Category: Sleep

I’m a night person. Okay, I used to be a night person. I guess it’s all just a matter of perspective.

When I was a kid I wanted to stay up as late as humanly possible, sometimes inventing fake “illnesses” in order to stay up just a little bit longer. Then I became a pre-teen and discovered 90210. But it came on at 9 o’clock, which also happened to be my bedtime, and my mother was super-strict. Luckily I got a VCR as a teenager and was able to record it, but it just wasn’t the same. You know?

Finally I became a young adult and I could pretty much stay up as late as I wanted. So I did. Often back then I wouldn’t go to sleep until 2 or 3 in the morning. The problem was of course dragging myself up out of bed when the alarm clock sounded the next morning, always way too soon for my tastes. Oh yeah, and I was in college, so I can’t tell you how many morning classes I missed due to my night owl habits. In fact, I showed up for one of my morning classes 3 whole times one semester.

It was pretty obvious I would have to find some balance or I would fail all my classes just for lack of attendance. But I just was not tired when a “normal” bedtime would come around. 8 o’clock, nope. 9 o’clock, still wide awake. 10 o’clock, just getting started. 11, 12, 1, and the time would keep moving while I watched TV, played video games, read books, listened to music, or all of the above at the same time.

Sometimes my mother would stop by my room on her way to bed and wish me a good night, giving me the look that said, “You know you should be going to bed too,” without actually saying the words. Her point was a valid one, one that I finally had to confront head on when at the end of my third college semester the school placed me on probation. You see, I hadn’t shown up to any of my classes for four weeks, and some of my professors thought I had dropped. When I arrived two classes before the final exams they told me in stereo that I wouldn’t be able to take the test. I hadn’t logged enough hours of seat time in each course.

That hit me like a ton of bricks. All the time I spent staying up late, getting up whenever I felt like it, it was all coming back to poison me like some erstwhile apple in fairy tales. There was no longer any time to “take care of it later.” The time was upon me, and I began making some drastic changes. Continue reading “The Early Bird”