Sleepless In Seattle

 

I love my family and friends. 

I love the world.

I love Valentine's Day. 

And I love to sleep.

On December 20, 2023, my husband missed a step near the bottom of a shadowy staircase, and fell with a crash on a wooden floor. 

Sadly, he messed up his knee and quadricep but the good news is that they have quickly healed. What got messed up even worse was my sleep schedule.

My husband is a classic early bird. Even with his busted up knee, his day begins around six, and as with many early birds, requires coffee to really get the engines humming. 

And while he can handily make his own lattes at home, he really does prefer a cup of joe from the local Starbucks.

That's how I found myself volunteering to rise with the larks in order to fetch his morning brew. 

To be honest, I also didn't want him roaming around the house with a bum knee for half the day while I snoozed upstairs. So I quickly became a morning person too, rising before the sun and scurrying about during early daylight hours, doing all the things that you morning people do while my delayed sleep phase comrades and myself catch up on our zzzs after our busy nights of productivity. 

I found myself going to bed at 10 or 11 p.m. which again, sounds perfectly normal to most non-chronologically challenged people but is downright bizarre for a 4:00 a.m. bedtime person such as myself.

My new early morning schedule carried on into the holidays. Since he wasn't working between Christmas Day and New Year's Day, my husband cut me some slack. He slept a bit later and also volunteered to go an hour or two into his morning without immediate caffeine consumption, since he was not facing his usual battery of Excel spreadsheets. And as the new year began, my husband's knee had recovered enough that he went back to driving himself to Starbucks. So by all rights, I was free to go back to my usual sleep schedule.

But guess what. I couldn't. My body had temporarily adapted to my new schedule and I realized that I would need some time to gradually adapt back. I figured maybe a couple of weeks.

And that wasn't a bad guess. Sure enough, by late January, my body had slowly slipped back to wanting sleep at around 4 a.m.

Then the strangest thing happened. 

My body didn't stop adjusting. Instead of continuing to feel sleepy around 4, I found myself wide at 5, 6, 7, and eventually even 8 a.m. Rather than spending hours tossing and turning in bed, waiting for sleep to find me, I began to get up and put those sleepless hours to use. 

Which has worked. To a point. 

But, culturally conditioned humanoid that I am, I still found myself trying to design and stick to some sort of predetermined schedule. 

Yet nothing - and I repeat, nothing - was working. 

Eventually I had to admit that my body was starved for proper sleep and I was exhausted. This weekend, feeling shivery and sick, I made a bold decision. I have no choice but to throw all conventions and schedules to the wind and simply sleep when I'm sleepy. 

So for the past couple days, I've gone completely rogue. Feeling wide awake all the through the night, early morning, and on up to 11 a.m., noon? No problem! 

Yesterday, I put myself to bed for the night around 2 p.m., woke up after a few hours to have dinner, then slept again until around 3:00 a.m. when I bounced out of bed feeling fresh and fit as a fiddle. I kicked off my day in the dead of the night with a few hours of intense house cleaning, and then with poor Gracie begging me to sit down somewhere so she could relax and get her own sleep, I parked myself here at the computer for several hours of nonstop digital productivity.

Where is this going to end? Will my body eventually settle back down to my usual sleep rhythm or will my circadian rhythm continue to float through day and night on an endlessly revolving schedule? 

I have no idea. But won't it be fun to find out?

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Read more about that Delayed Sleep Phase lyfe here

And for a story about another time my sleep schedule slipped, go here.