I had a re-realization a couple of nights ago at almost 6am when I was lying in bed struggling to sleep. I was thinking about what was keeping me from sleeping, and I settled on the explanation “it’s my book”. What’s up with my book? Well, some part of me felt like I hadn’t done enough work on it, and was holding me hostage as a result. And I realize that me writing my book is in part a reckoning.
I have a post from 2012 about how luxurious my sleep was sometimes during my military service. That was some of the best sleep I had in my life. I know that sometimes I sleep really well on vacation.
Also in 2012, I wrote “if there’s only one thing I could change in my life, it would be my sleeping habits“.
2016 blogpost: “Sleep. This is probably my biggest limiting factor right now”
In Dec 2017 I wrote a blogpost titled “to sleep earlier I need to fix my poverty mindset“.
2017 tweet: “If every day is going to be overwhelming and exhausting and full of distractions and missed obligations and deadlines, how can I sleep?”
In 2018, I tweeted “A simple but powerful truth I keep in a box is “sleep is the bottleneck limiting your brain’s performance”. Understanding this intellectually is easy; rearchitecting the rest of your life to accommodate it is hard. I know it’s stupid.”
Also tweeted “my aversion to schedules is perhaps my top bottleneck (if sleep and exercise schedules count)”.
and tweeted “sometimes self-concept is the bottleneck keeping us from fixing meatbag issues”
So… here we are. 2021. I’m 31 years old and I’m still dealing with a challenge that I struggled with throughout my teenage days and my 20s, with some brief, interesting exceptions.
I think my sleep issue is largely psychological. It’s that I don’t feel like I can relax if I haven’t “made the day count”. This seems to be some kind of Gordian knot that I cannot slice, a frame that I cannot seem to bust out of.
It would be glorious if I could simply choose a new frame of “actually it doesn’t matter if you didn’t make the day count, you deserve to sleep and rest no matter what. In fact that’s the smart and ‘obvious’ thing to do, because if you see the big picture, tiredness spirals quickly go bad fast, every single time. You have to cut your losses, stop going on tilt, acknowledge the bad play, and relax.” And I think… that may be possible for me, but it doesn’t feel possible for me right now, not immediately. It’s hard to explain why. I think it’s because this is a logical argument, while my body, my body-mind, doesn’t believe it. In this sort of domain, it seems to me that the body-mind only really believes experience.
I think this is also related to why people get so euphoric when they break a personal record in lifting weights or when running and so on. If they’ve been training for it, intellectually they know it’s possible. But knowing intellectually and knowing it in your body are two very different things. I’ve experienced a version of this socially, too. I used to know intellectually that I’m good at making friends. But I felt it in my body when my internet friends halfway across the planet flew me out to go see them, and treated me with tremendous love and kindness.
Circling back. Actually now I find myself thinking that it IS possible to choose the new frame, but it takes a lot of practice and meditation. I’d have to remind myself every day. Tiredness spirals are real. They are bad. I should draw or print a map of a tiredness spiral. I believe that if I reflect on this every day, openly, thoughtfully, over time it should become increasingly obvious to me, intuitively, that a “bad day” still deserves restful sleep, because otherwise you’re sabotaging the next day, and the day after that, and that’s not okay.
Also, I can practice forgiving my past selves for all their bad days and poor sleep. And I do! I’m honestly impressed with how my past selves got me to where I am despite their imperfect knowledge, lack of skills, lack of guidance, etc. They tried their best. It wasn’t obvious at the time, because it always felt like I could surely try harder, but looking back now, how could I have? Through sheer force of will? I don’t think I had that will.
I know how I would’ve supported my younger self if I could go back in time and be a big brother figure, with all the additional knowledge, skill, insight etc that I have gained. I wouldn’t push my younger self at all. In fact I would “pull” him, by asking him questions. I would help him develop a clearer view of his circumstances, his interests, motivations. I would encourage him, from a place of curiosity, to model the motivations of the people in his life. And to think honestly about what he wanted out of life, and what he liked to do for fun, and so on. And I think that’s how I’d have helped him do better in all dimensions – do better in school, rest better, have a better social life, and instead of a downward spiral, I think it would’ve been an upward spiral.
Well, hindsight is always 20/20. The real test is to apply it to the present moment.
Erm, did I leave out half the picture? So half of the picture is changing the frame to “you deserve to sleep well even when you’ve had a bad, unproductive day, because otherwise you’ll go into a fatigue spiral”. And the other part is, well, stop having bad, unproductive days, lmao. Start having good, productive days. You have a good productive day by producing output. It’s remarkable how simple and obvious this stuff sounds, but that’s the tricky thing about it. It’s like how meditation is “just sit there and breathe and don’t do anything else”. Your attention wants to wander. The simple thing is hard to do because there’s always other nonsense. Keeping things simple requires keeping needless complication away. And needless complication is always trying to get you.
Anyway, time for bed.