Sleep

This seems to be a recurring theme with me, and it is an issue that affects pretty much every aspect of my life. I’ve been suffering from crushing insomnia for the last few years now and it just seems to be getting worse. Add to that early morning meetings (like, 7 AM early), colleagues who like to be at the office early (like, by 7 AM) which motivates me to want to be in the office early as well, coming home late from the barn (9 PM) – looooooong days mixed with short nights and lots of trouble sleeping and I’m pretty much a walking mess much of the time these days. Of course this all ends up bleeding into my weekends because I then need to spend the entire two days in recovery mode trying desperately to catch up on sleep. As a result, I spend most of my weekend time like a zombie with no motivation to do anything other than sleep and zone out in front of the TV. It’s a frustrating and ugly vicious circle.

Tuesday morning I had another of these scheduled 7 AM meetings. Well, Monday night. I didn’t sleep. At all. Finally by around 1:30 AM, I gave up, realizing that it wasn’t going to happen and frustrated with all the tossing & turning in the dark. So I did some channel and internet surfing for a couple of hours. Tried to sleep again, when that didn’t work, went back to my channel and internet surfing. Finally, around 5 AM I fell into an exhausted sleep for about an hour, waking up around 6 to get ready for this bloody 7 AM meeting. The meeting was canceled 10 minutes before it was due to start with no explanation given. I was ready to kill someone! Of course the meeting organizer rescheduled the meeting for Thursday at 7 AM, which will just add another huge brick to the wall of sleep-deprived misery that I’m building here.

The lack of sleep thing just affects everything! Besides feeling completely crappy, being exhausted means that I’m less sharp at work, I crave carbs (especially junk food carbs) and I am completely unmotivated to exercise. I’m honestly surprised that I haven’t gotten sick. Anyway, so I've been feeling a little down and unmotivated and a little demoralized lately and I think the sleep problems are a big part of that picture. I am so thankful that I at least have the two riding lessons and the two personal training sessions scheduled each week because I know that I'm at least going to be active for those sessions, as much as I sometimes dread the effort before each appointment. I'm always thankful that I went after everything is said & done, of course, so I am very happy that they're on the schedule anyway.

So, I don't know what the solution is, but I've got to come up with something! I just am not functioning on all cylinders the way it's going right now.