I’m ready to focus on sleep.

I haven’t ever had great sleep hygiene.

When I was a kid it often took me a really long time to fall asleep.

In my late twenties I developed some really bad issues with insomnia that eventually led to depression and hospitalization.

Lying in bed trying to fall asleep and then having major anxiety about falling asleep and then freaking out about how late it was and how little sleep I would get if I could ever actually fall asleep was a constant loop.

I don’t function well without enough sleep.

I have a hard enough time concentrating when I’m rested. When I’m exhausted anything that involves concentration just isn’t going to happen. Or it takes me about ten times longer than it should to accomplish even a simple task.

It’s also pretty much inevitable that I’ll get sick if I string too many days with too little sleep together.

Lying in bed not being able to turn my brain off and waiting to fall asleep is my definition of hell.

I hate it.

And so, over the last twenty-five years, I’ve developed some really unhealthy coping strategies to avoid lying in bed for hours waiting for sleep to come.

My biggest issue is falling asleep watching TV.

I’m kind of addicted to it.

I either fall asleep on the couch watching TV or I bring the iPad into bed with me, and I watch something until I drift off to sleep without realizing it.

My brain never even has a chance to quiet itself down.

I just keep it stimulated and occupied with something until it runs out of gas.

Things have gotten worse since getting divorced because my routines have been all over the place.

Every day isn’t the same anymore. And the kids are getting older so their bedtime routines aren’t what they used to be.

Kristofer has his license and drives himself to morning practice, so I don’t have to be awake for that.

Most of the safeguards I managed to put in place over the last fifteen years are gone.

And I’ve let any tiny shreds of routine I had managed to hold onto completely disappear.

I sleep on the couch more often than I sleep in bed, and not only do I sleep with the TV on but also with lights on.

I drink coffee all day long.

I don’t take breaks during the day so my brain has a chance to settle down, and as a result, I need brain settling time at night.

Powering through the day without breaks leads to me going to bed too late because I need to stay up late in order to calm down, which is kind of ironic.

Then I repeat this cycle that isn’t actually serving me in any way.

I am set up for sleep failure.

I’m ready to change this.

Because while reying on the TV makes the process of falling asleep a lot more tolerable, the quality of sleep I’m getting is garbage.

I wake up multiple times throughout the night.

The ADHD & menopause cocktail doesn’t help things.

But I’m choosing to make things worse.

I’m tired of being tired.

I was not designed to operate on five hours of interrupted sleep. Or even six hours of interrupted sleep.

I wish I was. I wish I didn’t need more than a few hours of sleep per night.

But I do.

And it’s time for me to start giving my body and brain what they need or I’m going to find myself dealing with some long term consequences that I might not be able to undo.

I actually started this last night.

Actually, I started this at the beginning of 2022 after I got covid last January.

We had been in the house less than a year, and I prioritized getting the kids’ rooms, the main living areas and my offiice put together and I just never did anything about my bedroom.

It had become a dumping ground for stuff that didn’t have a home, I had no systems in place, and I hated being in there.

When I was trapped in there for five days quarantining, that’s when I decided it was time to give myself a nice space.

Now my room looks like this:

And this:

Sometimes I’m not so good about putting my clean clothes away, but for the most part, my bedroom is calm and pretty and relaxing and oasis-y.

So at least I’ve got that part of the sleep hygiene checked off the list.

And last night I sucked it up and slept in my bed without the iPad.

I unplugged all the Christmas lights in my room, and I turned the heat down to 59°.

I took a fan from one of the kids’ rooms for the white noise and also to help with the night sweats, because sleeping without blankets is virtually impossible.

(Next on the list of things to do is get a weighted blanket).

I set my environment up for sleep success.

I didn’t get into bed until midnight, so that’s gotta change, and I read for a little while. The challenge with reading in bed is putting the book down and turning off the light before I fall asleep. Because if I fall asleep with the light on, even the act of turning it off a couple hours later when I inevitably wake up in the middle of the night is enough to reset the falling-asleep clock back to at least an hour.

It took a while to fall asleep last night without any crutch. But I did it.

I woke up multiple times. I didn’t get a great night’s sleep.

But I’m moving in the right direction. It’s not gonna happen overnight.

I’m going to have to keep practicing.

The more I practice, the less uncomfortable the process will be.

With practice, my sleep habits will improve.

If I can consistently sleep in my bed and turn off my lights and limit the TV or iPad after 9 pm eventually the process will lead to the results I want.

Every little improvement will compound. And with enough practice and consistency, a year from now I’ll be writing a follow up blog post to this one about how I developed a really kick ass night time routine in 2023.

A year from now I’ll be telling you how I went from getting five or six broken hours of sleep on the couch every night, to seven or eight truly restorative hours of restful sleep in my bedroom.

And then I’ll share with you how the quality of my life improved dramatically over the course of 2023 because I made the decision to change what I was doing and exchange short term comfort for long-term comfort.

How the quality of my sleep changed. How my ability to focus improved. How being better rested enabled me to become a more patient and level-headed mom. How I was able to be much more effective with my time because I was able to concentrate more easily and wasn’t constantly struggling to just stay awake. How my financial situation improved in direct proportion to my sleep habits.

It won’t be easy.

It will definitely be uncomfortable. Just the thought of going to bed like a responsible adult in my bed without using technology as a short-term crutch totally sucks.

But it doesn’t suck as bad as living just about every minute of my life feeling completely drained.

Either way I’m gonna be uncomfortable.

I’m ready to go with the discomfort that will give me a positive return on my investment.

Because the other way around just isn’t worth it anymore.

The process I’m using to change my sleep habits is the same process I teach you how to use in

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