Me Playing With Photos

I’ll admit I was a skeptic about this FitBit fad. I don’t like gimmicky or trendy anything…diets, books, clothes, technology, body-types (like whether the booty size du jour is Kim Kardashian or Kate Moss)…I am really reluctant to adopt anything that everyone is talking about. It makes me feel like a lemming. It’s why I was the 2^nd to last person I knew to get a smart phone. It’s why I haven’t read Eat Pray Love. It’s why I don’t watch Game of Thrones. And it’s why I just try to ignore fad diets in favor of just eating real food, and letting my butt be whatever size it wants to be…within reason of course.

My FitBit is special though. It wakes me up in the morning, it helps me track food and water intake, it measures my steps throughout the day, and it monitors my sleep at night. And I’ve found that the last piece of that…the sleep part…is what I have learned most from in the last 3 weeks.  It’s helped me determine that the fatigue I feel when I wake up in the morning isn’t related to sugar…it’s related to actual fatigue.  My weekday sleep habits are pretty bad.

Here are some snapshots of what my sleep patterns look like on two particularly bad nights. Pink means I was awake. Light blue means I was “restless” which I guess means I moved for too long. Dark blue means I was asleep.

Here’s a snapshot of my best night of sleep so far.

My goal is supposed to be 8 hours. That seems like pie in the sky except for when I can be a weekend sleep warrior. Which is rarely.

So what can I change to get more sleep? I can’t get up later because my kids leave for school at 6:40am…so they can be ready to start their day at 7:15. Because isn’t that when all high schoolers are at their best? In December, it will be still be dark until halfway through their first period class.  Wrong wrong wrong. We’ve tried to convince the school system to consider things like science and adolescent sleep patterns when making decisions, but they apparently care this much…

So maybe I should go to bed earlier…I mean that’s the obvious answer, right? All I have to do is go to sleep at 9pm I’ll get those precious 8 hours. Provided I don’t spend 59 minutes “restless” (did you SEE that?) and assuming that my kids don’t need me to actually interact with them after they have gotten home, eaten dinner, and done their homework. I hear that quality time is highly overrated. But someone forgot to tell the offspring.

Naps? Does that even count? And is it even allowed? This is 'Murica not Spain.

Or…I could stop falling asleep watching Friends every night. Have you ever watched TV in the dark? It’s pretty trippy. You can see the flashes (which are unusually bad during commercials) even through closed eyelids. Most of you probably just face-palmed as if to say duh…yeah…turn off of the freakin TV. But that is an oddly scary proposition for me. I’m afraid if I stop watching it, Nickelodeon will stop showing it. And if they stop showing it, it will be like the 90’s are actually over and I will have to adult all the time.

I’m going to have to ponder this further. No answers (that I like) on the sleep front. Maybe I’ll just wait until I get so tired that I face plant fully-dressed into bed every night. But rest assured I'll keep you posted...pun intended.

My muse hasn’t arrived today – I guess he/she doesn’t want to get out in the rain – I have no deep insights today…no revelations about life to share. Only that sometimes I show up and the magic doesn’t happen. Or maybe fatigue scares away the muse. 

Whatever... it is what it is and tomorrow will be different.