Scheduling

It's weird how certain concepts simply stay out of your field of 'conceivability', so to speak, until they suddenly pop in and you feel silly for not considering them earlier.

Setting up a schedule for myself has been such a concept. I have read about the concept and its advantages several times before, but for some reason I have just shrugged and never considered it seriously. And I don't really know why - that's the paradox of gestalt shifts - once you have shifted, you're unable to see the reasoning behind your old view (unless you have written it down, or something like that).

I believe that perhaps part of the reason I have been reluctant to set up a schedule is my slightly irregular sleeping habits. I have thought it more important to be rested than to wake up at a certain time. And I still do - working ten hours at sixty percent is worse than working eight at ninety. And my brain is really sensitive to this. It's like sleeping badly puts some kind of insulator between the synapses so they're unable to fire properly.

However, there are a couple of reasons I presently have for willing to try out a schedule nonetheless:

If it turns out that I'm unable to function properly because I am determined to wake up at a certain time, I could always wait with setting up the schedule until morning the same day. That way, I know how much time I have for disposal.

However, I presently have another theory: That my irregular sleep is in part due to my not having any obligations to get up in the morning. Currently, I have a research position, which means I can pretty much come and go as I want. Could this have a negative effect? Perhaps if I approach it more like I would a regular job, my brain somehow would get more 'incentive' to sleep properly during the night? You see, my problem isn't that I cannot fall asleep in the evening - I usually do pretty quickly. Rather, the problem is that my sleep is light and not 'restful' enough. Also, I usually wake up before time, and if I get up at that time, I will be tired.

In other words, this is going to be an experiment. I will schedule the following day the night before, including a time at which I wake up and a time at which I go to bed, and everything in between. Naturally, it will be impossible to follow such a schedule to the point - unexpected events do occur, of course, and there are some tasks which are hard to approximate in terms of time needed for completion. However, those things I believe will come with experience. The first hurdle is actually following through with it.

Wrapping your body

Sometimes I sleep badly. I have no problem going to sleep, but sometimes I wake up too early for some reason and have trouble getting back to sleep, it's as if my mind as on some kind of high (excited about the coming day, maybe?) and isn't able to calm down until a while later, at which point I have missed two hours of sleep and just know that the day is going to be crap.

As long as you are single and have flexible work-hours, this doesn't need to be that big of a deal. If you wake up early you can go do some work and then go bac k to sleep when your mind has calmed down a little. However, that's a quite limited group of people.

Something that I've experimented with the last couple of sleepless early mornings has been a relaxation technique that I did a couple of times as a teenager. It 's pretty simple - you lie on your back, calm down, and then start thinking about your toes, of relaxing them. You then move upwards through your body and focus on each body part, relaxing it, thinking that it becomes heavier. It feels a little like wrapping your body in some kind of 'Relax-o-wrap'. You end with your mouth, nose and eyes. After that, all of your body is mentally wrapped up, and you actually feel like lifting your arm, for instance, would ruin the wrap.

Then, you start focusing on your breath. You inhale deeply, down to the bottom of your lungs, so that it is your stomach that rises and falls, not your chest. I was taught to inhale through the nose and exhale through the mouth, but it's not vital. The vital part is that you focus on your breathing with your mind. In the beginning it's frustrating and hard to focus, but after a while you suddenly realize that you almost dozed off for a second. Then you actually do doze off for a second. Then for longer. Then you start dreaming - my dreams have been weird during this exercise - often they're about falling and flying etc.

After waking up, I usally do some kind of 'unwrapping' routine, focusing on each body part and making it 'unheavy' again. I don't know how important that is, bu t it maintains the illusion of a wrap around your body, which I think is important for this exercise.

So far, I haven't been able to go back to 'normal' sleep with this technique, but I find a certain type of sleep which I think is far superior to being awake. Maybe with time, regular sleep comes as well. Progress will be reported (if I can remember to do it).