sleep Report
--Went to bed: 10:31 pm
--Sleep music: Julee Cruise, Floating Into the Night
--Fell asleep: approx. 10:46 pm
--First wakeup: 10:54 pm (phone call)
--Second wakeup (naturally): 2:37 am --- awake for 12 minutes, checking email (on phone)
--Subsequent wakeups: 5:10 am,
--Alarm attempts: 6:00 am, 6:08 am, 6:16 am, 6:24 am
--Out of bed/wide-awake: 6:26 am
--Total sleep period (counting brief wake-ups): 6 hrs, 28 min

Thursday night's sleep was less restful than Wednesday's. I got home from having dinner and walking my old little friend and it was 9:08 and the thought of going to sleep in 52 minutes when it felt like I'd done so little all day made me feel depressed. Though, as my THERAPIST told me yesterday, "Ben, hello! That's what real life is! Normal people go to bed and don't stay up all night." I resolved to wake up early the next morning and set my alarm for 6--I would get up and watch an episode or two of Lost that I'd been missing and get some writing done.

Unfortunately, about ten minutes after I fell asleep, my phone rang and woke me up and then I had trouble falling back to sleep as my brain began to get locked on various trains of thought. I eventually tried to start repeating numbers to myself and seem to have fallen asleep soon after that, but again awoke in the middle of the night at 2:37. It's strange to me how I come to at these times, feeling like i'm ready to get up completely. I noticed I had a text message from a friend, which I read and then decided to check my email (on my phone), which then led to me checking and sending work emails (those Korean and Indian work days don't correspond well with ours). Around 2:50 I decided I was crazy and went back to sleep.

Somewhat hilariously though it took me nearly a half hour to get up once my alarm started going off at 6. This has happened more or less each of the mornings this week--despite waking up early and repeatedly throughout the course of the night, when it comes time to actually "wake up / get up" my body slags. Anyway though, up and and at 'em and ready to face another day.

Unofficial Post-Sleep Day 4 (Thursday) Daytime Report
Same basic shit: wide awake, all day. This "experiment" has proven to have considerably more concrete outcomes than originally expected: clearly, if I sleep, I can make it through a workday no matter how bored or uninterested I am in whatever it is I need to do. Wow, rocket science. I have two brains, one intense and mechanical and relatively high-functioning, and the other made out of peas and struggles to process even simple human concepts, even when carefully explained by example. Slowly, I am merging them into one fairly mediocre but consistent brain that will empower me to a life of normalcy.

Week 11, Day 4: Approaching Regularity

The official Night 4 Sleep Report
--Went to bed: 10:41 pm
--Sleep music: Julee Cruise, Floating Into the Night
--Fell asleep: approx. 11:14 pm
--First wakeup: 5:11 am
--Subsequent wakeups: 6:08 am, 6:30 am, 6:38 am, 6:46 am (last three with alarm clock)
--Out of bed/wide-awake: 6:48 am
--Total sleep period (counting brief wake-ups): 7 hrs, 34 min

My first "regular" night of sleep, basically. Only two pre-alarm wakeups and, thank god, the first one didn't come until 5:11 am. Granted, I still felt wide awake when I came to, but it was nice to roll over and check the clock and not see that it was 2:30 am. And then, after falling back asleep, only one more pre-alarm wakeup--and strangely enough, I needed the alarm three times before I was able to rouse myself out of bed. Maybe tonight I'll sleep all the way through the point I'm ready to get up tomorrow morning. Thinking about trying to get up at 5 just to see what that's like.

I might carry this chart over into next week or beyond just to see how quickly everything gets fucked again, perhaps a preventive measure of self-conscious acknowledgement as to the way in which I allow myself to backslide toward unhealthiness.

Unofficial Post-Sleep Day 3 (Wednesday) Daytime Report
Another workday "bursting with energy." Experiencing more fully the good and bad realization of just how much of a difference it makes me for me to be able to go to work and be rested, as far as productivity goes, making the day go by faster, and feeling more generally connected to whatever's going on (which, by the way, is somehow no less depressing).

I will say that for sure I can now identify "Important Hyperliving Lesson #2", after CONQUERING FEAR, which is TIME MANAGEMENT. As nice as it is to make it through a work-day without getting tired, the 10pm bedtime window has made me acutely aware of how poorly I manage my time, in nearly all of my activities. How do people do it? Focus and sustained concentration are such struggles for me, and I think if I had to go to bed at 10 every night I would feel literally crushed by my inability to get all the things done I'd like (or need) to accomplish in the limited hours of each day. Obviously I would learn to do things better than I have, but nonetheless I can't imagine how I could possibly do it all. Blah--another lesson of ways to improve myself wrapped into hope, fear, and worry.

Week 11, Day 3: A Little Bit More, A Little Bit Less

I feel a little tired this morning.

The official Night 3 Sleep Report
--Went to bed: 10:26 pm
--Sleep music: Lali Puna, Scary World Theory
--Fell asleep: approx. 11:05 pm
--First woke up: 2:31 am
--Subsequent wakeups: 3:33 am, 3:58 am, 4:15 am, 4:34 am, 4:59 am, 5:11 am, 5:28 am, 5:47 am, 6:08 am, 6:26 am, 6:44 am, 6:59 am, 7:07 am, 7:15 am (last three with alarm clock)
--Out of bed/wide-awake: 7:16 am
--Total sleep period (counting brief wake-ups): 8 hrs, 11 min

Now I'm beginning to get the feeling that I really just don't know how to sleep well, or that maybe I can't. Last night seemed like the most restless night I've had yet, haunted by ridiculous "wide-awake" REM dreams with real people in very real situations. I fell asleep a bit later than intended because I'd met up for drinks with a friend who, after I recapped to her what's been going on this week, said, "Jeffrey... so basically you're sleeping like a pregnant woman," explaining how her friend who recently birthed a child has spent the past few months prior to and after her pregnancy sleeping for only 10-20 minutes at a time, unable to link the bits of rest together into something more cumulatively beneficial.

And that's the weird thing: it's like I get one first block of 2-3 hrs of sleep, but then upon waking up that first time (at which point each of the three times I've felt wide awake), I am unable to sleep for more than 30 minute chunks before jerking awake, certain it's now 7:45 am. Que terible. Perhaps it's more about being used to having to wake up when i'm still exhausted, and also about constantly sleeping until the point when I really "have to" get up, but it's sort of alarming/depressing. It's been recommended to me by non-medical professionals that I attempt to procure some kind of sleeping aid(s) for the duration of the week, but I'm really not generally into taking medication, especially not of that variety and especially not when some of the options have crazy/dangerous side effects like wakeless activity-engaging sleepwalking. I'll just try to keep sticking it out as I've been doing, hoping that the coming nights will be more restful than the last few.

Unofficial Post-Sleep Day 2 (Tuesday) Daytime Report
Even if the nights haven't seemed quite restful enough, Tuesday was my second straight day of making it through all of work feeling like I had maintained a solid and unwavering sense of alertness (can't say focus exactly, given my general disinterest in my job) all day long. Again, this should NOT be a big a deal and is only testament to how long I've let myself run on empty. It's been pretty nice, because I feel like I've gotten a lot of work done and have still had time to be myself, which is to say pretty unfocused and distracted and unable to work on any one project/task for more than 4 minutes at a time.

Week 11, Day 2: As my body laughs, Pt 2

After this morning's early wake up, I was thankfully able to fall back to sleep (though not right away) and stayed asleep for a little bit longer this morning. The thought of going to bed at 10 pm again last night seemed a bit distressing, but Doorknobs played Fascist Hardass by barking and glaring at me until I was sheparded into my room to sleep, noting that I'd cheated last night anyway by going to bed at 10:40 (and, admittedly, not actually attempting to fall asleep until 10 minutes later when he tore my guitar from my hands).

The official Night 2 (Monday Night) Sleep Report
--Went to bed: 10:14 pm
--Sleep music: Crying mix, 2003
--Fell asleep: approx. 10:43 pm
--First wake-up: 2:09 am
--Subsequent wake-ups: 4:12 am, 4:49 am, 5:51 am, 6:38 am, 6:44 am (alarm)
--Out of bed/wide-awake: 6:46 am
--Total sleep period (counting brief wake-ups): 8 hrs, 3 min

The positives of last night's sleep were that I stayed asleep longer before waking up for the first time, and, most importantly, I only woke up four more times after that before getting out of bed (as compared to Sunday night's horrifying eleven pre-GetUp wake-ups). Which means that my sleep was less interrupted and therefore more solid and, hopefully, regenerative.

On the other hand, upon waking up that first time at 2:09, my bed was covered in sweat and I got up to go the bathroom and when I came out a minute later, the realization hit me that I was completely awake and could have started a proverbial day. Which is kind of like, Umm, what the fuck?!?! What is wrong with me that my body's like, "Oh cool, gotcha, 3.5 hrs of sleep, so it's time to get up now, yes?" I guess I could respect the fact that I've turned my body into a fine-tuned machine able to operate on the sleep equivalent of banana peels and vegetable oil, but after twenty-five years of ill-rest, I think I'm less satisfied with this "triumph" than I have been in the past. My goal now is to find out if life has something else to offer a calmer, more rested version of me.

Unofficial Post-Sleep Day 1 (Monday) Daytime Report
If I had to offer a quick day-after analysis, I would suggest that Sunday night's sleep showed immediate outcomes in terms of my general wakefulness yesterday. For the first time in a non-busy workday while, at no point during the day yesterday did I suddenly feel overcome with exhaustion verging on sleep-collapse. This was both nice and depressing, as I feel guilty nearly falling asleep at work; though on the other hand, being alert only made me more acutely aware of my boredom and general disinterest in my job. I suppose, though, were I to have a different job, this might only be a positive, so I will hold onto that one. I'm curious to see how things will feel by Friday morning.

Week 11, Day 2: As my body laughs, Pt 1

It's 2:10 am. I have been asleep since approximately 10:43 pm after going to bed at 10:14, which is 3.5 hrs, and I've just woken up for the first time about 4 minutes ago. Wide awake. seriously. back to sleep i go for round two. If i can get three more uninterrupted hours, I'm taking them

Week 11, Day 1: Sleep means... rest?

Today is my first day of being officially "rested". [The official "sleep report" of last night is at the end of this entry.]

I went to bed last night at about 10:40. I know I said I'd do 10 pm, but honestly, in the relative scale of Jeffrey Beaumont sleep activity this was a significant bedtime for me. I can, without exaggeration, count with both hands the number of times I've gone to bed before 11 pm over the past eight years.

I am a person with sleep habits that would be described by most (non-monk category) people as "terrible", "dangerous" or "inexplicable." I have pretty much always been this way, dating back to being a two year old who freaked his parents out at night by climbing out of his crib at night to come downstairs and watch TV with them. This was followed by years of reading-by-flashlight past my curfew (which my grandmother, bless her heart, used to say was the cause of my burgeoning myopia). Finally around age 14 or so there was no longer a sleep curfew--just my dad waking up to go to the bathroom at 1am yelling upstairs, "Get off the
computer and go to bed!" Then I went to college a few years later and bad sleep habits were cemented by four years of sleep patterns best described as "retarded."

Basically, I've just never really cared for sleep. Or at least, not getting any more of it than I feel I need. Mostly, I hate "going to bed"--I am a person who is rarely or never bored and so it always seems like there's something I could be doing at night rather than going to bed. Which is, of course, a hilarious thought given that I'm a terrible ADHD procrastinator with a horrible sense of time management and so despite the many things I could be doing at night, I'm often just senselessly awake for the sake of not sleeping.

And these bad sleep habits have seemed to hit a peak of preposterousness lately. Specifically I do not believe that I have gone to bed before 12:30 even once since a few days before Thanksgiving, and the vast majority of the days I've gone to bed after 2:30. This began with going through one of my first bouts of true insomnia, starting around Thanksgiving and continuing until Christmas, followed by the beginning of Hyperliving as 2008 rolled around. Just as I finally became able to sleep at night, I took on a schedule of hypermotive activity like nothing else I'd experienced and bad sleep habits became crazy sleep habits. For once, I had become so active that, between "living, hyperliving, and documenting my hyperliving", I began to feel like I truly didn't have time to sleep.

I would estimate that for 5 or 6 days of each week in 2008 I have been sleeping only between 3-5 hours a night, and the other nights--even including weekends--I have gotten 6 or maybe 7 hours of sleep only. For a while I was fine on this crazy schedule, but at some point a few weeks ago I felt an overwhelming sense of major exhaustion creeping in and I knew that something had to change. Part of the problem, as I suggested earlier, is that I am not very efficient with my time. I need to budget more time than most people to complete each individual task because my mind is constantly distracted and wandering from what I'm supposed to be doing. Writing, blogging, cleaning, even getting dressed or getting ready for work... all of these activities take forever because I can't go for more than a few minutes without stopping to pick up a banana, check out a sports score, poke through my iTunes library, pick up a basketball, pick up my guitar, und so weite. Essentially anything laying around my house that could serve as a focus deterrent becomes one, and so it becomes a shitty struggle for me get through anything in a reasonable amount of time, let alone quickly.

A part of me is obviously comfortable with these distractions, and my liberal sense of timing coupled with my lack of concern over not sleeping enables these behaviors more further... but let me be clear that I wish it were different. I don't like the fact that I stay later at work than everyone else, because I get there later and then need more time to get basic shit done. And even for things that are fun, like writing, it still takes me forever to finish my thoughts, even when I have something specific I want to write about--and often by end I feel like i've left out some crucial points that I lost focus on and forgot about. The constant wanderings my mind aren't just frustrating; they sort of kill me.

But wrapped up in part of this week's task is an acknowledgment that at least part of my struggles may very likely come as a result of never operating at 100% brainpower, because, honestly, there's just no way anyone runs at 100% on only 3-5 hours of sleep a night. I have little doubt that I am less predisposed than most toward holding "normal" patterns of attention, but I truly have no way of knowing for sure how real my "problems" are and to what degree they come from never being rested enough, since (I'd guess) I have spent most of my entire life underrested.

So we'll see how this week goes. 10 pm is really early, more early honestly than I need, but if I want this to truly be an experiment, I needed to raise the sleep meter high enough so as to be certain that I'm getting a statistically significant increase in sleep/rest.

The official Night 1 Sleep Report
--Went to bed: 10:40 pm
--Sleep music: Yo La Tengo, And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out
--Fell asleep: approx. 11:05 pm
--First woke up: 1:22 am
--Subsequent wakeups: 3:30 am, 4:15 am, 4:40am, 5:05 am, 5:29 am, 5:51 am, 6:14 am, 6:32 am, 6:51 am, 7:06 am, 7:13 am (all without alarm clock)
--Out of bed/wide-awake: 7:22 am
--Total sleep period (counting brief wake-ups): 8 hrs, 17 min

As you can see, my body wasn't entirely prepared for all of this sleep, as I first woke up at 1:22 am (!!!!). It depresses the shit out of me a little that my body is like, "Oh two hours, cool, ready to go (sort of) if that's what you need." Worse though is the fact starting at 3:30 (4.5 hrs of sleep down) I began to wake-up approximately every thirty minutes for the duration of my "sleep" until I got up for good at 7:22--without the aid of my alarm, which had been set for 7:30. Worth noting is that each of these times I awoke, I wasn't so rested or alert that I actually wanted to get out of bed, but I was awake enough so that I couldn't just fall back to sleep and stay asleep.

We'll see how the rest of the week goes (hopefully better than last night), but I'm excited that maybe I'll learn something new or at least for a few days see a different side of Jeffrey Beaumont.

Week 10/11: The Sun Also Rises

So I thought it over and decided I had better things to do than sit around feeling shitty about the rough turns life can have for you. Life isn't always sunshine but even rainy stormclouds go away after a while if you can just try to be patient and hold on. My friend B put it best when she wrote me last night and said:

"The thing about depression is that you can't block it out. You have to live with it/in it and deal with it in your own way, second by second until it quiets/retreats/dulls."


It was hot enough that I didn't even really need the jacket.

So a new day it is and onward I go. I'll be ok if I can weather the storm.

It's also just dawned on me that I have to go bed in seven and a half hours. Hmm.