My Brain Runs on Vampire Hours

Daily writing prompt

What do you do to improve your sleep?

Good question.

Not enough, I fear.

I tend to stay up too late — enough so that my wife has started worrying about me not getting enough sleep. She is not wrong. I would love to argue with her about it, but that would require energy, and I used mine up scrolling through nonsense at 12:47 a.m.

The problem is that I often get a little productive right about the time I should be turning in. At 9 p.m., I am a man with good intentions. At 10 p.m., I am thinking about going to bed. At 11 p.m., suddenly I have ideas, motivation, focus and the strong belief that now is the perfect time to reorganize my thoughts, write something brilliant or solve a problem that has been sitting there politely all day.

My brain apparently runs on vampire hours.

Then there’s the middle-of-the-night wake-up routine. I usually wake up at least twice. Sometimes it’s to go to the bathroom, which is one of those exciting adult milestones nobody puts in the brochure. Other times, I’m just wide awake for no good reason.

And that’s when the phone becomes dangerous.

I tell myself I’ll play one quick game or check one quick thing. But “one quick thing” is one of the great lies of modern civilization, right up there with “some assembly required” and “this meeting should be short.”

Then I pay for it the next day. I wake up tired, drag myself through the morning and wonder why I feel like I’ve been hit with a bag of wet laundry.

So maybe the thing I need to do to improve my sleep isn’t complicated. Maybe I need to protect the last 30 minutes of the day. No phone. No game. No “one more thing.” If I think of something productive, I can write it down and leave it for tomorrow.

That sounds simple.

Which means it will probably be ridiculously hard.

But sleep isn’t wasted time. It’s maintenance. It’s the nightly reboot. It’s God’s reminder that I am not actually designed to run continuously like a Waffle House coffee pot.

And apparently, I’m overdue for some maintenance.

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About Douglas Blaine

Capnpen is a writer who was a newspaper and magazine journalist in a previous life. A college journalism major, he now works as an English teacher, but gets his writing fix by blogging about a variety of topics, including politics, religion, movies and television. When he's not working or blogging, Capnpen spends time with his family, plays a little golf (badly) and loves to learn about virtually anything.

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