#Ill sleep when i am dead how to#
#Ill sleep when i am dead full#
#Ill sleep when i am dead professional#
#Ill sleep when i am dead tv#
#Ill sleep when i am dead free#

I remember those early sobriety nights of trying to sleep as being truly miserable.

#Ill sleep when i am dead how to#

In recovery from alcoholism, one of the hardest things for me to learn was how to fall asleep instead of just passing out. 2) My mental health started getting a lot better. A lot of things changed for me during these years, so it’s hard to isolate the sleep variable, but I know two things are true: 1) I started getting a lot more sleep. However, because of all the alcohol, a lot of these were still very bad nights of sleep – night sweats, waking up nauseated at 2am, multiple trips to pee, etc.

#Ill sleep when i am dead full#

For years, I did it with a belly full of wine and in front of the TV, but I was getting a full night regularly for the first time in my adult life. I did start to focus on getting a decent night of sleep most nights. I didn’t take a ton out of my hospitalization, but something I remember is they said getting good sleep was one tangible thing I could do to improve my mental health.

#Ill sleep when i am dead professional#

When I was hospitalized for a serious suicide attempt, this is the first I remember of a mental health professional taking the issue of sleep seriously. Interestingly, for all the doctors and psychiatrists I saw during this time, I don’t remember any of them asking about my sleep. My mental health was precarious on a good day. Apparently I disregarded the obvious health and mental health implications of this speedball lifestyle. At times, in addition to horse-killing quantities of caffeine, I was drinking alcohol between shifts to come down from all the caffeine and get a little shut-eye. I wonder what problems were caused by the mental health havok of these conditions.įor a lot of my post-college working life, I worked two jobs with hours that extended from early morning into midnight. I was pretty unstable and miserable throughout my college years. What on earth was in these? I don’t even know, but they kept me awake like speed and made me only slightly insane.

When caffeine wouldn’t cut it, I resorted to Mini-Thins – remember Mini-Thins? Weird little over-the-counter amphetamine tablets. Do you know how hard it is to focus on conjugating Spanish verbs and outlining passages of The Canterbury Tales when your friends are partying 20 feet away? And of course plenty of days I would stay up with my friends and still get up at 2am to do homework, so throughout college, I was badly sleep-deprived and overcaffeinated. The other reason for my early bedtime and wakeup time was that sleeping was the only thing I wanted to do more than drinking with my friends.

So the early to bed/early to rise cycle reinforces itself. The only downside to 3am productivity is that my brain is totally useless by 4pm. Since I’m pretty clear-headed in the morning, this was a great time to do homework while my mind is fresh, and to this day, I do my writing in the morning. From her, I learned that mornings were a meaningful time to be embraced.

#Ill sleep when i am dead free#

For a couple of hours in the wee small hours, she could read or crochet and drink coffee and be free for once. She would always wake up at 3am because it was the only time of day no one was around to place their endless demands on her. I’ve always been good at getting up to an early alarm, and basically bouncing out of bed ready to take on the day. In college, I would go to bed at 8pm while my friends were all still partying.

#Ill sleep when i am dead tv#

I left the TV on to out-shout those thoughts, and slept on the couch where the TV was, instead of my room where my bed was. As an adolescent and teenager, I had trouble falling asleep, with my thoughts clanging around in my head. Literally the only time I remember being threatened with a spanking, I was running around resisting bedtime. There is so much to do that is more fun than sleep. For something that takes up like a third of our lives, we don’t pay much attention to sleep. We can have a different relationship with sleep that even depends on the day. Every individual has their own relationship with sleep, and in my experience, my relationship with sleep has changed over time. We humans, with our things to do and life stresses, have maybe a more complicated relationship with sleep than our animal friends. We think we all know what we’re talking about when we talk about sleep, but really we all have a different idea of what this universal need means for us.