I am grumpy when I don’t sleep well. I want to avoid people, skip exercise and ‘take it easy’.
I like to make a point to tell everyone that I didn’t sleep well. I am not in full form today. I only had five hours of sleep.
But you know what? I’m actually fine. My body may be a little sore. I may feel more tired before I have a coffee. But that’s it. The world is not crashing down, despite what my self-talk would have you believe.
What’s really happening is that I get a weird satisfaction from making my lack of sleep my personality for the day. I spend my day obsessing over the lack of sleep I’ve had, which makes me feel so much worse.
This is the problem of awareness. Because I’m aware of the number of hours I have slept and because this number is fewer than the amount I would like to have, I ruminate on how tired I am. In fact, if I did not know how many hours I had slept, I would feel a lot better. I would not have the layer of self-talk because I wouldn’t know whether I had slept enough or not.
What’s the lesson here?
This applies to most areas of my life. There is a gap between what I experience and the story I tell myself about what I experience. I am increasingly convinced that if I can cut out the storyline and experience reality as it truly is, I will be significantly happier.
Now when I don’t sleep well, I remind myself that I’m just a little sore, a little sleepy, but I’m not going to change anything about my day. I very quickly realise that I can do everything I was planning to do and feel great.