Last night was rough, sleep wise. I slept probably from 11pm to 1am, and then from 5am to 7am. I scrolled on my phone a lot, I tried meditating, I listened to podcasts, but Morpheus wouldn't arrive so I thought I might as well go downstairs and prepare myself breakfast, because sometimes a full stomach puts me into a catatonic state and I can sleep again. This actually did the trick, but it could be that it was simply so late that I finally needed to sleep again.
I've weaned off of weed for about 10 days by now. I usually smoke everyday in the evening, which helps me get a good night sleep. As I debug the conditions for sleep I see it was less than ideal, I was sleeping with Aceituna, a dog, and I was alternating between using the air conditioner and then turning it off when it felt too chill.
As I've written before, I'm temporarily living with friends, and we jokingly call the house "La casa del insomnio" because not sleeping well is a common occurrence here. Each one of us has reasons for not sleeping well, and I'm probably the best sleeper of the house, yet when I get up to pee in the middle of the night I sometimes don't flush the toilet because I know better than to interrupt a delicate sleep.
Sleep is the cornerstone of a good day, it makes everything go smoother. If you don't sleep everything trips up, you don't perform as well working, at the gym, in your social relations, etc. Even writing this feels uninspired because of sleep deprivation. I'm sipping my coffee not really looking forward to going to yoga in a while.
But, as I've been listening to a lot of podcasts lately, especially around meditation, what I will do is inspect into the feelings of sleepiness. I actually do not feel sleepy, I feel dull. I think this is a common occurrence, if I felt sleepy I would cancel yoga and happily put myself into bed again, but as I know this won't happen, I'm pumping myself up with coffee and going about my day with more negative affect. This will probably mean, for example, that when I'm biking towards yoga in a while, I'll be complaining to myself that I feel exhausted, that I'm low on energy, and such.
On good days there is no inner-dialogue when I'm biking to yoga, I'm flying on the bike, I listen to my breath, I pump my legs and feel my glutes contract with the pedaling, I become one with the bike. The same happens with work. There is no complaining, simply work gets itself done.
I don't remember where I read or heard it, but Carl Jung is said to have tried to learn controversial topics very late into the night, when his ego was exhausted so that it would not fight against what he was reading. Sometimes, in the acquisition of new information, we pass judgement too soon and thus whatever seed we are planting in the soil of our mind does not take root, we scorch the earth with our judgmental gaze and we don't allow new concepts to grow. We need to understand everything, we need to destroy our perspectives time and time again.
Can I use this sleep deprived state to my advantage? I don't feel like it, but alas, I don't feel like doing anything. I will do as when I was quitting smoking: the anxiousness was a prompt to put your attention back to the breath. Let it be this way: the negative affect will be my prompt to put my attention back to the breath.
And so begins the day.