For me the worst thing about not sleeping during the night is not having my mornings. It does my head in.
When I was younger, I was always one of those people who used to get up at 6am and be in the office by 7.30am or 8am. My activity level in the mornings was always phenomenal. I always had a hit list of things to be done each day and usually had most of them done by midday.
Nowadays, with my sleeping pattern running from about 3am to 10am and most mornings waking with a migraine, I rarely get anything productive done before "lunchtime". More like "breakfast time" as far as I'm concerned.
Not only that. Living on my own, there is no routine in the house. When things were very bad and I often just didn't sleep at night at all, it felt as though I was in some sort of netherworld and really wasn't part of human society. It was horrible, quite bizarre. I felt so isolated as even when I was awake, I was so spaced out and exhausted that I couldn't really do anything productive at all. At one point my sleeping hours were running from about 5pm to midnight, just frightening. The consultant wondered why I laughed when he told me to get out of bed at 8am every day no matter how badly I'd slept.
I know that my condition now is much improved and most days, I'm able to get a decent amount of productive stuff done in the afternoons and evenings. I do try to avoid doing "work" in the evenings, but on a good day I can get a decent 5 - 6 hours done between midday and 7pm ish and often do an hour or two in the late evening/early morning. Occasionally I get nothing done, but most days at least a couple of hours.
I think it's important to try to have some sort of normal routine that makes you feel at least part of the human race. Even if I can't control my mornings, and sometimes don't get much done in the afternoons because I'm very exhausted or my head just hurts too much, having a traditional evening with a normal meal and relaxing and knitting/watching tv makes life a lot more bearable.
But I still really miss the mornings. I miss those walks to the office or the railway station or the bus stop in the early morning, especially when the sun was coming up or shining on a crisp cold dawn.
Hope you get some decent sleep tonight!
Marie
