Tag: sleep

Yawn

~ e.v. ~ 2 Comments

I didn’t get enough sleep last night. I woke up at about 1:00AM needing something urgently then didn’t go back to sleep until about 3. Apparently, at this time of night, my mind considers the most important thing in the universe to be my old job. So it wasn’t really great quality sleep from then onwards, and I still felt stressed about it when I got up.

Maybe I’m just less tolerant because of this but the recruiter spam has really been annoying me today. The best one today is a job based in…. the Netherlands. Not only that, but hidden right down at the bottom of the job spec, it says “Dutch speaking is ESSENTIAL” 🤦‍♀️ Yes, in bold and capitalised. In English. I clicked “Report spam” on this one. This one is utterly absurd but despite not making my location a secret, I get more that are not even slightly commutable than are.

I’ve also had a recruiter try to phone me FOUR times today. About a month ago, he phoned me up by chance one day (he must have had my number on their system from when I was looking previously) and we had a bit of a chat which mostly seemed to be him probing me for information about my employer’s hiring plans, but I humoured him because he said he had a few jobs that might be relevant and he’d send the details over. He didn’t send the details over, it was just a fishing call. So I guess this is the follow up “How’s the job search going, where have you been applying?” *scribbles down company names*.

So anyway… four times! He seems to urgently want to speak to me, but isn’t leaving a message or sending an email indicating why I might want to speak to him. In related news, I discovered a wonderful Android feature where you can set a contact to always go to voicemail.

I think I need a better plan for passive job seeking because so far it seems to be taking up too much of my attention and yielding no results.

Tired

~ e.v. ~ 2 Comments

I had trouble sleeping last night. I don’t know why, I just ended up lying in bed for an hour feeling my heart pounding. I was playing Factorio until 10PM which might not have helped… I used to have a strict “no computer games after 9PM” rule. But Factorio is addictive. Hmmmm…

So I’ve been tired today. The kind of tired that comes from not sleeping well. It’s been a long time since I felt like this. There have been a few issues with my sleep lately that take me back to about a year ago. Just before I started anti-depressants. One night last summer we had a thunderstorm at about midnight that went on for a few hours. I remember sitting on my bed at 2AM with a cup of tea and my guitar on my lap, because I’d pretty much given up on trying to sleep. A week or so ago we had a few nights with thunder around bed time and it reminded me of that night.

I don’t think I really had any problems with sleep after starting anti-depressants. I just slept. Now that I’ve come off them, I definitely miss that…

I can’t even blame last night on work stress because I have a few days off. I was a bit down the last time I wrote about work, and I don’t know if I genuinely feel that way. I don’t think it’s really bothering me at the moment. I think how I feel is that it was the right move at the time, but that doesn’t mean it’s right for me long term. And right now I’m OK with that.

Solstice

~ e.v. ~ 2 Comments

So, the thing is that I like sleeping. Lots of people don’t get enough sleep. I’ve been there and done that too. It doesn’t kill you, and actually, you start getting used to it so you don’t really ‘feel’ tired. But it dulled my cognitive abilities without me really noticing, and, overall, it’s just not great.

So I try to get lots of sleep. Especially with all the running I do. Recovery is good, you know?

But it does feel a bit weird at this time of year. Lying in bed at 9:30, trying to feel sleepy, but it’s still daylight outside. Hmm. For most of the year it feels very natural to be in bed at this time. At the moment though… it doesn’t. Maybe I should move to Scotland.

Running again

~ e.v. ~ Leave a comment

So today I got a (very short) lunch time run in. I packed all my running stuff into my bag for work last night, but then I woke up at 3:50 and remembered I hadn’t put my running belt in! Oh no. I didn’t want to get up, but I also thought I might forget, so I sent myself an email from my old phone (which I keep switched on in bed with me, because I use it for Insight Timer meditations), because that’s the kind of thing I do.

I had been having a really vivid dream about my old workplace. I could see the heart rate graph on my watch had been elevated for about an hour before I woke up, so it was obviously stressing me.

At some point I drifted back off to sleep to the soothing voice of Lisa A Romano on Insight Timer.

I seem to spend a lot of my life lying awake in bed at about 4 o clock in the morning. I like it at that time because it’s so quiet and peaceful, but I also like not struggling to stay awake at 3PM at my desk at work.

So, the run.

The abs felt… OK? Not amazing, but OK.

I have found that if they start aching then I need to suck my stomach in as much as I can a few times and that tends to make them feel better. I think the after-effect so far is that there’s an extremely vague sense of discomfort, which, if I wasn’t hyper-aware of the area, I probably wouldn’t have noticed. Hopefully it’s the kind of thing that a bit of exercise will loosen up and heal.

I did some general stretching and foam rolling and core bits and bobs this evening and it feels OK. Not 100%, but OK.