I don’t know why I’ve been so muddy-brained recently but let’s document it.
No fever, no body-aches, no GI symptoms, and nothing in my head or chest. This seems to rule out most of the common bugs and viruses that roll through the population in winter, including cold and flu. I’m tired but it’s not a physically-exhausted kind of tired, and it’s not the sort that has me nodding off mid-morning after not getting enough sleep.
I’m getting plenty of sleep. I’m getting possibly too much [?] sleep.
I can ‘get by’ on six hours of sleep, when I have to. I can function 3 to 4 days that way, almost a whole work week, when I know I can catch up on the weekend. This last weekend started out like that. I went to bed early on Friday and slept 12 hours, 9 to 9. I slept well, sometimes I wake up every three hours or so but that night I was out and only got up once, after like 7½ hours (bladder), and was able to immediately get back to sleep. “Fantastic!” I think to myself, “I’ll be so productive this weekend.”
On Saturday night I went to bed at 7:30. It’s winter, the sun sets early, no big deal, and I figured my body was telling me it needed the sleep. Catching up on a sleep deficit.1 But this still wasn’t so far out of the ordinary, and since I have in the past suffered from insomnia, I was almost happy. I missed out on a few hours when I was going to stream/binge some new TV but that was the only drawback.
Sunday I went to bed at 5:30. I was a little concerned — not at the time, at the time it was bedtime — while ‘catching up’ on sleep is normal and sleeping in is one of my favorite things about the weekends, this new thing with sleeping 12 hours a day was… unusual for me.
Now that I’m into my work week again and my 5:30am alarm and getting to work well before 7am and all that, I figured I’d go back to ‘the usual’ and not get enough sleep.2 But no, not yet. With the alarm I’m getting up early enough that I can’t get 12 hours of sleep, but so far this week I’ve been getting 10½.
I’m still fairly firmly in the camp that listening to what my body needs is good. If the damn machine needs sleep, I guess I have to put up with that for a while yet, while it works to repair whatever the hell is wrong. But I’ve also read the articles about Long Covid, so I have to wonder if that’s a factor (or a new reality I’m suddenly living with). I don’t know.
And with what’s going on at work3 I shouldn’t be too surprised that I need those extra hours of sleep. And that I’m finding it hard to concentrate, or to find the enthusiasm each evening to tackle my side projects and the things I’d rather be doing over the stuff I have to do because we live in a capitalist hellscape where you have to trade hours of your life for the means to afford even basic necessities. I mean, I love my job.4 But there are also things I’d rather do and a few small goals I’ve set for myself for this year and the reality is: it’s still 8 hours out of my day, 40 hours every week, the treadmill that never ends.5
This counts as a project update. Look, it’s been a long week.
On the plus side: Whatever was wrong with me for the past week or so, I think I’m on the other side of it.6 I’m looking forward to getting back to the various side projects too, and just the fact that I’m looking forward to it bodes well. I’m not going to mess with my sleep by drinking an espresso or a venti iced coffee at like 3 in the afternoon7 but maybe this evening I have something light for dinner, like a salad, and then pull together notes and sit down at my dining room table8 and draw some things and map some things and write random bits of a fantasy world — at a bare minimum, my dreaming brain has had plenty of time to work behind-the-scenes on things & I should be able to tap some of that inspiration.
1 To be fair, I’ve been running a sleep deficit since I was 14
2 which would then be a good [?] thing?
3 see the last blog post; Friday of last week was rough and yeah maybe it is just work and the fact that I turn 50 this year.
4 “love” is too strong a word; of currently available options I find the situation workable with most other things I’d rather do and preferable over many, many others.
5 four day work week WHEN, already. long overdue.
6 not least because I’ve managed to fight off the muddy-brained feeling long enough to write this up, in a way that I hope is cogent.
7 at least not yet. I’m hanging onto that as an option for next week, if I have another ‘lost weekend’.
8 my preferred ‘workspace’ for things that aren’t work. oddly, I can’t be productive at the computer or at my desk.