Working with what is

I’ve not been sleeping well recently. No matter what time I go to bed I wake up at around 5.00am.

For a while I fought against what felt like a rather anti-social habit. I tried going to bed later (which is how I know that whatever time I go to bed I still wake up at 5.00am!), but that just meant I got less sleep.

I tried taking something to help me sleep. That worked for a while, but after a few days I felt tired and groggy all day, despite sleeping until a more “normal” 8.00am.

Eventually I just decided that I would accept that at the moment I seem to want to wake up at 5.00am and just to make the best of it. Once I decided to make the best of these early starts a funny thing happened, I started to see the advantages of following what I’m growing to see as my own natural rhythm.

Finding my own routines

Waking early means I can let myself have a slow and gentle start to the day. I can make a cup of tea and bring it back to bed, collect my thoughts, and plan a little of what I’d like to do with the day. I can start to write or draw, and often find I have done much of what I’d like to get done before the rest of the world wakes up, or certainly before they arrive at their desks.

Stopping fighting against how my days seems to want to shape itself gets easier the more I do it. I’ve started to see that even though I don’t have, I’ve been trying very hard to fit my life into a very conventional 9-5 routine, with just small tweaks and allowances around the edges to compensate for the fact that I’m not well some of the time.

No more 9-5

It’s very tempting to always try to fit our routines into conventional structures. There’s a certain comfort in following the normal 9-5 routine that in all likelihood is being followed by family and friends, and is certainly the one we see portrayed in the media.

However if we work with fluctuating energy levels it makes much more sense to create our own routines, and also to learn to be flexible with them. It’s taken me a very long time to realise that I’m allowed to decide on the shape of my day, and that if I do I can function much better. I’ve spent years working towards being in charge of my own time in terms of the work I do (partly out of necessity and party out of desire) but it’s taken even longer to realise I’m also in charge of how I organise that time. What a relief!

To celebrate this little epiphany I went out to breakfast midweek. I decided to enjoy the luxury of sitting in a cafe sipping hot tea and waiting for my plate of food to arrive, rather than feeling guilty for not being “at work” when most of the rest of the world seemed to be. The next time my eyes snap open at 5.00am and I can’t go back to sleep, I won’t worry about being tired and in need of a long nap at mid-day, instead I shall use the quiet of the early morning to work on my latest 20 Minute a Day project, make a pot of tea, and decide where I would like to eat breakfast today.

Do you try to fit your working life into conventional structures even though you don’t need to? Are there ways you could change your routine to fit in with your own rhythms?