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Mar. 18th, 2013 03:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
proximoceptionThe 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...
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...
