Some people sleep walk. Others sleep eat or talk in their sleep. I apparently sleep news. @jaltucher would be disappointed. –@iamtiffani
By the way, this wasn’t a question. She just happened to tweet this while I was doing the Twitter Q&A.
Here’s my worst habit when I’m trying to sleep eight hours.
I wake up to go to the bathroom at 2 in the morning. This, in itself, is annoying. I’m dead tired. I’m in the middle of a dream, and suddenly in the dream I have to go to the bathroom. But everywhere I go, there’s someone already there. So I have to run around in my dream to find another bathroom. It never ends until I finally wake up at 2 am and go to the bathroom.
I’m so tired, I think to myself: well, at least I’ll fall back to sleep right away. I’m too tired.
But then I get back in my bed. I have my iPad, my laptop, my phone, and maybe even some headphones within three feet of me.
I figure, “I’m so tired, I might as well check what’s going on for a few seconds. Its too tempting.”
iPad On: Email, Twitter, Twitter mentions, blog, blog stats, Facebook, S&P futures, Amazon book rank. And god forbid, The News.
And now I’m up. Why did that one person write that one email? Or, why is the world so screwed up? Or… do I need to delete that negative comment right now?
Claudia is sound asleep next to me. Doesn’t she even care what’s going on in the world at 2 in the morning.Now 3 in the morning? Doesn’t’ she want to know what my book fell in Amazon ranking? Or that I got an email about that deal I was working on? Has she given up so easily that her eyes are just closed and she’s off in her own dreams, flying across her own astral landscapes while I lie here awake, sick, puking in my brain with every pixel in the darkness laughing at me?
Maybe I’ll read a book for fifteen minutes. That will make me sleep. I’m up anway. Maybe I can even get work done. So then I read until 4am. I’ve been up two hours. Normally I would’ve woken up between 4 and 5 so now I fall back to sleep and I don’t wake up until 7 am and I’m totally exhausted now.
This is bad.
So I replied to @iamtiffani. Screen diet. No screen between 6:30 pm and 8 am.
We never had screens before and we lived. Why do we need to see the screen between those hours now? We’ll sleep better. Make love better. Eat better. Be less stressed. Less anxious. Less needy (I won’t need to check my number of Twitter followers for an entire 13.5 hours a day.)
But it’s hard. For people with screen addictions (me), it’s very hard. So do this. Try it for five days. Starting today. Just do it. No screen between 6:30 pm and 8 am. That’s too hard? Poor baby! Ok, try this: between 7:30 pm and 7 am.
Please, I beg you. Because I’m selfish. Because I know the world will be a better place if we all just try this screen diet.
Let’s Occupy Sleep and become in the top 1% of people who live well-rested, less stressful lives. Then we will inherit the Earth.