Drifting away...

Ah yes, I've begun to drift again. Do other people drift like this?

Just when I think I've settled into a nice pattern of sleeping between 12 and 1am and waking between 9 and 10am, it suddenly shifts. I wish I could blame it on the switch to Daylight Saving Time, but I can't. I can never quite tell when it's going to happen, but this time it really kicked into action on Friday.

We were out a bit late - at a friend's birthday party - and got to sleep a bit later than usual. Still, it wasn't too far off the mark - certainly not far enough that I was worried about not being able to wake up on Saturday morning. Imagine my surprise when I opened my eyes, looked at the clock, and saw that it was 11:30am already! Yikes. A couple of hours past my own personal "normal" wake up time. So much for a relaxing Saturday morning. It was already over.

The next day, I was particularly conscious of my sleep/wake pattern. I went to bed at midnight but of course I couldn't fall asleep. I did some catching up on my National Geographic reading and finally managed to get to sleep around 2:00am. Woke up at 10:30 on Sunday.

Drifting is a strange thing for me. My very first memory of drifting happened way back in grade school. I have distinct memories of sitting in the kitchen with my mom, who was telling me it was 2:00am and I really had to go to bed. It was Christmas vacation and I'd been allowed to stay up on Christmas Eve for midnight mass - and my body just decided that was it. That was my new bedtime. Given the house we lived in, I must have been younger than 10 years old. When school started again, it was hell.

The whole phenomenon reminds me of what it must be like to be able to be flexible in your sleep schedule - like my boyfriend who happily slept until 11:30am with me, but easily woke up at 6:30am to play golf the very next day. He has a distinct preference for sleeping later hours, but it's not a problem when he can't.

Drifting is like that for me. I can manage my to work my sleep schedule away from the drift if I really, really try hard. A few days of vigilance and I can usually shift it back a couple of hours. But there's a hard stop. I call 9:00-10:00am my own normal wake time because it's the absolute earliest that I can manage to get up and function on a regular basis. It's my hard stop. Of course, if I left it to my body, I'd probably be sleeping a lot later much of the time. I imagine that other people have other hard stops - maybe noon or 2:00pm or even 5:00pm and later. I feel extremely lucky that I can work it back to 9:30ish, which is still a reasonable time to get up for work in my current situation. (But NOT in a 9-6 office commuter type job!)

The problem with drift is that yes, I do have to have some willpower and motivation to stick to a schedule, trying to fall asleep even just a bit earlier each day when my body just wants to stay up later and later. I find that Benadryl sometimes helps with this, but again there's a hard stop. Before midnight, it's useless.

Today, I've blown it already. It's 12:40 and I'm nowhere near tired enough to go to bed yet. I might try the Benadryl trick in an hour or so, but honestly? I've been so productive the last couple of hours that I really don't want to fall asleep yet. I don't have any morning obligations, so I'll probably just work for a while, catch up on some Tivo, and sleep until I wake up in the morning.

The problem with that is that I'm already stressing out about the day after that - when I have to be awake for an 11am conference call. In my "normal" world, that would be fine. But when I'm drifting, it can be tricky. Wish me luck!