The Gift of Sleep

One of the things I’m glad to get more of because of the pandemic is sleep. I haven’t really practiced good sleep hygiene before the quarantines happened because I was your typical yes-man – I’d say yes to almost everything. If there was work that needed to be done, I’d of course do it. If someone needed help with something, I’m your man. If my friends wanted to meet up and get a night cap, watch a movie, or just hang, I’d have an award for best attendance.

 

All these made my life so rich. It also robbed me of good sleep. What I’d usually do is sleep in during the weekends to catch up for all the sleep I lost during the weekdays. I won’t be up till midday even though I’d be awake. I’d just enjoy my bed and the rest and the fact that I don’t have to wake up to an alarm clock. This was heaven to me.

 

I’ve heard of the 5am club and how starting your morning this early in the day gives you a lot of time to do everything you want to do. I’ve been meaning to try it, and I think the pandemic is the best time to do it because there aren’t any socials and you really have no other reason to stay out late. For some reason, my body started waking me up at 5am this week and I would usually just tell myself to go back to sleep and wake up at 8 or 9am again. This week, however, I became restless and decided to try it. At the start of the week, I was awake by 5 but only got up by 7. I did some light exercise, and all the other things I usually do in the morning – things that I made more time for since the start of quarantines. Things that if I had a choice, I would choose to do all the time. This was read a book – an actual book on paperback and not an e-book or audiobook – play my guitar, learn some more piano. This always makes me feel a strange feeling of being enough and happy and contented that I gave time for these things – enough so that I could go on with the rest of my day and do the work that used to just be something I HAD to do. Doing these things first actually made me enjoy the work part of the day more.

 

Anyway, I found myself getting so sleepy by 9:30pm. It felt a bit lonely. I don’t know if it’s because I’m just used to being a night owl and I like to take my time and do my thing till midnight. Being sleepy by 9 made me feel a bit incapacitated, as if I didn’t have control of what I wanted to do really.

 

The following days I just pushed myself to sleep longer and wake up later, and not at 5am anymore. I felt good the coming days, and I felt good that I didn’t need a nap in the middle of the day just to be able to make the most out of the rest of my night.

 

I did enjoy the way the sun shone early in the day, in the nonmenacing, really beautiful way it glowed when it was around 7am to before 9am. If I were to choose, I’d probably want to wake up feeling fresh and rejuvenated, preferably sometime in between these two hours in the morning. I feel like I’d have enough for the rest of the day, enough not to need a nap, enough to finish a good night and feeling like I still made the most out of the day.



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