A Recipe for a Good Night's Sleep
How you manage to be the most well-rested human ever
You’re a night owl.
Your nighttime skin care routine happens sometime between 11p and 1150p. It has to happen before midnight because you want to fill out your mood tracker for the day before the day turns to the next one. Usually, you fill out your mood tracker before your skincare routine. Tonight, it’s after.
The skincare routine is simple because you wouldn’t do it otherwise. Wash your face. Spritz the spray toner. Apply eye cream. Finish up with nighttime moisturizer. Good. to. go.
Now, you turn to your mood tracker which is basically a daily journal at this point. That makes it relatively easy to fill in. Within the last year you’ve added a gratitude practice to the routine. You struggle tonight with the third thing and settle on something that probably appears as a last ditch effort throughout all the entries.
Most of your lights are turned off by midnight. But it’s not time for sleep quite yet, oh no. There are episodes of The Great North that you’ve seen a bunch of times and phone games. You know you aren’t supposed to have your phone with you in bed so long but…phone games.
Lights fully out by 2a at the latest. That’s the rule you have for yourself. Many years ago, you didn’t have that rule and there were more than a few times that you stayed up until the shine rose in the morning. Tonight, it’s 130a. Under the deadline!
You don’t actually sleep with your phone in your room so take it out to the living room and plug it in. Come back and try to set yourself up for, hopefully, a good sleep. That means white noise—a white noise machine, yes, but the fan and, since it’s summer, the A/C as well. So much white noise! Sleep must be close! Unplug the rest of the string lights. Go to the restroom. Finally get into bed.
For a bit, you simply hold your eye mask in your hand as you close your eyes. There have been times when you’ve been so tired that you fall asleep like that, only to wake up at 5a and finally put it on. Not tonight. You grasp the sleep mask for a bit, getting the sense that sleep may not come easily tonight. You put on the eye mask and hope for the best.
Well well well, the brain is active tonight. You try all the regular tricks: counting backwards from a thousand, counting up from one, spelling out every single word of the things you think to yourself. The brain isn’t falling for any of that. You find yourself in your head, giving talks at your undergrad, telling the students all the things you wish had been told to you. They think dream Samantha is very cool. Dream Samantha is at ease. Real Samantha is still struggling to get to sleep.
You get up and go to the restroom one more time even though you don’t need to. You figure if you try this last part of the routine again, it’ll work this time.
Back in bed and you try every different sleep position you can think of. On the stomach, either side, flat on the back. You know you are generally a squirmy sleeper but this is a bit ridiculous. Hey brain! It’s time to sleep!
When you roll over and look at your analog clock, it’s 7a. So, you must have fallen asleep, thank goodness. You guess that you probably finally drifted off between 230a - 3a. You get up and go to the restroom, doing that thing where you basically try to stay asleep so that when you get back into bed, sleep comes immediately.
Back to bed you go. But not back to sleep you go. Your body decides now is a great time for an anxiety attack. You try to cut it off at the pass but it goes right by your efforts and into every corner of your body. The anxiety starts in the pit of your stomach and radiates to the tips of your fingers and toes. Your limbs feel a little floaty. The tools you have to handle this feeling aren’t helping this morning. That happens sometimes. It’s okay. You still know it will pass. But it’s far from pleasant.
What’s the intrusive thought jackpot today? It’s your right ear. One of your earrings broke recently so you finally switched from the earrings you got your ears (re)piereced with to ones that are good enough until new ones arrive. The earrings are the infinity symbol. And they are old. They seemed fine but before you put them on, you cleaned them with alcohol anyway. At first your right ear was weird about the new earring. Then it settled down. Now, it’s irritated again and you’re very aware of your ear. It’s probably going to get very infected and fall off. That’s the only logical conclusion. After thinking about it for too long, you finally go to the restroom, regrettably turn on the bathroom light, and decide to pull out your saline solution and spray it for a good measure.
It’s obvious that it’s going to be hard to get back to sleep. So, you try out another tool. You make your bed and sleep on top of it. Trying to sleep in a new way usually tricks your body to stop fighting and just go to sleep. You put your eye mask back on and wait for a bit. It feels like sleep may still not come. You think that if it doesn’t in the next ten minutes, you’ll turn on Bob’s Burgers at a really low volume and try again. That usually works when all else fails. Luckily it doesn’t come to that.
The next time you wake up, it’s 9a. You’ve awoken from a very weird dream where you are visiting your high school as your adult self and, of course, everything is different but feels exactly the same. Also, your Mom is there for some reason. Hi Mom.
This would be a totally respectable time to get out of bed and start your day. But you think, “Nah,” go to the restroom, and go back to sleep.
When you wake up again, it’s 1030a and that feels exactly right for you. To be so happy that it’s nearly 11a when you get out of bed? What are you? A teenager? Well, good job regardless. That was a night of sleep. Or something like it.
…oh. Did I say a good night’s sleep? Um…you’ll have to ask someone else about that.
I do set two alarms. And I snooze so much.
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