The hour I don't want to give back
On the part of the day we protect, and what it can cost.
Peace and avoidance look identical from the outside.
Most nights I wage a battle with sleep.
Generally I take myself off to bed around 11pm or so, even if I’ve been tired for hours. Logically I know an earlier bedtime is good for me, and when I’m completely exhausted I honour it, but in the main, I find myself reluctant to hand over those evening hours to sleep.
Why? By around 8-9pm the day has been spoken for with work, the trip there and back, dinner, and two or three hours of study I need to do five or so nights a week. What’s left is what I protect: an hour or two of quiet peace that I’ve learned helps me relax and wind down. It might be a book or a show, or some personal writing.
It often feels like the only part of the day that is truly mine, and I have become so protective of it that I’ll refuse to hand it over to sleep. Even though I know that would be good for me. So I’ll get off to sleep by midnight, wake at six or six thirty. Six hours… less than the eight or nine I know I need.
I’ve called that a preference for years. But it’s really a trade. The quiet evening hours take the sleeping hours, and it impacts me all the next day.
A little while ago I had nothing scheduled on a weekend day. No expectations, nobody needing anything, nowhere to be, and the day just for me.
There’s a small town an hour or so away from where I live with a bookshop I love. The kind where an hour disappears and you come out with three things you weren’t looking for. I was looking forward to that day all week.
The night before though, I did the ‘not giving up sleep’ thing. I stayed awake and protected the quiet, peaceful hours, and I slept through the morning. So I woke late, moved slowly, and by the time I was somewhat ready, the day had passed the point where the drive and some time in the bookshop would fit.
Here’s the part that gets me: that drive was a chance for peace too. An hour of open road, a favourite playlist, a shop where nobody knows me. Better peace than the two hours I stayed up to protect, and a whole day of it instead of the tail end of one. I gave up the good version to keep the small one.
I can see where I’m going wrong and what I need to work on. I’ve cast bedtime as the thing taking my peaceful quiet time, instead of seeing it as peace and restoration. And sometimes it’s not just me who pays that cost the next day, but other people. They get the flatter version of me, the shorter sentences, the attention that’s not fully there.
There’s a hard question sitting underneath this habit, and I’ve been dancing around it for quite a while, both in my own reflections and in therapy.
What am I afraid of missing if I go to sleep, and why do I view sleep as ‘missing out’ on something?
The deeper truth is, I don’t fully know what I’m staying up for. Some nights it’s genuinely because I’m reading a good book or watching a good show that has me captured. Other nights I wonder if it’s because a book or show asks nothing of me, and lets me just be whatever I am feeling.
There are a couple of things in my life at the moment that do ask something of me, and to feel some big and hard feelings. If that’s what the hour being distracted by a book or show really is, then calling it peace is generous. Because peace and avoidance look identical from the outside.
Clearly, I don’t have this worked out.
But I have the honesty about it, and a willingness to keep working on it and improving. And that’s a good place to build from.
Three things to try.
1. Work out who pays for the hour.
Acknowledge what tomorrow gives up so tonight can run long, and check whether it’s a fair trade.
2. Ask what the hour is actually for.
Rest and avoidance both feel like a book at eleven o’clock, and the difference usually shows up the next day rather than at the time.
3. Move it by fifteen minutes.
An hour earlier is a plan we abandon easily. Fifteen minutes stands a better chance of taking root.
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