I look at the time, which reads “10:05 PM”. I go back to doom scrolling on TikTok, and by the time I finish, it’s already 11 o’clock. I receive a call from my mom and we talk about our days, which leads to me complaining about how tired I am from the day’s events. She tells me that she’s going to let me go so that both she and I can go to sleep, and we hang up to part our separate ways. However, despite being so tired, I don’t sleep. By this point, it’s midnight, and I think about going to bed, but instead, I decide that I’m going to stay awake just a little bit longer and that ten extra minutes can’t hurt, right?
Wrong. Ten minutes turns into thirty, thirty turns into an hour, and when I turn to look at the time again, enough time has passed by for it to read “3:00 AM”. I decide to call it a night and finally attempt to sleep.
This has been a daily routine of mine ever since I was younger. I can’t remember the last time I slept before midnight, let alone 10 p.m. It’s been especially bad this past year, and I don’t feel compelled to sleep until the clock hits 3 a.m., and on the rare occasions that I attempt to sleep at an earlier time, I spend hours tossing and turning, and don’t manage to fall asleep for a few hours. Regardless of how tired I am, or how early I have to get up the next morning, sleep refuses to hit me. This has caused me to deal with various physical and mental consequences; some being increased irritability, low energy, drowsiness throughout the day, trouble remembering things, and increased anxiousness.
I’ve tried many different methods to coax myself into a somewhat normal sleep schedule, but I can’t say that most of them have worked. However, something that I’ve tried that has helped me has been sleeping thirty minutes earlier than I usually do for a couple of weeks, then sleeping thirty minutes earlier than that time for another few weeks, and repeating this until I condition myself to go to bed at my desired sleep time. Another method I’ve utilized to help me develop a better sleep routine has been associating certain tasks with sleeping. For instance, I have started turning on my fan and putting on moisturizer only when I’m ready to go to bed, and now, when I perform these actions, they signal to my brain that it’s time to go to sleep.
Ironically, I’m writing this article at exactly 10:48 p.m., but I sincerely hope you are reading it earlier than I am writing it.