forty winks

During my time in grad school, my sleep habits were atrocious. Stress and lack-of-sleep whirled around me in a vicious cycle that led me to a dangerous depression among other problems. I've been out of grad school for over a year now and I've had an especially difficult past five months, for reasons I won't get into here and now.

For the past month or so, I've thought that I've been wallowing in a depression by sleeping an excessive amount. It took me until last week to realize that my body is demanding eight to nine hours of sleep a night. I can't recall having having such a consistent amount of sleep each night. I can't believe my sleep habits were so unhealthy that I didn't recognize a somewhat healthy sleep pattern for a good three weeks.

I say "somewhat healthy" because I still have a difficult time actually falling asleep -- I am having a difficult time "switching off" before sleep. It used to be that I valued my middle-of-the-night time because it was the only time I had to myself, as my family slept. Lately, though, I've been envying them that sleep.

I'll work on this sleep stuff. I'm sure I'll be experiencing another shift at the end of August when school starts up again. Ah, well.