When my kids were little I noticed a strange phenomenon: if their naps got interrupted, I'd expect them to fall asleep early and stay asleep. They were extra-tired, right? They needed the sleep even more than usual, right? It was so exasperating when it didn't work out that way. They couldn't fall asleep; they couldn't stay asleep. I was pretty rigid about naptime and bedtime during those years, because everything deteriorates when people aren't getting the sleep they need.
This observation is true for the middle-aged people in a family as well. I told you earlier this week about my recent interrupted nights. "I am going to bed nice and early," I said to myself last night. "I need a little extra rest." I was SO annoyed, SO SO annoyed, when I sprang awake at 4:15. I tried to go back to sleep; it didn't work. But as I lay there I had a little flash of insight: it is much easier for me to sleep well, to ease in and and out of sleep painlessly and to get good restful sleep, when the conditions are right. Exercise makes a big difference in my sleep quality, and I have not been exercising consistently since I got COVID. And here is something that just dawned on me, almost 52 years into living in this body: accumulated fatigue makes it harder for me to sleep well. My brain is better at restoring itself overnight when it is not running a sleep deficit.
So. Instead of lying there trying to will myself to sleep, I got up and did my morning stuff and then I went for a short gentle run. (I've been worried about getting back into running because I know someone who went into COVID with the same benign arrhythmia that I have and came out of COVID with a life-threatening arrhythmia requiring invasive treatment. So I said to my husband, who probably thought I was being absurdly paranoid, "This is the loop I am going to run. If I am not back in 20 minutes, something is wrong. Please come find me and make sure I didn't throw a clot.")
After an entirely uneventful run I betook myself to class, where I felt reasonably perky. This afternoon I decided that instead of slogging through my list of tasks I would try to nap, with low expectations. I often can't fall asleep in the middle of the day, but today it worked and it was GLORIOUS. I woke up feeling a zillion times better -- motivated to cook a yummy dinner and get my writing time in afterward. (It was going to be a meaty version of stuffed chard (bulgur, ground meat, chard stems, onion, garlic, fresh mint and oregano), but my chard leaves wound up thoroughly boiled instead of parboiled. Only a few were stuffable, so I minced the rest finely and stirred them into the remainder of the filling. I liked it a lot and the kids did not complain.)
I like to think I have better emotional regulation skills than a toddler, but I too find that everything deteriorates when I am not getting the sleep I need. It is so much easier for me to catastrophize about difficult students when I am short on sleep, so much less straightforward to say, "I have a lot of agency in this situation: I can ignore it, or have a low-key conversation about it, or have a conversation-with-consequences about it, and I get to decide which of those things to do."
Hurray for rest! I think I am going to go get some more of it.
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