The Quality of my Sleep

When I was in college I made it a rule to be in bed by 10, 10:30 at the latest. (I know how lame, right?) As many of you can imagine, there are large parts of college I wish I could redo. I finally came to my senses my senior year and started staying up until midnight on a pretty regular basis.

Up until my family and I moved 6 months ago, Hubby and I rarely found ourselves in bed after 10:30. The clock would hit 10 and I would be headed to brush my teeth and remove my contacts. It was some weird internal alarm I had, I don't know how else to explain it. But now that we've moved, we're night owls. I sit here typing this at 11:17 PM knowing my alarm is set for 5:30 AM (I really hope I can get out of bed and not just turn it off) and that only leaves a mere 6 hours of sleep.

I don't know what changed to make us crave the night hours. Maybe it's b/c I'm staying home and I'm grasping to whatever downtime I can get before the whole day begins again and I won't have a free moment until nap time.

My nighttime routine is the same every night: make supper, eat, rinse and load dishwasher, set timer on dishwasher, put kids to bed, watch TV downstairs while simultaneously playing on my iPad, come back upstairs after a ridiculous long time watching TV to remember the 100 things I need to get ready for the next morning. If I would just get up at 5:30 when my alarm goes off I could probably avoid a lot of that, but I don't. Why? Because I'm lazy! I like my sleep but I'm losing some self esteem and I'm hoping that's more important to me than sleep right now.

I have a sleep cycle app on my phone that's supposed to monitor my sleeping patterns and wake me when I'm in the mode where I won't feel the most tired. It tells me how long I stay in deep sleep and at what times I'm "awake." it also tells me what percentage my sleep quality is and stores past nights. As of right now, the best night of sleep I got was right after thanksgiving. Now I don't usually use this app unless I need to set my alarm so I don't use it on weekends. I found it interesting that I haven't had a good nights sleep for 2 months. I thought I'd been sleeping pretty well. Although I got the flu at the end of last week and I've had lots of coughing fits mainly at night. That hasn't helped my sleep quality.

Now that its 11:30 my chances for those 6 hours tonight is dropping pretty fast. Maybe I should shoot for 5.5.