Daily Journaling Experiment – Day 24: Not as Bad as I Feared

I had a good day yesterday. Which was pretty typical. Give me a day with almost insane amounts of things to do and I’ll do fine. Not several weeks in a row but still. I went to the post office, the health food store, the farmer’s market, ran a short 3 kilometers, took a shower, tried taking a nap (couldn’t fall asleep), practiced a little, taught, had dinner, and went to the parent-thing at my son’s school.

Which was not as bad as I had feared it to be. I often come home frome these kinds if events feeling like a bad mother, and like I should do way more. There were two or three teachers telling us parents to supervise homework better, and make our kids do this or that but I was really happy that his German teacher reminded everyone that you can’t really make a teenager do something, and that they should be old enough to organize most of their stuff themselves. Phew.

In the past I was often left with the feeling that I shouldn’t work in the afternoons, and spend my time sitting next to him while he is doing his homework, holding his hand. Mind you, he really wouldn’t care about that. My MIL did try to supervise his homework but in fourth grade he told her he was now old enough to not need that anymore, thank you. (We’re not talking about the fact that he didn’t do his English homework for today, and only found out this morning after breakfast. He had thought he had time until tomorrow. Despite packing his English books into his backpack last night. Yeah, I don’t get it either.)

He was also very surprised that he’ll have to go to the orthodontist today. For the second time in a row. Guess who will be surprised again at lunch.

The other thing rattling around in my head (apart from a ton of annoying, little things from my epic to do list) is about my fatigue/tiredness/exhaustion. Tini commented yesterday that the cause might also be something thyroid-related or a vitamin deficit, or something.

Now I had the idea that that might be the case as well. Probably not thyroid because I get that checked out pretty regularly (though I have to make an apointment for my next hormone checkup) but maybe this is not about sleeping. And every time I fear there is something else wrong with me I decide that first I need to get enough sleep for a few weeks, and then if I am still feeling tired I will go to the doctor.

And then I don’t manage adequate sleep, and then I start the whole thing over.

So my plan is this: 1) I try to go to bed at 9.30 every day as often as I can, 2) I stop drinking alcohol for about three weeks starting Monday, 3) I will be more strict again about no screens after dinner, 4) I’ll keep a sleep log. I have all the data from my sleep tracker, I only haven’t found out how to get the .csv-file into any spreadsheet software in a way that it makes sense but I’ll figure that out today. And then I’ll put that data into something that makes sense when I look at it.

The sleep tracker is leaving me scratching my had, though. It tells me that it took me 11 minutes to fall asleep yesterday, for example, and those 11 minutes happened between 11.16 and 11.25. Huh? And it does that every time.

I need to get a grip on this feeling sleepy thing, it’s really no good. I have gotten so used to feeling completely zombified most of the time, it’s not even funny anymore.

So, sleep log it is.