I’ve mastered many things over the years. I’m really good at Fridays. I have my routine of doing Bitter Friday Giftures every week, regardless of how busy I might be. I also take the burden of having dinner planned every single Friday. It might seem like everyone else’s plan of having pizza, but that isn’t actually true. I basically invented pizza Friday to the point that I’ve renamed pizza AS Friday. I’m also really good at making sure that the last few hours of work have nothing to do with work and are more of me being really good at pretending it is work.

On the other hand, I’m really bad at some things. I am really terrible at sleeping. Well, that’s not true. Actually, everything around me is terrible at allowing me sleep.

At the top of the list of my sleep deprivation is my old anxiety friend implanting thoughts of work and other nightmares in my head like Leo in the Inception. He goes at least three levels deep just so he can plant that one idea of me being in a maze at work and not being able to escape until I get out of the corn maze…and finish my statistics report.

If my anxiety isn’t working overtime to prevent me with the Z’s I need, then there is the old springy, hard, uncomfortable mess of a mattress we lay on for one third of our lives. If we are leaning to one to the point of falling into an abyss, or running into the Great Wall of China that’s been built over the years in the middle of the mattress, then we are creating neck cramps from the laying on of the pillows. If that isn’t bad enough, I have to have something in between my knees in order to make sure my sharp blades of knees aren’t slicing together like a villain going after an action hero with his two knives.

If my uncomfortable bed isn’t betraying me, then my old, warn out, completely unless shell of a body is making it hard to sleep. Some people may say that my warn out body is my fault, but they are wrong.  All that delicious, but bad for you food is at fault. All the so-called good for you exercise is at fault. I’m not the one that made exercise painful and hard. In fact, I blame exercise for my bad knees. If I wasn’t playing basketball until well into my late 30’s I would have knees in much better shape.

 

If my unfit body wasn’t to blame for my atrocious sleep, then light would be one of the biggest causes for my bad sleep. Light is the ultimate betrayal of sleep for me. I don’t care how comfortable I am or how anxiety free I might be, if any light penetrates these eyes at any time of the night, I will be wide awake. The reason I know that light is my ultimate sleep nemesis? When I was in college, I slept on the bottom bunk of a bunk bed and draped a dark sheet over the part where the light could come in and I slept better than I slept in the womb. I would wake up at noon and feel like I was fresh and ready to go to my 1 pm class. I’m pretty sure Dracula sleeps better with light than I do.

In fact, I think if it wasn’t for mid-day budget meetings, I wouldn’t get any sleep at all.

What tricks do you guys have for getting any sleep?

ARRRRRRGGGGGHHHHHHHHH

Bitter Sleep Deprived Ben