Sleep is not the enemy

How do I get more sleep while continuing to do the things that matter to me?

I wrote this question to myself last week after once again failing on my promise to get more sleep. The end of the day comes and my good intentions to turn off the lights by 10:30 are abandoned as I play one more game of Tetris 99 or read a few more pages of my book (it's mostly been Tetris 99 over the last couple of months but reading a few pages before firing up the Switch certainly delays bed time). I jotted down a response to this question further down the same page.

View sleep as a component of these goals.

My original note has a question mark at the end, but after sitting with this idea for a week or so, I think it's the right answer. I've been viewing getting more sleep as a competing goal with all of my fitness/reading/general health endeavors. Sleep is a key contributor to success in those things rather than a conflicting obligation. I may lose some time by going to bed a bit earlier, but I will be much more effective with the fewer hours that I am awake. At least that's my current position on the matter.

My performance in my annual 10K relative to other years reinforced the role sleep plays in my efforts to live a richer and fuller life. I did not sleep well all week. My brain felt tired during the race. I went back and looked at what I was doing in the month before my best 10K back in 2017 (when I was about 3 minutes faster). I was getting up later a couple days a week, taking more naps on the weekend, and drinking less beer (partly because I was going to bed earlier on the weekends). My training over both of those years wasn't dramatically different, at least not divergent enough to account for those 3 minutes. Those differences in sleep between the two years aren't much, but it's enough for me to see how making getting sleep a component of my goals could be beneficial.

It's not necessarily the number of hours that I'm asleep that really matters. If I'm better rested, I can push myself harder on training runs. There are way too many times when I'm doing all I can to just get myself out the door. I get in the miles, but I'm not working on getting better. I'm happy to run at a moderate pace and be happy with the distance. That's the right approach for the workout sometimes, but I also need workouts where I am pushing my limits. That's a difficult challenge in the best of circumstances. Stretching myself like that when I'm barely awake is not a successful strategy.

More sleep is a good step to doing more hard things. I've been avoiding books that are challenging to read because I'm tired enough as it is when I do most of my reading. I don't know how much I get out of any book when I'm dozing off in the middle of a page. I definitely have no hope of making it through Proust or War and Peace when I'm just trying to keep my eyes open!

So I'm going to start working my way to earlier bedtimes. I'm shooting for 30 to 15 minutes earlier than normal this week. I will cut back again once that feels normal. If things feel better at that point, I will reassess my sleep requirements.

To and Fro

I should be playing Tetris 99 right now, but the Switch is having fun at a sleepover. I read for a bit before coming downstairs where I can mourn the absence of trying to get my 32nd, 33rd, 34th win. I quickly composed a nifty little post in my head while pouring a beer but as always happens the nice flowing thoughts stopped coming the second I tried to put them down where other people can read them. I guess coming out of the safety of my whirling mind was more than they could handle. I'm not surprised. Expressing myself in this way has become a rarity. I look back in wonder at how much I could get down more years ago than I like to really think about. This kind of thinking was a release. It made me feel better. It wasn't always easy to get started, but once I got on the trail of a good idea things usually feel together pretty easily. It's kind of sad to realize that the biggest drag on that momentum was a poor computer choice. I bought a new computer and everything just kind of ground to a halt. The pad of my thumb would hit the mouse pad and move the cursor. It was minor but annoying enough that it was a drag to get the computer up and running. The always dead battery didn't help.

I was searching for something through all of those words. Repeating a pattern set way back as a lonely teenager pouring myself out to a piece of notebook paper. The answers are out there if you look hard enough, work through enough of the hard stuff. Life was all around but I was pretty busy trying to get all of that action to fit into the way I thought it should come together. Eight years later I don't know if I'm wise or jaded. Maybe a little of both. I've seen the folly in some of my old ambitions, but I've also yielded some of my desire for better and different. I've softened and slide into the mold of the life offered. This has brought me peace with a small dose of complacency. I've taken what's been offered. That choice has made a difference.

Perhaps I'm no longer at war with the truth. I railed against the truth about myself, my job, and where my career was taking me. I could see the light that everybody else was missing. It was so obvious, why can't they see it? Reality has slid between me and my view of the abstract that fired all my musings about the role of R&D in a business, my potential for change, and what I really needed in my life. Writing a bunch of stuff on the internet is easy. Changing what goes on in reality demands more. Nine years ago I spent most of my time running samples at the bench. Now I'm in charge of the people running samples at the bench (and making the stuff that gets tested at the bench). The answers aren't so clear from this view. People don't react the same way as molecules in a flask. Molecules will tell you their secrets if you ask nicely enough. People refuse to share their truth. You have to piece it together from hints and clues scattered in their wake. It's taken me decades to really understand my wife. How can I ever really know the people I work with? Have I really tried?

I used to come here to flee what I feared. Disintegration. Insignificance. Those were just shadows. My fears were real enough, but I was afraid of a pile of clothes. As I was just about to write that putting together these posts was the first step in rebuilding myself, I have to realize that in many ways these posts were preventing me from moving beyond my fears.This is where I reinforced my mistaken notions of how the world worked. I had to set this self-focused process aside and really engage with the reality of my life before I could realize the unreality of my fears. I came here to patch holes in the walls that I used to keep the bad feelings away. I faced the truth every now and then. Maybe that's where the growth finally started. It's all scattered in here. But that's just looking back. There is still plenty ahead. That's where I should focus. These little forays into my decision making record are marginally useful, but I can't let looking back replace moving forward, always forward.