Posts Tagged → sleep hygiene

Level 19 in darkshore wow

Up incredibly early this morning. Not feeling great.

Yesterday, after work, I came home and played World of Warcraft Classic for an hour at my standing desk. I walked on a little treadmill while I did so, hoping that a little more exercise would help out with my sleep.

It didn’t.

Well — I know that I’ve got to make doing that sort of stuff more habitual in order to see benefits. As it is, I only walk like that once or twice a week, which simply isn’t enough. I’m going to try to pick up the pace as much as I can, but work has been rough recently and I am stressed out the the bejeezus belt.

All the more reason to exercise more, I suppose.

Anywho. I finished Twelve Months last night, which was great, but then, when I suddenly snapped awake at like 3:30 in the morning, I didn’t have my next audiobook queued up. In a daze, I downloaded the full-cast edition of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets on Audible. Sarah and I listened to The Sorcerer’s Stone a few months ago, so I figured the next book would do in a pinch.

These new full-cast editions from Audible seem like a great idea, although I’m sure they’ll suffer from the same thing that will hit the HBO series when it comes out: Comparisons.

With an IP as omnipresent as Harry Potter, it’s difficult to get away from them. When the original movies came out, everyone compared them to the books. (“DiD yOU pUt YoUr NaME iN tHe GobLet OF fIrE!?!?!?”) Any new version that comes out now will be compared to both the books and the movies.

And can anything stand up to that kind of comparison? The movies are great. The books are even greater.

I want to give these full-cast editions a fair shake, but it’s hard to get away from thinking, “Ron doesn’t sound like that!”

News flashes & routine procedures

I’ve been trying to set a bit more of a morning routine since school started back up in January. It’s always been tough for me because I’m not the most consistent sleeper in the world. On some mornings (like today), I’m able to hop right up at 5:00 AM and start doing things. On other mornings, I’m completely dragging ass and hit the snooze until 5:45. The problem is that I wake up randomly in the night and often struggle to get back to sleep, so there’s no telling if/when I’ll be well-rested.

I’m not sure what to do about that. I’ve tried to improve my sleep hygiene, but I don’t think I did that correctly (I’m still not sure what “sleep hygiene” means, exactly). I’ve tried medicine, but I’m not a huge fan of feeling super groggy. I’ve tried drinking more water, exercising, meditation, and most recently a humidifier. I’m still wildly inconsistent with my sleep.

The other problem with my morning routine is the news. I enjoy turning on the news first thing in the morning so I can see what’s going on in the country and world — my parents used to do this and I’ve always thought it was a “normal” part of getting up, but all of the news sources I can fund just … suck. It’s all either 30-minutes of “What is Donald Trump talking about today?” and/or segments on the most divisive subjects using the worst “reporting” they can muster. ABC. CBS. NBC. BBC. Their reporting is all garbage.

Not only is it bad to start your day with such rampant negativity — these bozos can’t help but spin every little thing to preserve the status quo that earns them their bread, which means treating disturbing, murderous content like it’s “just another day!” — but it’s wildly inaccurate and full of nonsense that isn’t news.

(Hill I’ll die on: Reporting on polling data doesn’t qualify as “news.” It’s a major corporation telling us how to think.)

I know I often seem flippant about current events, what with my funny little pics like this one:

But everything happening in Minnesota is so horrible I’m not sure what else to do about it. There’s video — multiple videos — of a guy being held down and executed. The Trump administration openly lies about it while the news shows the videos, and all the news will say is, “Well, shucks, fellas, it looks like we’re getting conflicting reports of what happened!” when what they should say is, “Administration officials are lying to your face.”

The whole thing does make me want to share this George Orwell line from 1984:

“The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

I’ve tried watching some Al Jazeera news in the morning to get more of a world perspective, but that station’s reporting is like a who’s who of starving nations, which is important but not the sort of thing I want to ponder over my morning tea. So, maybe my problem is more that the world is awful and I don’t want to hear about it at 5:00 AM.

It’s still cold and a lot of the country is buried under ice. (That sentence is true both literally and figuratively.)