When I was nine, my house burned down. For the next two or three years, it was hard for me to fall asleep at night. I would stay up all night reading and going online and listening to Harry Potter audiobooks and listening to NPR. “It’s five o’clock GMT, and you’re listening to the BBC World News Service” was the siren song of my tween years.
I’m a person who likes to do a lot of things all the time, and while that is rewarding for me, it can sometimes cross into overwhelming. This happened in my senior year of college, where I was working three jobs and doing an honors thesis on top of my classes. At that time, I was getting very little sleep and generally not doing a great job taking care of myself, and it took a toll on my health. I spent the spring semester putting much more work into my health than before. One major piece of that was sleeping more.
Since college, I’ve done better with sleep than I did in college, but I’m still not doing it perfectly. I have visions of waking up rested, without an alarm, every single day, but I still have some room to grow there.
The two biggest sleep challenges for me are getting to bed at the same time every night and having a pre-sleep ritual. Those are the focus this month.
I’m going to get in bed at 9:00 every night. I know that seems very early, but I’m going to the gym at 5:30. If I go to bed at 9:00 and wake up at 5:00, that gives me eight hours, which is what I need.
I’m going to get into a pre-sleep ritual. I’m going to stop working at least 30 minutes before bed, and then allowing ten minutes to read or write in my journal. This is just to give me some time to unwind so that I can get to sleep when I go to bed.
I remember my dreams pretty rarely – once in a long while. I was in a car accident in January, and ever since then, I’ve had nightmares about car accidents, which has me waking up in the middle of the night. Hopefully working on other aspects of my sleep routines will help with the nightmares, but we’ll see how it goes. In the comments – any ideas on how to stop nightmares?