Please forgive me for the incoherence you are about to read.  It is a literal and figurative reflection of my serious lack of sleep.  This morning I had to board a flight at 7am.  As anyone who has ever flown knows, in order to be on time for a 7am flight (that usually boards at 6:30)  you must leave the house at approximately 4:30am meaning you need to wake up at 4:00am at the very latest.  This was the situation in which I stood this morning.  Needing to be awake at 4:00am; however, the problem was that I couldn't even get the point of sleeping, thereby negating the need for a wake-up time.

I planned ahead.  I was in bed by 11pm.  That would give me 5 hours of sleep, which wasn't enough, but would do.  I went through my normal pre-bed ritual.  Everything was pretty status-quo about it, but what wasn't normal was the fact that I did not, immediately upon laying my head on my pillow, fall asleep.  In fact, my immediate response to my head laying on my pillow was anxiety, which I eliminated after about 10 minutes of deep breathing (try the 5, 7, 8 exercise--it's the best).  After that, I should have been able to fall alseep immediately.  But I didn't.

Instead I laid in bed, tossing and turning, for two hours.

As a psychologist in training I've got lots of conceptual knowledge about how to manage insomnia. Get out of bed and do something else.  Have a hot cup of decaffeinated tea.  Turn your clock around.  Make sure the room is cool. Get rid of any ambient light.  I know all of these things conceptually, but when it came time to actually practice these things I preach, it wasn't so easy.

You see, after two hours of investment in my mission to sleep, I was hesitant to throw away all of my effort (see sunk cost theory) and just give up. But I was going to have to wake up in two hours anyways and realized that two hours of sleep wouldn't get me much farther than no sleep.  So I got out of bed, turned up the A.C., made a cup of sleepy-time tea and read a book on my couch where, after an hour, I fell asleep.

Except after all of this, I got a grand total of 40 minutes of sleep.  Hence the current exhaustion.

Moral of the story: it's really easy to preach but not so easy to practice.  It's also really hard to write while sleep deprived.

Keep on thinking,
Josie