Thursday, March 04, 2010

Waking Up Is Hard To Do

So the start of March kicks off a tweaked schedule for me.  So far it’s not working out so well. 

The plan was to switch up my workout time from lunchtime to early in the morning, which means waking up earlier than I already do.  Monday’s cold turkey attempt to wake up one hour earlier than normal was brilliantly unsuccessful.  Tuesday’s attempt to wake up half an hour earlier than normal was an improvement over Monday – only one snooze used.  The attempts the rest of this week back up the alarm until I get to the wake up time I need.  That’s been more successful, but in the meantime I still haven’t been to the gym this week.

For the last couple months it’s been a real struggle to get myself out of bed.  My brain will be awake, but my body rebels against movement.  It feels like it takes a force of nature to get me to move.  Does anyone else get like that?  Like it's almost an insurmountable obstacle to get yourself out of bed?  It makes me feel like I have lost control of myself, an idea that scares me. 

The point of being hyper-involved in lots of disparate activities is to keep me distracted from the day-to-day dull ebb and flow of being a twenty-something.  Maybe I’m too involved and I need the rest to recover from everything I’m doing.  Maybe I have too many aspirations and can’t accomplish everything concurrently.  Then why an I even more lazy if I don’t have “too much” going on.  I need the stress in order to be productive at anything, but recently it seems like the gap between enough stress to be productive and enough stress to be incapacitated is too small to find a life in the middle.

I want so much out of life and I don’t want to give up on anything I currently have going on.  It would feel like I’m letting myself down.  So then is it a question of how much do I want it?  What am I willing to give up in order to accomplish my goals?  Am I willing to give up the extra hour of sleep every day? I know it’s a girl thing to have every thing I’m doing so intimately tied to everything else so that if I don’t have success in all of my goals, then it feels like I’m a failure.  Worse still is the idea that I didn’t do enough. 

I see so many working moms who are successful at work, get dinner on the table, support the kids' after school activities, leave time for their spouse, and achieve amazing physical feats all at the same time.  I know one such person who reports that they go to bed around midnight and wake up at four.  If I only had four hours of sleep I would not be lovely to be around.   Right now I need seven to eight hours of sleep and a Grande Americano before talking to anyone civilly.  How do they make it work? Some say it's something you acquire through parenthood and takes years of practice to be able to juggle so much.  How do you ever get used to that little sleep?   If that's something I want in the long run, shouldn't I practice some of the juggling now?  What does it mean if I can't seem to keep all the balls in the air? 

“Enough” is one of my least favorite words, right below “should.”  

2 comments:

Amanda said...

Honestly I think most of those people who sleep so little and do so much are living on caffeine and it eventually catches up with them. The perfect life that's on the surface doesn't reveal all the things that are wrong behind the scenes. We're supposed to get at least 7-8 hours of sleep. That's a good thing. Remember that you're only 27. You have many years ahead of you and if you have to do some things slower than others, it's okay. You've already done an amazing amount of things. You're almost done with a novel, you run all these races, you have a good job and are working towards a second degree in something you love, you own a house, etc. You have done very well.

I know the feeling too well of always wanting to do more. I have a bit of an obsession with it, to be honest. But sometimes it's necessary to just sit back and relax, to realize you need to take things one step at a time. If your old routine was working for you without sleep issues, maybe instead of trying to train more, you should go back to the old schedule and accept that your training will just be slightly slower than if you had a different job or whatever. Either way, you're still doing well. Very well.

Faith said...

My run times change--sometimes I would do them early morning, but sometimes that doesn't work for me, other times I would be on a noon day schedule, and other times, a right before I eat dinner schedule, and lastly, a night run. It just depends what my schedule is like for that season in my life. Good luck, girl! And yes, you are doing a lot, do NOT under estimate yourself!