About Sleep

I agree, my sleep habits are totally screwy. Ever since I was a baby, I've had trouble sleeping. My parents blame it on my pediatrician, who told them to wake me up EVERY TWO HOURS to feed me so that I would gain weight. I think another part of it is that my dad has the same natural sleep cycle that I do--genetically, I may just not be an early person. During the summer, we go to bed at the same time and wake up at the same time.

I get up at sixish and go to school. I'm fairly alert until around lunchtime, when the hunger kicks in and I'm a bit more tired. I eat lunch and then I feel fine. I get tired again about an hour and a half before going to tennis. Then I go to tennis, where, once again, I'm happy and awake and active.

If I played at tennis, I'm awake through dinner until about eleven. On those days, I can get into bed and fall asleep within an hour fairly easily.

If I didn't play, my brain shuts down earlier. My personal non-scientific theory about why this occurs is that since I love tennis, it's like the equivalent of ice cream to my brain. It makes me happy and cheers me up. The problem is that then my body is ridiculously jumpy until about twelve-thirty. If I go to bed before then, I toss and turn and fidget for hours. (I think my record is about four hours of jumping around. That night, I finally gave in, and got up and did some crunches or something. Worked like a charm.)

I think that this happens because I'm not getting nearly as much physical activity as I used to. During the summer and early in the tennis season, I would be playing tennis for an absolute minimum of two hours a day. So now, my body thinks it needs to be awake--my metabolism has adjusted to make that amount of energy which I now don't need, since I mostly just watch.

I've been meaning to make some exercise plan for days I don't play, and I think that the sleep issue may force me to find time to run or play paddle tennis or at least force myself through some core work.

This should help. But it might not. Because, quite frankly, it's one hundred percent true that teenagers genuinely aren't meant to go to bed at ten p.m. Yeah, I can do my best to work around that. But I've tried so many things that supposedly help sleeping--dim lights and warm drinks before bed, soothing music, avoiding my computer, not eating any sugar (that one was hard, let me tell you.). None of them worked.

I've been having a bit of an issue lately with one of my friends as well as my mother lecturing me constantly about the amount I sleep. I think the worst thing that was said to me was "Since you're so tired, you don't know that you're tired! Sleep!!!!!"

Gee, thanks. I think it should go without saying that a) I definitely know my body way better than either of them do and b) unless I'm doing something that legitimately inconveniences them, it's absolutely none of their business.

I've been really upset by this for the past couple of days (don't even get me started on this), for two main reasons. First, I am a very private person. I don't like it when people tell other people anything I said, even if it was completely innocuous. (I have a half-written post about how much it sucks to be as shy as I am. I'm sort of fifty-fifty on whether or not I'll post it, because some of the stuff in their is rather personal. I may do an abridged version, because I think that my shyness is probably the most important part of me that needs to be understood) Second, I'm finding myself completely incapable of making my mom and my friend stop without resorting to walking away or yelling.

The ending to the post is horrible because I got sidetracked reading about immunology (have I written about how much I loooovvvve my physiology class??). Sorry.