or: Lack of Sleep Can Be a Positive Though Coffee Will Still Be Necessary Later
Since returning to Hong Kong, one of the things I hoped would improve was my sleeping patterns.
Prior to leaving Tokyo, I was sleeping fairly restlessly. Tossing and turning throughout the night to wake at either around 1am or 3am. On occasions I would fall back asleep after a couple of hours. This was more likely to happen if I was awake at 1am than 3am as after the tossing and turning for a hour or so, I figured that wasn’t too far off when I would want to get out of bed anyway at 6am.
I put this down to the general stress of my role and juggling too many things while not quite accustomed to living in another culture. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed being there and my job. It was possibly the combination of the scale and intensity at the same time over the last few months that was causing me to wake in the middle of the night (or at stupid o’clock – whatever you’d prefer to call it). Everyone knows that’s not usually the best time to solve the world’s problems yet it doesn’t seem to stop a few of us from trying.
Compared to how I normally sleep, this was all very unusual. After wearing a sleep monitoring device while still living in HK, it showed that I could fall asleep at the drop of a hat, be in deep sleep not too long afterward, could come out of it fairly quickly to a light sleep in about the thirty minutes before I was due to get out of bed. I would have a solid 7-7.5 hours deep sleep per night. Friends joked that I must hit my head on the headboard and knock myself out each night. I have no bruises.
I would almost consider headboard head hitting toward the end of my time in Tokyo though the headache the following day would be a bit of a challenge.
Here I am now at 3am having been awake since 1am. I am awake for entirely different reasons to when I was in Tokyo.
This time it is because I am excited. I have so many ideas at the moment for various projects I am working on that I struggle staying asleep. My ideas are waking me up, wanting to be heard. There seem to be at least a billion ideas through my head and some of those are coherent. They fight for dominance, each one thinking they are better than the last. I am having a solo brainstorm. I’ve taken to writing them down in a paper notebook so I can stay away from the blue light of a computer screen and can filter them properly when I’m properly awake. After coffee.
Tonight / this morning / right now is different. I have decided to be a little more productive with my time as tomorrow / today is going to be busy and I don’t want to rush to write later. That is a recipe for disaster.
Or entertainment.
It’s all quite exciting!
Will be having a strong coffee later…
* Thanks to Meatloaf for the title to this post.