My friend Sam around 1am. Providence, RI. 2006.

I’ve discussed here before the fact that I don’t sleep much. Most of that is natural short-sleeping; I sleep through the night, it’s just a short night – usually around 1a-7am. However, sometimes I just can’t get to sleep, or I wake up in the middle of the night and can’t fall back asleep. I would hesitate to call it insomnia, because it doesn’t happen often, but it happens enough that I have a strategy for dealing with it.

You see, if I can’t sleep, I simply don’t. If I roll around in bed for more than half an hour after turning the lights off, I just get up. There are few things less productive and more frustrating than rolling around in bed trying to fall asleep, so why do it?

When I lived in Korea, I kept my laptop on the floor underneath my bed, within easy reach. When I couldn’t fall asleep, or woke up with a thought-worm (similar to an ear worm, only it’s an idea I can’t stop thinking about), I would pick up my lapop and use it in bed. Now that I have Marc next to me in bed most nights (he works graveyard shifts on occasion), I usually try to get up and sit in the reading chair instead, so that the light and sound are less bothersome. When I was in college, I even sometimes went so far as to get up and go for a walk around campus!

Self portrait taken around 3am at Hampshire College, during my thesis-induced insomniac days. Amherst, MA. 2007.

Whatever tactic you choose, my general point is this: if you can’t sleep, use that time to do something else. Write a blog entry. Read a book. Look at lolcats. I don’t care; just do something other than pointlessly turning over and over in bed. Not only have you turned unproductive time into productive time, but it will likely tire you out as well, leading to deeper, better sleep once you do go back to bed. If I get up and work on my blog for an hour, by the time I’m starting to lose steam, I also find that my eyes and body are beginning to get tired enough that sleep is possible. Almost invariably I wake up the next morning feeling as if I have slept really intensely, and while I do occasionally feel more sleepy than usual for the first 15-20 minutes after I get up, I end up feeling more rested than if I had tossed and turned all night.

If you have even one night a week that you have trouble sleeping and instead choose to get up and write for an hour or two, that can end up being 2-4 quality blog posts a week, or 8-16 a month. If you choose to read during that time, it will add approximately two books to your “finished” pile a month, or 24 books a year! Not only that, but since you will likely feel more rested the next day, your productivity for that day will likely be increased as well!

So, if you can’t sleep…don’t.

(I am actually writing this post on such an occasion. I went to bed at 10pm, slept until midnight, woke up, used my laptop in bed on a low-light setting for an hour and a half, tried to go to sleep for half an hour after that, then got up and am now typing away in the living room. It’s now 2:45am and I’ll probably be back in bed by 3:30. Since I’ll be getting up around 9am, that means I will still have gotten around 8 hours of sleep.)