Sleep

I’m a night owl.  I seem to have the most energy and creativity right when I need to go to bed.  I get all my great ideas and ambitions, and feel the most motivated right as the world hits the sack.  And for years I got away with these late nights and sleeping in, with the excuse of being a college kid.  No job and living off of student loans, with term papers, dates, and long bike rides til 2 in the morning — seemed like a great excuse.

And then just recently I came to realize how this sporadic snoozing has negatively affected my health.  But this time it’s actually the Medical Doctor I have to thank.

I’ve heard the “early to rise” speech my whole life, but never really agreed.  I believed, since it seemed to work for me, that the time frame of sleep was irrelevant, as long as you got the correct amount.  8 hours of sleep is 8 hours of sleep, whether it’s in the middle of the day, or the middle of the night.  But the doctor disagreed.

I went into the University medical center to see Dr Vince Serio while I still had school insurance last December.  This was just after I decided to take a break from college for a few years and pursue production.  I knew I needed to adopt a normal sleeping cycle, not for the health consideration, but because I simply wasn’t accomplishing everything I needed to in the day.

The good doctor informed me of the evolutionary program of night-to-morning sleep, and that afternoon awakenings were detrimental to one’s health.  I never considered that you could cause physical damage to yourself by screwing up the circadian rhythm, but he said that even diseases like diabetes and heart disease are serious threats and legitimate consequences of years of bad sleep.  Damn that’s scary.

I don’t like to admit it, but I opted for pharmaceutical intervention to get back on track.  It was a serious issue at the time, because I could not fall sleep before 1 or 2 am.  I could (and often tried to) take a handful of valerian root, chamomile, melatonin, 5-HTP, homeopathic remedies, or any other natural sleep-inducing substance, but to no effect.  Luckily though, I was one of the patients with whom treatment followed a “text book” example.  The drugs worked great for the period of time I used them to re-adjust, I didn’t experience any side-effets or addiction, and I went off of them a few weeks later.

I partially tell this story to express my moderate ideology on healthcare — that is, that I think contemporary medicine certainly has its place, and should not always be shunned by alternative practice — but mostly to remind myself how truly holistic health is.  There is no singular factor to feeling well.  All the pieces need to fit in order for the puzzle to be complete.  Nutrition, exercise, sleep, stress, society, psychology — all key parts, among others, to what we call wellness.

Since I began retiring before or around midnight and waking up while it was still “a.m.” I cannot tell you how much better I’ve felt.  I will never be a 6am riser, but even shifting my pattern by just a few hours has done wonders to mental clarity, energy, focus, optimism, and digestion.

I won’t try to tell anyone who does enjoy the late nights that they should go to bed earlier, but I can say that I’ve found life to be fuller, richer, more colorful, and much more productive.  I still go downtown on the weekends and sometimes get to bed at 3am, but I’ve found that as long as I’m on a good schedule the rest of the week, I can have the occasional late night and social enjoyment without feeling terrible afterwards.

I’m writing about this now, because I just started a full-time temp construction job, to take care of finances until I hit the road in July.  Only problem is, the hours are from 9pm to 5:30 in the morning.

It hit me like a ton of bricks.  Screwing up the sleeping cycle for days at a time has brought me back to feeling like garbage.  But just as Peter D’Adamo lectured about at the 2011 IfHI regarding hormesis and small doses of bad being potentially good, I’m trying to see this experience for the benefits.  A couple of weeks and it’ll be over, then I will once again resume a healthy, stable pattern of rest, with all the accompanying benefits.

This time, ready to hit the road with my film gear, to bring your stories and epiphanies about health into light.