Let’s first define owl in the way I intend to use it: someone who goes to sleep very late.
I’ve been an owl for a very long time, essentially since childhood. In fact, I typically went to sleep later than anyone I knew, and this continued throughout my entire adulthood, including at times when it seriously deleterious to my health. It’s a problem I have acknowledged and tried to fix several times, but not consistently enough to yield proper results. It’s important to understand the root cause of why I am an owl if I intend to fix it, otherwise I’m just putting band-aids on a major lesion.
To my understanding of my situation, nighttime is a time of relaxation and cooling off from the stresses of the day. Once the day’s work and problems are completed, I give myself time to decompress and rest. It’s an important time for me to reset myself. Being awake for as long as possible during this time is my only escape from the rest of life’s ongoing stressors.
Thus, staying awake later into the night allows me more time to escape all of the things I simply do not like to deal with during the day. Going to sleep earlier means I will once again have to deal with all the crap that life throws, just with less decompression time.
It’s a consequence of both my career and my own approach to life. For years, I have worked and worked without doing too much that would give me quality rest time. I rarely give myself something to look forward to the next day. Even when I have given myself the opportunity to look forward to something, especially in recent years, it has not worked out in my favor. Someone would get sick, or change their mind, or come up with a reason to not do something that was intended (even if not planned), and the entire thing would be destroyed.
I became more and more jaded with looking forward to anything in the future, simply expecting something to go wrong. I only looked forward to the rest I would receive the same evening, with no prospects for anything exciting the next day… or next week… or next month… God forbid trying to plan something for next year.
This is an unhealthy mindset. I give no room for spontaneity in this equation either, even though I am young enough to be spontaneous. However, I have no friends that would simply spontaneously come up with a plan to hang out because they are also out there living busy lives. I certainly do not want to do things by myself, as I actively dislike my own company (and dislike myself).
Maybe this is the root cause of all of this? Disliking myself, thus not wanting to do anything alone, thus being afraid to go out and do something fun, thus not making plans, and consequently only living for the few hours of peace I can obtain in the evening by watching television?
Either way, now that I temporarily do not have a job, I don’t feel quite the pressure of the next day that I used to feel, even though I am keeping myself productive with more things than I have to (including searching for a job). I have less of that terrible sensation of “I do not want to face the next day” because I know that I will have more downtime.
Maybe the lack of reasonable downtime over the course of many years is the root cause of me not wanting to face the next day? After all, it’s been more than 20 years since I actually took a real vacation outside of the confines of my town.
Either way, I now find it slightly easier to cut myself off from the internet and from watching television as late as I did before. I’ve been getting off the internet earlier than I have in a very long time, spending some more time with family, and getting to sleep a little bit earlier than I did before. It’s still a very late sleep time, but it’s better.
Compounding the difficulty of breaking my habits as an owl is the fact that my body has gotten used to unreasonable sleep times. It’s physically challenging to break this habit because I’m now used to being asleep at hours which are very far from ideal.
Now, I don’t expect to become an early bird right away, but I intend to keep making gradual changes so that I can go to sleep no later than midnight. If I can accomplish that goal this week, that’s going to be a major positive change… which I’ll then have the challenge of maintaining. It takes one day of sleeping in later to break this – and that’s happened several times before.
Currently I have good conditions to make a long term change in my sleeping schedule. In order to address the underlying causes of my “owlness,” it will be important for me to plan and execute positive things which will make you look forward to upcoming days, and thus get me to sleep earlier. The accountability lists (from my prior couple of posts) are something I really have to take seriously and not dismiss. I also have to be brave enough to find some activities outside and meet new people. These changes might be the key to helping me dig myself out of the hole that I’ve dug for myself.
Let’s see how it all goes…!