(no subject)

Fucked up a sleep correction. No idea how to salvage it, but I'll have to. No idea what time my body thinks is bedtime, either. I think I could sleep now, which is not a good sign - 3 a.m. is where I started back on Wednesday, is the time where I knew there was no choice but to take action. If it is I won't be able to push it forward meaningfully till Friday morning, and will have lost tons more sleep in the meantime. After losing tons during this five-day correction attempt. Which I made because I'd lost too much sleep to be able to afford to lose more.

Two presentations over the next seven days also. Maybe I should go to the doctor and beg sleeping pills. Last time I asked one he said he'd never give it to someone with this problem. I partly see his point - there would be a great temptation to take them to simulate normalcy. Nightly, since just once would do nothing. And then tolerance would build etc. But early on in a correction it seems like they'd be a godsend. I've tried Ambien a couple times - I slept like fifteen hours because I'm not an actual insomniac. Didn't help my bedtime, it's true, was in fact counterproductive because I was so rested I just stayed up later. But that's exactly why it would be great during a correction! Fifteen hours of sleep and I get toward the goal faster? As compared to falling asleep at random because you've been getting five or six hours sleep because you keep overshooting each new temperature bedtime? I drool just thinking of it.

(no subject)

The trick to living with my stupid thing is not chronotherapy, which is last ditch and drives you insane, but flexibility. You need a large stretch of time during which you can slip forward without having to correct chronotherapeutically, basically. This stretch is defined by two points: the earliest you can realistically go to bed, and eight hours before the earliest time you have to wake up each week. The latter for me was 9:45 p.m. this term. The earlier one was technically about 6:00 p.m., when I get home from Tuesday's class (5:00 when I beat traffic, but it's the latest occurrence that matters), but realistically was 7:30, after Maddy goes to sleep. We start the bed ritual by bathing her, and Julie still has significant wrist pain so has trouble hauling her out. She may end up needing surgery, as she's had it almost a year.

So just over a two hour range where slipping could happen: not ideal. And since one wants to have some alone time with one's spouse I tended to let those two hours zap by very quickly. But the problem with bleeding sleep, for those with this malady, is that it's progressive. You can't make it back from naps or significant sleep-ins without risking moving the bedtime, inviting in even worse bleeding.

And once you've run out of that safe stretch all it takes is a single wobble and you're permanently off-course. This last time it was being kept up for two hours from back pain caused by an uneven mattress. For the last one it came in a couple chunks: taking over a single night feeding for my sick wife, hallucinating Maddy crying during sleep training. Even two hours means you're losing two hours of sleep per week that can't reliably be made back: after four weeks it's like you've stayed up all night. Every day is, I mean. And that's a lot worse when you get dragged further into the night, as you inevitably do, bit by bit. Most often because you worry for a few minutes about how late you're falling asleep...