When I don’t get sleep everything feels wrong for the rest of the day.  Sleep is often an elusive thing for me.  There are many nights that I lay awake and wonder why.  Either I am thinking too much or my sleep isn’t deep enough or I am awaken too early by a kid or husband or cat or mouse.  A snore or a cry or an alarm.  And then there is nothing that I can do about it.  That is that.  I am up and can’t go back to sleep.

I have found that when I sleep I feel pretty stable, as long as I get around nine hours a night.  When I sleep less I get dysphoric hypomania.  (I turn into a bitch with a mission.)  And when I sleep too long I get depressed, down in the mouth.  And if this happens night after night then those moods get worse and worse.

I don’t know the cure.  I do know that I take a sleep aid and I work at making sure that I follow a routine and I don’t think that I will ever be able to change the fact that I am a light sleep and always have been.  My heavy feather pillow has been the saving grace in it all.  I plop it over my exposed ear and I can hardly hear anything.  That helps a lot.

So this morning it was the alarm that was snoozed twice and I lay there and kept thinking, “Why don’t you just get up?  Or instead, why don’t you set your alarm for later?  Either way, quit waking me up when I could still be sleeping.”  And so I am awake.