You Know What You Need? A Nap.

Last Saturday on our every-other-weekly trip to the acupuncturist in Santa Monica, Candace and I had an interesting conversation. (This is what happens when you sit in a car for 2+ hours in awesome LA traffic).  We were talking about how certain things can affect your state of mind.

One of the first things that I thought of was sleep.  Or mainly, a lack of it.  A lack of sleep can affect your state of mind.  I know this because when I was younger, I didn’t get enough sleep and it affected my state of mind.

How little sleep did I get?  So little that my waking hours were often spent trying to catch up on sleep.  I fell asleep watching Star Wars, Braveheart, and a few of my other all-time favorite movies – in the theater.  I fell asleep in my first class on my first day of college.  I nodded off at Disneyland, standing, waiting in line for the Indiana Jones Adventure.  I even fell asleep riding atop an open air double decker tour bus in London in the middle of summer… on a sunny day.  You can probably blame that one on jet lag.

My college years were the worse.  Back then I got about 4 to 6 hours of sleep every night.  I went to bed late because I was working on pointless school work (different topic for a different post), and/or hanging out with friends.  And then I would get up early to continue working on school work I hadn’t finished the night before.  I never freaking slept!

Even after college when I no longer had to write papers on things that were uninspiring to me, I became a substitute teacher and lived with a bunch of guys in an apartment.  This meant I would go to bed super late (because there is no going to bed early with three male roommates ages 21-23 in the city of San Diego) and get up super early – 5am – to answer the call from the school district offering me a position for the day.

How did a lack of sleep affect my mind?  The less funny part of this story is that my lack of sleep contributed to a filter I created that perceived most things negatively.  Being tired made me more irritable than I otherwise would have been, which meant that life’s little curveballs, inconveniences, and underachievements were amplified into something much more than what they really were: a normal part of life.

A little example: getting shot down in Goldeneye.  Goldeneye is that video game for the N64 that I didn’t really care about, didn’t practice much, and wouldn’t have been good at no matter how awake I was.  Every once in while I would play, lose, get angry, and turn it inward on myself (an entirely different problem) and be in a bad mood for a long time.  Had I gotten ample sleep, I might have laughed a little watching myself running directly into open fire.  Or I could have thought clearly enough to realize that 1) I’m not into video games 2) I’ve never been into video games except Tetris, and 3) the guy that never plays video games will always get beat by the guy that practices eight hours a day.

Although I have zero empirical evidence to support this claim, I feel that the negative thought patterns I developed during my Sleepless in San Diego era took at least a decade to undo.  Once I started regularly getting enough sleep, I started noticing how my disposition would change on those rare occasions when I didn’t get enough sleep.  It was a beautiful thing to be able to say, “Hey self, why is this small thing making you cranky?  Might you be reacting this way because you’re tired?  You know what would solve this problem?  A nap.”

Yes, sleep is important.  I get it now – 8 hours a day, when my three year old son hasn’t snuck his way in between his mom and me.  Seriously, what is up with toddlers constant fidgeting at night?  Do all toddlers practice jiu jitzu in their sleep?  Tangent, sorry….back on track…  Sleep.  I’m not saying that getting enough sleep is the answer to all life’s problems, nor am I saying that not getting enough sleep is the cause of all problems.  I’m just saying that it will help with all life’s problems.