Binge Sleeping

While I’m not a clinical insomniac by any means I suffer from what I’ll call occasional severe sleeplessness, insomnia light lets say. This leads to periods of manic midnight activity and days where I only wake up to eat and drink.

I can remember a year when I worked the whole summer at a kids camp. As you can imagine, most camp staff don’t sleep much. I was getting an average of probably five to six hours of sleep per night. I woke up between 5:45 and 6:45 depending on the day: for staff meetings or to bring in the horse herd before staff meeting or to set up high ropes. I went to bed after the kids had called it quits and everything was sorted out from evening snacks or late night games, between 11 and midnight most nights. I will admit some of the late nights were self inflicted, trying to get in time to visit with my room mate or another staff member, wanting to read a few pages of a book.

At the end of the summer I went on a week of holidays with my family. For the first four days, from the moment we got there I claimed a bed and slept until breakfast, from breakfast to noon, from noon to supper, and from supper to breakfast the next day. I’m really not speaking figuratively at all either–I slept like that for four days straight. On day five I woke up and swam across a lake while my parents canoed beside me so I wouldn’t get hit by a motor boat.

It’s been awhile since that, but lately I have found forcing myself to just get to bed has been a struggle and I can feel the tiredness creeping up on me. Between my morning exercise and my late evenings somethings gotta give and it’s not going to be my exercise. I figure at some point I’ll just fall asleep in a comfy chair and wake up the next day. We’ll see though, I suppose.

I can’t say this cycle is particularly healthy, but I’m not ready to put into action a plan to change it. I really don’t know how I need to work at it to change it right now anyways. Some days I just look at the clock and say screw it, you can’t run me and end up staying until 1 a.m.

I’m sure I’ll find a way but in the meantime I’m curious. Anyone else out there an actual insomniac or have trouble forcing themselves to bed even when they know they need to be up the next day? How do you combat it?

 

xx.