4am Experiment

Hello Friends!

Well, actually it’s 5:02am, but I’ve been up and typing for about an hour. This AM I decided to run an experiment… and I just couldn’t do so without sharing with you – those wonderful, indulgent and supportive friends & family who may read my ramblings from time to time. Thank you!

As we all know, I run at a fairly high RPM… I’m incredibly grateful for this fact, and I’m regularly amazed by it as I really don’t know where it comes from. However, I do accept that it is my gift… and I’m trying very hard to figure out what I’m meant to do with all of it to make the world a better place. The GREATEST THING is that in my new life, and with my new job, I have found a happily bottomless pit where I can direct so many of my ideas, thoughts, and efforts + experience.

But, here’s the thing – even though I know that I’m under 1000% less stress and I’m infinitely happier in my new role & new life… I’ve found that I’m waking up in the almost-middle of the night (3/4am) very regularly with my “brain on fire”. It doesn’t seem to matter much when I go to bed, I wakeup a this awkward hour just completely buzzing with energy, thoughts, ideas, to do lists. It’s weird and very annoying. I probably started noticing it in September, because honestly in July – August I was just too exhausted for this to happen. Aha! That is probably a HUGE key to the equation – I’ve been doing ZERO physical exercise, and that is certainly impacting my sleep quality. (Good stuff, glad I started writing!). But now, it happens alot, and I’ve been trying to do two things: resist the strong desire to pick up my phone, check the time and start putting things in wunderlist + meditate to get myself back to sleep (while trying to remember all the great ideas I’m having for fear of losing them in the AM). Alas, this approach has not been super successful.

So today, since it is Saturday and I have the whole weekend to recover if this turns out to be a terrible idea, I decided to just GET UP and let the ideas flow. I thought, if I just indulge my crazy brain for an hour, I can go back to bed at 5am and sleep another few hours and I should be OK – plus I can take a nap this afternoon. Experiment underway! I just spent about an hour working in my favorite Google Sheet where my colleague Jennifer and I are tracking topics we want to discuss and collaborate on as well as another Google Sheet with our master calendar for the year. All very satisfying, and not super hard on the brain but also a great place to park ideas so I don’t lose them.

Who knows? This might be the perfect time for me to start writing in “ye baby blog”, so stay tuned… you might hear more from me at these wee hours. For now, I’m going to sign off, crawl back in bed, and hope that by opening the escape valve on my frenzy of thoughts I’ll be a bit more calm and able to sleep. At the very least the cats think this is fun – they are here keeping my company.

Sleep tight friends & Happy Saturday!

XO