Why do we stay awake, when we yawn to sleep?
There was a night during the week that I slept so well. Like a baby, we would say, forgetting that babies do not sleep for long stretches. They wake up wet or hungry. They wake up frightened by baby dreams or noises in the waking world. To sleep like a baby is not to have an unbroken night's sleep. The irony is that as a baby I was a good sleeper; these days not so much.
On the occasion in question, I only woke long enough to register being awake, not long enough to worry about lying awake. I slept well, and I dreamed all manner of odd things. I went to bed early, before 10pm, and I got up late, after 8. Even allowing for waking, that has to be a good ten hours' sleep, or as near to sleep as makes no odds. To me this disproves the notion that we cannot "catch up" on missed sleep. I believe we can.
I know, without scientific experiment, purely from personal experience, that the catch-up sleep will occur on the second or the third night, not the one immediately following the deprivation.
On the night at the end of a day that has been wasted, because I have been 'wrecked' from a late night followed by an early morning, I will not go to bed early. No matter how shattered I am, no matter how fractured, no matter that I have spent the whole day barely functioning, I will find distractions to keep me awake longer than I have any need to be. Why is that?
I will be a bit better the next day, but that's the day I'm more likely to go to bed early, or maybe even the day after. That's when the negotiations between my brain and the rest of my body will have been concluded and my body will have won out. That's when the interiority understands the net gain to be had from just turning out all the lights and lying down. Sleep isn't the objective. Rest is. Non-thinking is. We find it easier to not-think in a dark room and a cosy space. We find it easier to not-think lying down. Our body understands horizontal as no-threat-relax. And if we do, if we need sleep, sleep will come. That all makes perfect sense to me.
What I don't understand is why I can't just do that immediately on the evening of the deprivation, and/or equally why I keep myself up so late that I end up sleep-deprived in the first place. What is it that keeps me awake, when I am yawningly obviously in need of sleep?
One theory is that procrastinating against going to bed is a form of 'revenge' against life. A small civil disobedience victory against the world, a 'sod-you-I'm-claiming-this-time-for-me' action. I can see how that might play out with time-poor people. But I'm time-rich, that can't be my excuse…unless it is simply a habit I developed during all of my stressed-out time-poor working years, and my subconscious hasn't yet learned to trust the conscious knowledge that those rules don't apply any more.
Between them Allesandra Edwards[1] and Floor Kroese[2] imply that we claim the late night hours to process the day. All the emotions and unresolved anxieties come back to haunt us in the dark. Their theories seem to be that if we dealt with the day better during the day, the night would welcome us more easily. For me that suggests that as well as my now-embedded Morning Pages I might need to think about evening journalling as well. It's true enough that when I am consciously agitated I do write "late pages". A good splurge onto the page does help. So perhaps creating the habit will alleviate the un- or sub-conscious agitation.
Elsewhere, I read that the sleep drive is very much like the hunger drive, and there has been a suggestion that we confuse the two. The late-night snackers amongst us (guilty as charged) are eating not because we're hungry, but because we're sleepy. What I'm not sure about is whether this is staying awake because I'm eating, or eating in order to stay awake.
I confess to what many might call 'comfort eating'. The horribly bizarre thing is: this is a learned behaviour. Time was that my response to depression, stress, emptiness was to "not eat". Recognising the potential harm in that, I taught myself to eat quickly: to get the food in before I recognised that I was eating. That has not served me well in the years since my emotional recovery. What I recognise now, is that behaviours and habits developed over years, take time (maybe not equal time, but definitely time) to be dissolved. Putting labels on the habits and behaviours does not help with that process so I consistently and deliberately decline to do so. No disrespect to anyone who does. For some it may be helpful. I just call them unhelpful behaviours.
I have my own theory about sleep procrastination. Namely that it is either a desire to prolong today or a desire to avoid tomorrow. The first occurs at the end of a brilliant day that we don't want to end. The second is when there is something on tomorrow's schedule that makes us anxious.
Having developed strategies to these two scenarios is really helpful.
At the end of a perfect day…my preferred method is to take some time to revel in the perfection of it. I finish the day with a warm bath or shower (I'm elementally water, and being freshly cleansed is always a bit more perfect). I put the lights low, and the music lower. And I journal about the beauty of the day, or I just sit and watch and listen. I make sure I am warm, and comfortable. If I'm with someone the rule is gentle conversation or companionable silence. Perfect days don't allow for doubts. Perfect days require a little extension of 'wow'. I wrap myself in that and take it to bed with me. And because I don't emotionally need to sleep, my body is free to take over and let me sleep or just rest comfortably dozing.
If I'm worrying about a morrow with anxious associations, I try to recognise that it is tomorrow's problem, that tonight I'm here, I have this bed, and these hours of rest awaiting. I remind myself about all the times I have succeeded and/or survived before. I remind myself that the world will still turn and I will still breathe if I mess up big time. And then I simply note the hours until the ordeal will be over. A count-down to relief. In 12 hours I'll be out the other side of this….In 8 hours, this'll be done…in four hours this will be under way…in 90 minutes, I can grab a coffee & a cake and get on with the rest of my life…! And then tomorrow or the day after I will catch up on my sleep.
