I have been trying to fix the way I sleep. My general habit, over the last decade or so, has been to stay awake until I get tired, then go to sleep until I wake up. This is nice in that I sleep well and usually wake up feeling okay, but sucks in every other way – you know, employment, access to services, respect in the eyes of the world, that stuff. Left to my own devices, I tend to gravitate towards days that are a bit longer than 24 hours, and slowly cycle around the clock, bit by bit. It’s difficult to schedule this way, particularly more than a week away, so the first casualty of this approach is any sort of temporal work discipline. When I was younger, if anything I actually wanted to do was happening at the other end of the clock, I would just stay up later or wake up after a few hours of sleep and still be basically fine. Now, I’m tired for a few days afterwards when I try to do that. It’s become clear that, as long as I have to interface with the outside world in any way, drifting carefree across the clock won’t work out.
I’m trying to diagnose how this happens. It’s not insomnia the way people normally talk about insomnia, because I don’t usually have difficulty getting to sleep – I have difficulty wanting to go to sleep. Sleep is like physical exercise, in that I expect I’ll enjoy it know that it will be good for me but, still, when I think about actually doing it, I tend to reject that thought, to avoid and procrastinate as much as possible. Once I procrastinate on going to sleep once, though, it takes me longer to fully wake up the next day, which means it takes longer to get work done, which means I have to stay up later, and so on and on, a vicious cycle.
However, I’ve begun to suspect that, more than I am avoiding sleep, I am chasing the sensation of sleepiness. The sensation of being awake past tiredness, being just a bit frayed around the edges but still aware, gives everything a heightened sense of importance, of significance. Waking up sleepy, too, slowly coming up to speed while sipping at coffee, has its own appeal, such a time of gentle rest. Even aside from these pleasant states of tiredness, I also tend to have an adrenaline reaction to being tired, so at the same time as it can be fun and exciting to make myself tired, it can also be difficult to tell when and how I’m actually getting worn out. Tiredness has become a set of sensations I am hooked on, but also a set of situations and behaviors I identify with so strongly that it only recently occurred to me that this might be something I was doing to myself intentionally.
Even when it started to seem less than healthy, I still resisted the idea of fixing my schedule. It felt like a capitulation to a world not really set up to handle people being awake at night. The idea of day and night as times being specifically set out for work and not-work seems very old-fashioned to me, still, and I don’t really like playing into it. Realistically I know everyone has their own schedule, and we’re all just trying to work together and put together a system that mostly works, but I still resent being the one who has to change. This is one reason I like living in cities: They’re actually set up to handle people who are awake at 4am and want to get order a pizza or get some grocery shopping done.
I think the reason why I avoided sleep, though, is because I resent the idea of time where I can’t do anything – can’t work, can’t create or learn or play. It’s a hard mindset to get away from, but it’s also entirely backwards: If you want to work in a way that is effective and enjoyable, the way to do that isn’t to sacrifice as much time as possible at the altar of Getting Shit Done, it’s to shape yourself into the sort of person who that work flows out of with the minimum possible lost effort, establishing a mode of existence that is satisfying and sustainable with the work you do flowing out of that, as much byproduct as product. We like to position what we want and what the world wants of us as in opposition, as a relationship of give and take, but there’s no reason for that to be the case.
Still, it’s a work in progress. I try to get more done earlier so I don’t need to stay up late to do the same amount, I set deadlines past which I don’t allow myself to work more for the day, I take melatonin to try to help myself get to sleep and set up lots of bright lights in my room to try to help myself stay awake. It feels like it’s getting better.
And yet, sometimes, I want to stay up late, later, latest, early. It feels like time travel. It feels like magic.