Last night was the first “normal” Sunday since I retired. The first Sunday was the day before a workshop trip-something I had done several times before using vacation time-and the second Sunday I was sick and would have called off anyway. (There is a discussion of that coming in another essay.)
As I had on most of the previous 2,850 weeks I went through the standard end-of-the-weekend personal care rituals. I washed my hair, refilled my pill container, laid out clothes for the following morning; all the things I did in preparation for going back to work in the morning.
But I wasn’t going back to work in the morning. I didn’t need to follow my old patterns, and I could choose a different pattern. Unfortunately, that message hadn’t quite reached my brain. Instead my brain decided to fall into its famous Sunday Night Anxiety Attack (pat pending).
It seems that for those same 2,850 weeks my brain had a standard process also. It went into freak-out mode about the coming week, all the things I had failed to accomplish over the weekend, the car payment that was due in two weeks, did I turn off the light in the kitchen, and eventually branched out to the time I missed the bus in college and tried to walk the 6 miles to school, and that embarrassing incident in 6th grade involving people I have not seen since 1963. Okay, so maybe a few more weeks that I originally calculated.
Good times!
I have always blamed myself and my schedule for these attacks. I would run on four or five hours sleep every day of the week, then on the weekend I would try to “catch up” on the missed sleep. I would wake up at my usual time, say to myself “It’s Saturday,” and go back to sleep. Lather, rinse, repeat, until I finally rolled out of bed at noon having eventually slept about eight hours.
I told myself that by Sunday night I was somewhat rested and since I’d only been out of bed for twelve hours I wasn’t ready to go to sleep when I finished my routine and crawled back in bed.
In the past, part of this pattern was staring into the dark, trying not to wake my sleeping husband, and obsessively checking the clock and calculating just how many hours sleep I could still get if I managed to go to sleep right now. It didn’t help, but doing the math at least gave my brain something else to do for a few minutes. Sometimes the distraction-if I could draw it out long enough-would break the cycle and allow me to sleep for a few hours before dragging myself out of bed at the same time as always and trudging groggily off to work.
Last night was no different. I stared into space, checked the clock, did all the usual things, even though I knew deep down that I didn’t have to go to work in the morning. Old habits die very hard.
I didn’t do the one thing I always told myself I would do if I didn’t have to go to work. I didn’t get up and create. I followed my old pattern, the not-very-functional one I developed to cope with an anxiety attack on a work night; the one that tried to get me at least a few hours of rest before I had to get up and face the world.
But I don’t have to do that anymore, and the old coping mechanism doesn’t fit with my new circumstances. If I can’t sleep I can try doing other things, including getting up at four in the morning and writing.
Truthfully, once I had that realization I did spend the next hour or so writing this piece in my head. I still didn’t get out of bed and actually put it on paper (or in pixels, but you know what I mean), but I did begin to understand that I could. I didn’t have to follow the routines of the past.
So what am I going to do with this new-found knowledge? My intention is two-fold:
1. The next time I have one of these episodes I am going to give myself permission to “give up” on sleep, get out of bed, and go do something creative. Channel that mental energy into something I want to do and hope that doing something positive will allow me to return to bed and sleep for whatever hours I need. After all, I am not on anyone else’s schedule and I can sleep as late as I need to, or take a nap later in the day if I want to.
2. Alter the pattern. I don’t have to refill the pill box on Sunday night. I can do it on Tuesday, or Thursday morning, or in the wee hours when I can’t seem to sleep. I can wash my hair on Wednesday afternoon, or Saturday morning, or every time I go to the pool for water aerobics (Side note: I can go to the pool for water aerobics in the middle of the day now, because I am no longer on anyone else’s schedule!) Altering the pattern means that I am removing at least some of the triggers that set me up for an all-nighter watching re-runs of Chris’s Greatest Screw-Ups.
I hope that by taking these two steps-altering my response and changing up the routine that triggers the anxiety in the first place-I can reduce the impact or reduce the frequency with which the attacks occur.
Stay tuned here for a report in a couple months on the outcome of this experiment. Whatever happens will give me some insight into what works for me now, and if this doesn’t succeed maybe the failure will point me in a new direction.
Either way, I hope we can learn something along the way.