I was on the fence about blogging today! It’s Saturday, so I could justify skipping today and coming back to it Monday. But I do way better with daily habits than with M-F habits. I can lose steam over the weekend and watch my motivation crater on Monday morning. So here I am blogging away on a Saturday night!

After the sudden stop to my work life and main source of livelihood, the pandemic brought me sleep interruption. I didn’t get the kind of insomnia that my friends told me about, where you stay up most of the night, binge-watching TV, increasingly tired but never sleepy.

No, my kind of insomnia was the kind that would rouse me at 3am, wide awake and unable to fall back asleep. I thought I’d trick my brain by skipping the all-appealing nap and staying awake until 9pm the next night — but my body tricked me back, waking me up at 2:30am the next morning, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.

I decided to give in to the afternoon naps for a week, but then had trouble falling asleep at a decent hour each night, and woke up around 3am anyway.

When problems like this arise and are so deep-seated that I can’t actively fix them, I trust they are temporary and let them run their course. Just go with the flow, adjust my schedule and expectations the best I can, and roll with it. This insomnia tried my patience for an entire month. Seeing a possibility I could resume my work schedule after a 90-day moratorium, my psyche relaxed, and the insomnia went away.

But then Texas “opened back up” quite prematurely, and we ended up with a spike in COVID infections before the first wave had ever subsided. This same leadership failure happened in enough areas of the U.S. that my hope for a 90-day pause to my work looked more like a one-year pause. The insomnia change chose me again.

I happened to find the video game Animal Crossing: New Horizons during the first period of insomnia, and it was an excellent way to spend those wee hours of the morning alone. Becoming a middle-aged gamer exposed me to new online communities I’d never have been part of. It’s total immersion in Gen Y and Gen Z! And I learned some coding and other new tech skills along the way. But I still wasn’t sleeping well.

Several months ago, I decided to stop being a potato and start exercising regularly again. In the past, I’ve experienced a direct relationship between consistent exercise and better sleep. And what do you know? A week or two after engaging in HIIT workouts three times a week, I was naturally sleeping later each morning.

I’m not sure if waking between 4:30-5:30am is insomniac or if that’s just my life now. Either way, I continue to observe, measure, and experiment. I continue to flex, make accommodations, try new things, and learn everything I can along the way.