No Sleep for Average Jane

Insomnia sucks. I’ve been waking up every couple of hours throughout the night for the last couple of weeks. If I sleep under the covers, I get hot. If I sleep on top of the covers, I get cold. I wake up because I’m thirsty, get a drink of water, and then later I wake up again because I have to pee.

Fortunately, my husband stays up all night, so he’s neither a contributor to, nor annoyed by, my dysfunctional sleeping habits. That is, unless he decides to go to bed early some nights, but by then I’m usually so tired that I don’t even notice the snoring.

The wild cards in the situation are the three cats in the bed. Velcro sleeps on me, so she has to settle down and get comfortable again every time I toss and turn. Velvet gets excited that someone might be available to pet her, so I’m likely to feel her raspy tongue on my hand if I happen to stretch out my arm in her direction. Only Xena, who prefers the end of the bed (often under the covers), sleeps soundly no matter what I do.

I’m really swamped at work (still playing post-vacation catchup), which is probably the main reason my brain can’t seem to gear down when I’m trying to rest. When I have my wits about me, I can do some breathing and relaxation exercises to drop back to sleep. Unfortunately, that doesn’t always occur to me right away at 3 a.m.

I have another minimally-scheduled weekend coming up, so if I can just get my workload under control, there’s hope that I can sleep and nap my way back to a normal schedule. Just in time to leave for a business trip to Chicago next week. Well, at least I’m not changing time zones again…