A Quest for Sleep

I’ve been a light sleeper for as long as I can remember.

I have well-engrained habits from childhood that still deter me from getting a “good night’s sleep.” They started in high school, when I had to wake before 5:00 am at least 4 mornings per week for swim practice. I often nodded off in classes as a result of this, but even nodding off was not enough to overcompensate for severely shortened sleep cycles.

In college I made my sleep pattern worse by alleviating my lack of sleep with caffeine. This led to a caffeine addiction. I needed caffeine to prevent headaches, as well as to stay awake through a typical day. On a typical day I would drink two or three Red Bulls before morning classes and several cups of coffee before each afternoon swim practice. I would add another Red Bull, sometimes two or three, after my evening swim in order to stay awake for long enough to complete homework. It was not uncommon for me to have more than a thousand mg of caffeine on a weekday. I’m sure my daily caffeine intake was sometimes much, much higher than a thousand mg.

I’ve spent the better part of the last fifteen years trying to overcome my poor sleep habits that resulted from my college and high school experiences. Lately I’ve full realized that sleep is necessary for wellbeing. I observe it in my colleagues, who seem increasingly irritable in the blue screen era. I also observe it in myself. I read about the multitude of diseases, cancers, and brain issues that are linked to years of poor sleep patterns. I don’t want to be a “poor sleep casualty”. I want to be happy and astute in my upcoming years.

My quest for good sleep has nothing to do with athletic performance. I’m seeking longevity.

As a result, I have one goal right now, and it’s more important to me than any goal I’ve ever had: get myself sleeping well each night.

Over the last fifteen years I managed to slowly cut my caffeine intake down from over a thousand mg per day to about three hundred.

The last few weeks, I’ve lowered this caffeine further to about one hundred mg per day, which is the equivalent of about one daily cup of coffee.

I’ve stopped sleeping with a phone in my room.

I’ve started eating a more plant-based diet.

I’ve started drinking herbal teas with relaxing properties at night.

I’ve started taking small doses of melatonin to aid in resetting my circadian rhythm.

Still, in spite of these changes, there were two nights over the last week when I barely slept at all. When I struggle to sleep, I’ll toss and turn for an hour or so, then take early morning walks and read. My mind is too damn active. Sometimes it feels like it just won’t shut down.

My bad patterns are tough to kick. There is hope though. The other nights, the nights in which I did fall asleep, I managed to sleep for eight hours. I rarely slept more than eight hours before attempting to change my sleep habits. So there is hope in my quest for good sleep. But, I have to change further. I will do anything at this point to sleep well.

How do I eliminate these sleepless nights from my life for good? I realize that further changes are necessary.

• I’m going to quit drinking. For the two nights over the past week in which I barely slept, I drank wine the day before (not much, but it clearly is a factor). Alcohol is proven to disrupt sleep cycles. I might be getting more sensitive to alcohol with age. If quitting alcohol means sleeping better, I’ll quit.

• I’m going to quit watching tv at night (maybe for good?). I always found the passive act of watching tv to be a waste of good life. Clearly minimizing blue screen exposure from the phone is not enough. I need to adjust the eyes to darkness when the sun goes down. Instead of watching tv I’ll take a walk outside and let my eyes and body respond naturally to dusk.

• I’ll take melatonin and herbal tea earlier in the night, closer to sunset, to trigger an effect from the ingredients that syncs with a natural circadian rhythm.

• I’ll wear some noise-canceling headphones made for sleeping (I just ordered them). I live in an urban area. The urban noise, which lingers late into every evening, isn’t natural. Long-term, I shouldn’t live downtown. Who the hell sleeps well in a downtown area?

• I’ll practice meditation.

Of all my challenges in life, I feel that learning to get a good night’s sleep is my most difficult one. You can’t just kick 37 years of bad patterns overnight, or at least I can’t. But as stated, I’m willing to try just about anything to get my sleep in order.

The quest isn’t over. Hopefully this week involves a lot more sleep.

The Still Point of the Turning World

T.S. Eliot referred to the act of reading as “The still point of the turning world.”

Finding such moments of stillness seems crucial to sanity, now more than ever.

With the advent of clockwork came the creation of anticipation, and with anticipation inevitably came anxiety. Yet time as we know it today is a relatively recent phenomenon in relation to the span of human history.

The first mechanical clock was likely invited some time in the 14th century. Portable clocks, or pocket watches, arrived much later, in the 1700s. So while clocks entrenched a spot in societal life only over the last several hundred years, humans have existed for over 200,000 years.

Before clocks, we evolved to sense time as something that ebbs and flows, like the rise and fall of the sun.

With clocks came a march toward “progress”, something that could only be tangible if we had “markers” and “goals” to anticipate.

Now there are such time markers everywhere. Beeps on phones serving as reminders of looming appointments and peers to call. Blings on computers reminding of upcoming work meetings and due dates. Deadlines on projects. Metrics on spreadsheets marking durations of tasks to push employees in the assembly line faster, for the sake of “efficiency.”

Where can modern people find stillness?

Alarms pull the languished out of bed so that they can rush and “hit a calorie count” on a gym machine, which has a set duration that counts down to an end time, after which that person must rush to work. Hurry, or your exercise time gets reduced! Even time outside of work is spent hurrying to get to work.

Phones remind us at lunch that our eating time must be brief. We have appointments, and tasks, and deficiencies to address!

The constant tick of the modern mind has never been louder, and I have never more ardently sought stillness to counter it.

I do not exercise with a phone on me. I bike and run without one to get lost in the moment and appreciate the elements, and how they interact with me and the world around me. “End time” be damned.

I try to hide screens when I read. Reading is a rare opportunity for absolute focus and meditation, and time does not need to exist while in this state of mind. I don’t want schedules and reminders distracting me from my chance to push time aside.

I hand write these blogs first, then type them later. I don’t want a sense of urgency in a rare opportunity to reflect.

The march forward creates a longing for more and uses a tool called time to hammer feelings of incompleteness into the minds of the masses. It is this sense of urgency that turns a state of peace into a state of longing. Clocks are now tattooed into our upbringing and we justify the need for them by fooling ourselves into thinking we need more. We become obsessed with addition. More screens, more material stuff, more upgrades, more responsibilities, more promotions, more emails, more phone reminders, more bills, more Xanax, and more work hours.

It feels so damn good to just hit the pause button on it all.