It’s official. I’m on a daysleeping schedule this week. Trying not to be frustrated with the schedule flop around currently. It’s a recurring cycle. Believe it or not my natural sleeping rhythm is to be awake days (daywaking) for a week or so then flip around to sleeping days (daysleeping) for a week or so, it cycles this way. I’m a lot better off obeying it trust me. Been down the fighting it road, not pretty.
It is vital that I get sleep with in every 24 hour period, and also that I get enough sleep. This may sound overly dramatic. It’s not. If I don’t get enough sleep I get hospitalized. I lost my early twenties to not being able to avoid the hospital due the results of not getting enough sleep. I have permanent damage from all that.
It’s easy for people to say just get some sleep. It’s just as easy for those same people to wake you up and demand that you not be asleep when you should be, with zero regard to what that in fact does to you.
What’s this sleep stuff got to do with art and writing?
- When I was going through the hospital system, etc, for it they kept putting me on zombification medications. For me those had side effects like making it impossible to write or draw or otherwise be creative. My creativity is the biggest part of who I am, when I was artificially impaired from doing my creative things I was dead inside and way suicidal. But I don’t want to get too deep into all that, but it definitely is an artistic issue related to sleep I need to not repeat. And I’m not the only one.
- Day & Night are suited to different things, as well as very different atmospherically. As any creative has experienced atmosphere makes a vast difference in what you’re doing. So a schedule that works for one probably is not ideal for the other.
- Quality & Quantity of creative output suffers when one doesn’t get enough sleep.
- Other people in your house affect your schedule. If you sleep days and they work days then your most convenient hours for really getting knee deep in a creative project are being slept through. If you then sleep when the other people in your house are sleeping then they’ll be getting up and doing their morning thing which sorry to say will throw your optimal morning routine way behind and much of what other people do when they wake up or get home is not conducive to your being in the midst of some creative project. Much of it is unpredictable for the purposes of accurate scheduling.
- Suddenly you get sleepy and wake up later to discover you’ve drooled all over your project or keyboard.
- You fight the sleep too long and wind up with nothing of value to show for your time.
- If your sleep schedule bounces between day & night like mine naturally does, you may discover there is stuff you are supposed to do regularly that can only really be done on one and not the other. Obvious things like going to the post office calling your utility company or going to the bank, which are clearly daytime activities. Then there are not so obvious things. I have come to discover that writing blog entries worth a darn is more attainable at night…though this may go for most real writing (as in working on a draft as opposed to background things like making a character list)
I’m sure there’s more but well I’m starting to get tired since it’s now early morning.
How does sleep affect your art, writing & creativity?
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