I’ve been trying to become more effective and efficient as a person. This isn’t always my top priority at any given point in time, maybe because it’s not a very natural way of thinking for me. In fact I have some aversions to it, which might be worth examining in a separate post.

That said, when I do find myself in the right headspace for thinking about it, I tend to find that the #1 bottleneck in my life is sleep. When I’ve been sleeping well, I am clear-headed, make better decisions and so on. When I’ve been sleeping poorly, I am sloppier, think less clearly, make worse decisions. So. If I want a good life – and I’d like to think that I do, whatever that means specifically – I should sleep better.

So what is the general quality of my sleep, and why isn’t it great to begin with? There are some legacy issues here. I consistently have a habit of staying up really late, and sleeping late as a consequence.

I’ve experimented with a range of hypotheses to explain this. One particularly sticky one right now is that I like to stay up late because a lot of my favorite people tend to come online around 4am Singapore time. But… I could hypothetically hang out with them simply by going to bed early and waking up early, and talking to them at 6am. So why not do that instead?

Well, to wake up at 6am, I would have to go to bed at something like 10pm. Why am I not doing that? I often don’t feel sleepy at 10pm, I find myself saying. Why? Because… I wake up late to begin with. It seems like an endless cycle and I’m not sure that I can go back to the start.

One thing I do know is that I used to stay up late all the time as a teenager. Why did I do that? Well, back when I used to live with my parents, in their house, late nights seemed like the only time that I could have to myself. When everyone else was asleep, and the world was quiet, and the internet seemed faster. I wonder if I romanticize that somewhat. I used to have to go to school early in the morning, and going to bed even earlier (say, 8pm?) seemed like a socially strange thing to do, considering mealtimes and whatnot.

Well, that limitation no longer applies. I am now free to go to bed at whatever time I please, and wake up whatever time I please.

I left my job at the end of June 2018. At the time, I was typically sleeping around 1-2am, and waking up I think around 10am-ish. I would often go to work at about 11 or 12. Even then, I wasn’t very happy with how my sleeping habits were. I would love the days when I woke up early and got to office early, but most of the time I was reaching work at around lunchtime. (Being just slightly ahead of lunchtime felt a little wasteful, since I wouldn’t be able to get substantial chunks of work done knowing that lunch was 30 minutes away. I really enjoyed lunchtime with my colleagues. I always felt bad if I was late and missed the window when everyone else was eating and talking.

So why didn’t I “fix my sleep” (is this the wrong sort of language to be using?) when I still at work? Well… I tell myself that I felt tired and overwhelmed all the time. There was a lot of work to do and I never felt like I was “on top” of it. Looking back now, I realize that it’s not really possible to ever truly feel “on top” of everything. But I don’t know if that was something I could’ve appreciated at the time. I might have had to leave in order to develop a broader, bigger perspective on things.

Looking back I feel like even when I tried my best, I was never quite fully able to… “get out of my head” and see the big picture, re: how I was spending my time and energy. When I was a child I hated school timetables and homework and so on, and I had a scarcity mindset. At some level I felt like my time wasn’t mine. This stuff is really… something. There are questions here about autonomy and agency and debt. We’re 740 words in and I haven’t talked about the nightmares.

So… it’s a thing, I seem to get nightmares sometimes when I sleep early. And I seem much less likely to get them if I basically put off sleep until I’m exhausted. And the story I’m telling myself here is, I think I have been avoiding sleep because I’m subconsciously trying to avoid the nightmares. I had one two days ago when I tried to sleep early. The thing is, the nightmare doesn’t even feel very relevant anymore. It feels outdated. It feels like it was something that maybe was trying to protect me 10+ years ago.

So here’s what I’m thinking: my subconscious flinch, fear, aversion of nightmares – which I’ve never really properly articulated, I think because it sounds silly – is the bottleneck that keeps me from sleeping well, which is the bottleneck that keeps me from living well. So here’s how I’m choosing to approach it moving forward. I welcome the nightmares. I encourage the nightmares. Come at me, nightmares, and let me love you. I’m going to do a bunch of reading about nightmares, and I’m going to do the meditation and the breathing exercises and the reflection and journaling and whatever it takes to face this head on.

I’m pretty excited, actually. I hope I’m right. There’s a chance I might be wrong. But whatever the case, simply having some sort of working hypothesis to play with is making me feel less helpless, less overwhelmed. I feel like I have some sort of strategy now. Maybe this feeling is itself a kind of false hope. But let’s roll with it and see what happens.