Your Daily Focus: Bedtime
Don’t lose sleep over not wanting to go to bed, you just may be an entrepreneur.
I don’t know if you feel like this, but I did and I know a lot of people who do. Why is it that we go to bed early when we’re off work the next day but stay up late when we have to get up early for work?
When I was a practicing anesthesiologist I needed to be at the hospital before 6:30, and needed to be out of bed by 5:15 a.m. to stay on schedule. Yet, I would never go to bed before midnight. Five hours sleep was certainly not enough to make me feel my best when the alarm went off in the morning, yet there was a bigger need keeping me up in the evening.
The answer: freedom! The nature of my job was that every third or fourth day I worked well into the evening, and most other times I didn’t make it home for dinner. I had to be available for whatever came up in the hospital… heavy surgery schedules, pain management cases, maternity consults, and of course emergency surgery coming through the intensive care units or the emergency room.
The knowing I had in the evening was that the minute I consented to heading to bed, I was giving up all available choices on what I could do with my time. The minute I laid my head down on the pillow, my conscious time for the foreseeable future belonged to the hospital. That could literally be up to forty consecutive hours if I was “on call” the next night. That giving up of all personal choice was basically giving up freedom.
So I held on to the last precious few hours in the evening when I could actually have control over my own choices of what to put my attention on… work on hobbies, the computer, write, play video games, work in my workshop, organize the garage, spend time on the phone with my friends, whatever. Even though those activities don’t seem that important, it was the “owning” of the personal choice to do them or not that was so key. Personal freedom. It was a really strong draw for me.
If you feel the same way I did about resisting going to bed when you need to get up early for work, this may be a sign that deep down you want a change. You may want to work toward bringing increased personal freedom into your life. You may be an entrepreneur at heart, and may never be truly happy long-term working for others.
Start nurturing the thought of owning your own business and controlling your own schedule. Think about it, write about it, take action researching the details of your ideas, and promise yourself that at some point in the future you will take action to control your own schedule. Mmmm, what a wonderful feeling it is knowing it is coming.
WOW! That’s the truth. You actually captured it in words. I used to be so resistant to go to sleep because my creative mind was always thinking of new things to do and figured I would have plenty of time to sleep when I was 80. It is personal choice time and that is invigorating. However, I found out the hard way that the body does need a certain amount of sleep to restore itself or we can get adrenal fatigue. Last month when I was writing my new book “Diary of a Turkish Wedding” My brain was on full speed ahead because my goal was to finish writing the book by Jan.1 and I could hardly get more than 3 or 4 hours of sleep a night because I was so excited and the creativity was flowing. I didn’t even mind sitting at the computer for 5-6 hours at a time and still kept up my coaching schedule. One night I was just too exhausted and I hit the wrong key and wiped out 5 hours of adding a new chapter. I figured it was a message from the Universe that I was burning myself out and needed to take a week off of writing and get myself into a nourishing and renewing sleep schedule. Now I stop writing by 11 so that I can be asleep by 12. I look forward to it and I reward myself with nourishing sleep…..instead of resenting it because I could be doing something interesting and exciting. We need the sleep to rebuild and rejuvenate. Ahhhhh. sweet sleep.