Although I am now officially 25 years old, I continue to have the sleeping habits of an unsupervised 12-year-old on summer vacation. I routinely stay up past midnight for no apparent reason, and often take hours-long naps as soon as I get home in the evenings. Most of the people close to me are aware of these habits, and they all think it is HAHA HILARIOUS to joke about how I can't get anywhere on time in the morning, which is not even true, thankyouverymuch. If you want me to arrive on time, you just have to plan your event after 10 am. Otherwise, you should be aware that there is about a 75% chance that I'm going to be late.
Anyway, I've been thinking about it, and I've come up with a few potential explanations for why my sleep schedule is so erratic. It could be any one of these things, but I suspect that it's probably a combination of all three of them...
Reason #1: I just like to be up late at night. To me, there's something mystical about being up late at night, and I've liked it ever since I was a little kid. Even though it scared me a little, I used stay up well into the night reading, the only person awake in my house. I liked to imagine that my bed, ensconced in lamplight, was an island adrift in a sea of peace and solitude and darkness. Being awake late at night, when most other people are asleep, makes me feel both completely independent from and inextricably connected to everyone else in the world. Our differences are greatly attenuated when we're unconscious, and unconscious people can't exert their will upon each other. There's freedom and unity in the dead of night.
Reason #2: I simply don't understand the connection between the time I go to bed at night and the time I'll have to get up the next morning. This is related to the fantastical way I have of thinking about the nighttime. While intellectually I understand that one day blends into the next and that getting up early means I should go to bed early, I think that somewhere deep down I really believe that the amount of sleep I get is somehow a constant, and that whatever I do late at night doesn't really count as yesterday or tomorrow. I have been proven wrong on this point repeatedly, most recently last night when I stayed up until 3 am reading, even though I had to get up at 7:30 and go to work. And yet I persist behaving as though the time after the sun goes down is actually time spent in the Twilight Zone, completely unrelated to how I spend daylight hours.
Reason #3: Procrastination. I firmly believe that the best possible way to accomplish anything is to put it off for as long as possible. I think that my poor sleeping habits might be a natural extension of my tendency toward procrastination. It starts with procrastinating homework, then procrastinating running and phone calls and showering, and suddenly you're procrastinating the start of an entire day. Because part of me believes that if I don't sleep, tomorrow won't come, and thus staying up late is a way to prevent tomorrow from ever arriving. If late-night is timeless, I don't have any responsibilities, and if tomorrow doesn't come, I'll NEVER have any responsibilities. It's clearly a win-win.
... At least, it seems like a brilliant strategy while I'm reading and playing video games until 4 am. But 3 hours later when my alarm is going off and I'm forced to trudge to work and write a grant proposal with only the vaguest remaining grasp of the English language, suddenly it doesn't seem so smart. But what can I do? Twelve hours later the sun goes down, and I'm whisked off into responsibility-free solitude, once again.
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