Sleep Better at Night

I am a light sleeper. I wake up to the sound of my cell phone vibrating, to the sound of a car door closing, to the sound of my downstairs neighbor smoking a cigarette and talking on his cell phone beneath my window. While this is annoying, especially because I live in an old building with paper-thin walls, it's never really been a problem for me because I can generally fall asleep quickly.

Lately, however, I've been having a really hard time falling asleep, and I wasn't sure why until last night, when I was staring at my ceiling, listening to the wind blowing my bedroom door against the door frame softly, I realized something: I cannot sleep when I'm stressed.

Now, let's all take a moment to appreciate the Duh! factor of that statement. You done? Okay, now pay attention.

I know that stress is a major contributor to insomnia, and that there are probably hundreds of articles and blogs written about it, but that's not what I'm worried about. What worries me is that I went sleepless for almost two weeks before I even realized that I was even stressed in the first place.

I have a theory, and among my friends it's been holding pretty true: you can reduce your stress enormously by simply naming the factors in your life that are stressing you out.

I'm relatively convinced that stress comes not from having too many deadlines or from the hectic nature of our lives, but rather from the feeling of dread that springs from feeling that things in our lives are out of control and that we have no idea what's going on. It's that feeling of losing control that is freaking us out, not the workload, personal problems, or lack of time.

For example, right now I'm stressed out because I'm working a pretty steady forty to forty-five hours a week at a day job, working on four freelance projects, interviewing with a few companies for a higher-paying, more fulfilling day job, and trying to start a band, all while attempting to keep my personal life (i.e. getting to the gym, cooking meals, cleaning my apartment, grocery shopping, etc.) in some kind of flow. That's a lot of balls to keep in the air, and I've never been great at multi-tasking. So I've felt really stressed; I worry that I don't have enough free time to keep up with my freelance projects, but I'm scared that I can't afford to lose my day job until I have more freelance work; I'm terrified that I'm going to to end up half-assing my new musical endeavors because I'm "too busy" to put effort into it; I haven't been grocery shopping in two and a half weeks, and I missed a couple workouts, so I've been feeling like I'm gaining weight and falling back to my old, bad nutritional habits.

My last couple weeks have been permeated with that gut-wrenching feeling of being late for work, and I barely noticed it because I was making myself so frantic. I lost sleep, which left me feeling groggy and actually detracted from my productivity, resulting in more panic and, therefore, less sleep.

So how do we break the cycle?

For starters, I had to sit down and list everything that I had going on. If you look above, it looks like a lot, but when I list it, it gets pretty simple:

1. Full-Time Day Job (40-45hrs weekly)
2. Freelance Work (10-20hrs weekly)
3. Band Practice (2-4hrs weekly)
4. Job-Hunting (<1hr weekly)
5. Cooking, Cleaning, Working Out, etc. (7-8hrs weekly)

So, I'm looking at needing about 78 hours a week, at most, to accomplish everything I feel I need to accomplish. If I'm sleeping 8 hours a night, that means that in the average week I have 112 hours of productive time (168 hours a week - 56 hours of sleep a week = 112 waking hours). That means that I have 34 hours a week to burn before I even start wasting the time I need to keep up with my life. Add in a couple dinners with friends and a movie, and I've still got an entire day to waste, all while getting a full night's sleep.

Knowing that you've got the time won't make you any better at time management, and it certainly won't take care of your responsibilities for you, but the fact of the matter is, there's plenty of time in the week. And just realizing that you're not spread as thin as you may have thought could be just the comforting thought to help you drift off to sleep easily.

Have you had similar experiences? How do you keep yourself sane with a heavy load of responsibility? Let me know in the comments!

Tags: insomnia, time management, sleep, stress