The Night Formula

Dear Conscience,

My 2nd core habit, after writing to you, is that I should stay away from a phone screen at night. Might not seem like a big deal, but I spent many a night awake, scrolling on my phone, feeding my biggest fears: serial killer Wikipedia bios, FOMO-tracking of crypto markets, cases of child kiddnapings… And then not functioning the next day. But still repeating the same habit the following night. Quite a downward spiral both mentally and pysically.

Moving my phone away from the bedroom really helped. My sleep got much better. But I still don’t know what to do on those occasions when I wake up in the middle of the night, and simply can’t fall back asleep. I got a Kindle Paperwhite, to read a book on a dim-lit screen. Reading a book will often put me to sleep. But somehow I didn’t take to the Kindle. I still hope that I will, but reading at 3am is not something that is working out for me right now.

The big risk is that, when I am genuinely bored of just lying in my bed awake, eventually I succumb to the urge and take my phone. And that mostly means that the rest of my night is gone.

So my new plan for those moments of sleeplessness is to get up, go into the living room /kitchen area, take a melatonin, and start decluttering or cleaning. Once I start feeling sleepy, just go back to bed, feeling like I’ve done something worthwhile with my “sleep gap”.

Namely, this decluttering effort has to start at some point, and while I wait for it to get on my agenda, I might as well start in those nightly minutes and hours uselessly spent otherwise. If it’s just 5min, great – that means that I quickly went back to my main nighttime activity: sleeping. And if I seriously don’t get sleepy from the combo of melatonin and decluttering, then at least I’ll have made some progress on my many clutter piles. Another benefit of choosing deluttering or cleaning, is that it needs enough focus that it distracts me from whatever doom thoughts were keeping me awake, and yet it doesn’t switch my brain on to a fully awake state (such as planning, writing, working, or any administrative tasks would). And most importantly, it doesn’t involve screens!

Just thinking about all this is making me sleepy – I think it will work like a charm!:)

Sincerely,

B.