Sleep habits

I do envy the way other people seem to be able to fall asleep. I tend to just lie there for ages, trying to find something to focus on that won't make me so tense that I'm lying there awake for hours.

I guess that's meditation. I sort of have to latch on to an idea and just follow it, and I'll eventually drift off. Unfortunately, in order to work, it needs to be a neutral idea; not something that will get me hyped up or angry or feel any strong emotion. It just needs to be something fairly bland that I can follow a long, like a trail into the land of sleep.

It's an absolute pain in the arse, especially when the person (or people) you're sharing a room with have clearly dozed of half a dozen times while you're still trying to get your brain to JUST SLOW DOWN. It's especially obvious if you're sharing a bed, because people tend to twitch in weird ways and click their jaws and do all sorts of things as they're drifting off. And then they snore.

If you haven't managed to fall asleep before the snoring starts, you're doomed. You can just hope that they'll enter the next phase of their sleep cycle soon and stop with the jack-hammer. Meanwhile, you just have to try not to focus on the angry train of thought about how they're asleep while you're not and how DARE THEY snore and interrupt your careful and strategic search for the PERFECT SLEEP MANTRA.

Why not think about the same thing each night, I hear you say? Because it's boring, that's why. No, seriously. It's like watching the same episode of the same TV show every single night before you go to sleep. Eventually, you'll want to ram your head through the damned screen. Except in this instance, your head is the TV, and that leads to really mind-boggling levels of recursion...

So, sleep is difficult to find. I need to go to bed at a reasonably similar hour every night and I need to meditate before I can get anywhere in that department. And then there are all the little things to deal with, like having all my limbs evenly covered, warm enough, not too warm, sheets not crinkled, etc etc ad nauseum.

No wonder I'm tired so much of the time :-/