I recently participated in a sleep study to correct my nocturnal habits and longtime insomnia. Most of my friends, especially those on Facebook and other social media sites, have noticed that I am active online very late in the night. I have been like this for many years. I rarely sleep more than a few hours at a stretch. This has never been a problem for me, until about a year ago when I started feeling tired and rundown. My docs, after ruling out more serious reasons for my tiredness, have suggested that my patterns before bedtime may be the cause.
The sleep study was basically to investigate why I always seem to revert to vampire-like schedule regardless of whatever continent I am on. My first thoughts were that I was just getting overly anxious about my upcoming final tenure review year. But my docs wanted to be very thorough.
They looked at the things that I ate and drank before bedtime to see if something in my diet was the cause of my insomnia. Dark chocolate, coffee, tea, and caffeine are all big no-nos prior to going to bed. They also told me that our electronic viewing habits are also things that can impact sleep cycles. For example, lighting from monitor screens can act as a mental stimulant that can cause you to have difficulty sleeping. Since I am always in front of some device (TV, desktop, laptop, iPad, smartphone) I suspected that may be one of my issues. Especially when I think about how much reading or movie watching I do on the iPad before I turn in for the night.
Personally, I still think it is the tenure review. No sleep ’til Brooklyn!