So I stopped taking melatonin and drinking coffee last Friday. I went to bed at reasonable times this weekend, and woke up without the aid of an alarm clock at around 7-8. It felt pretty good. Last night, I couldn’t sleep and lay awake restlessly until about 2:00am. But I woke up easily at 7:30am feeling pretty good. I know it usually takes a lot longer than a single day to change your sleeping pattern, but I’m hoping this trend continues. I’m about to go to sleep again (without melatonin) and hopefully I’ll wake up feeling good at around 7 again. I have about a month before the GRE and I hope I can get this sleeping issue out of the way by then.
It’s hard to believe, but I used to wake up every day and get to class by 8:15am in high school. That memory seems remote and distant now. Then suddenly in college, 11am classes were almost impossible to wake up in time for. Now I’m sort of in between. Soon I’ll be in grad school where I’ll have to be especially disciplined about sleep. With a bad sleeping pattern, my whole life becomes pervaded by a bleak fogginess. The simplest daily tasks seem impossible or simply not worth doing. My actions seem vague, like I’m watching them peripherally from a distance. I imagine it’s what depression is like, only not nearly as crippling. The memories of time spent this way are even more discomforting. It’s like huge swathes of time have shrunk away; not gone, just somehow shortened.
