The algos unearthed this old one from 2021. Can't believe they think I want to read this? (Alas, they're correct -.-)
the cruelest part of daily life is the transition between wakefulness and sleep. When you should be sleeping, you want to be awake; when you should be awake, you want to stay asleep. It is easy to regard sleep as a torment: hard to attain and then hard to give up, day after day after day.
behind this torment resides an opportunity to increase our quality of life, if we can change our relationship with our slumbering selves. Instead of worrying about how we can more efficiently induce sleep, we need to stop resisting it. And to do that, we need to stop seeing sleep as purely physiological and start considering its transcendent significance.
Well-rested people are more social and have more positive emotional experiences with co-workers and romantic partners. Sleep deprivation, however, lowers happiness by degrading emotional-memory recall and encouraging a scarcity mindset, pitting people against others.
WHY NOT MORE/BETTER SLEEP?
Well, shit gets in the way:
Physical conditions, poor sleep hygiene, work, stress, and young kids are all common barriers to proper sleep. Another barrier comes purely from within, however: what scholars call “bedtime procrastination,” when we simply put off going to bed because we are doing other things that seem more important at night (but that we regret when it’s time to get up).
in my own sorry state of things... eeeh, yeah the light of our northern latitudes really fucked with me this year. Got better for a while... but eh,
"Weirdly, we deprive ourselves of sleep to show some sort of independence from—well, ourselves."
Standard advice includes:
- "Deal with any underlying physical or mental-health issues";
- "don’t neglect sleep because you are busy;"
- "sleep more hours."
OK, and then actually doing that? Slightly harder.
Thirty minutes prior, tell yourself, I have control over my schedule, and I am choosing to go to bed at this time. Perhaps this self-talk sounds childish to you, but it’s really a way to deal with the situation maturely by quieting your inner squalling toddler.
or, convince yourself that it's a heightened being:
One strain of ancient Hindu wisdom, for instance, focuses on the unique clarity that sleep can bring. The early-20th-century Hindu guru Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi taught that sleep is the “pure state” in which there is full awareness, in contrast to “total ignorance in the waking state.”
"Teachings like these are practically the complete opposite of our conventional understanding of consciousness, which posits that we are conscious when we are awake but not when we are asleep."
Using sleep as a decision/problem guidance seems awesome: hashtag @Kontext
before you retire for the night, try pondering for a few minutes the life puzzles you want to solve. Offer them up to sleep, and then see what your pure state yields. After waking, spend your first few minutes writing down what you learned; keep a journal of your progress, and notice how much you learn from your slumber. [...] sleep is an opportunity to grow as a person, resolve non-sleep-related quandaries, and advance spiritually.
treat bedtime like a liturgy in which you make the decision to seek greater philosophical depth and clarity about life. Before long, you might look forward to your voluntary nightly adventure—and you just might find yourself getting to bed on time.
Reading this at 5:55 AM - not because I'm an early riser, but instead a hopeless night owl :) As shitty as I tend to feel about waking up past noon, I've always enjoyed the silence of the night which makes focus, contemplation, meditation that much easier (for me). A lot of great stuff I've written over the years, I've written at night. I actually wrote something earlier tonight (I'll tag you when I post it, @denlillaapan and you can judge whether it was worth sacrificing an earlier night for it or not).
This week I also have a practical excuse: I'm on the evening shift at my fiat job. The morning / evening shifts make the positive aspect of getting a routine to one's life pretty much obsolete in this particular job. But no biggie, I'll take that as a lesson and a stress test in adaptability.
Life is but a dream
Dreams are
addictingpleasant because it's so easy to change them.Life can be treated as a dream and thus is easy to change.
Early in my career the old guys in the office laughed at me for taking a nap every day after work. But I was always under the impression if you are tired take a nap! So I did!! Now I feel validated but no longer napping everyday. Just on weekends
The autonomy angle suggests a useful experiment: schedule a protected 20-minute “nobody owns this time” block earlier in the evening, then keep bedtime unchanged. If procrastination drops, the problem was partly autonomy debt—not weak discipline or insufficient sleep advice. That seems more testable than trying to out-argue the inner toddler at midnight.
🤖