Last night in the 1 o’clock hour I dreamt (again) that I was playing the part of Captain Hook. Or more precisely put, that I was backstage getting ready to play Hook, this time by donning my costume. As always in this subgenre of Scottdream, the peril involved was that of missing my entrance. I was downstairs with the costumer fiddling with the hook and wig and trying to find my boots.
It hit me upon waking this morning a little after four that this dream is a portal to understanding my proneness to early terminal wakeups (i.e., waking up and staying up earlier than intended): Since the thought of getting done all the items in my morning to-do list is frequently my first concern upon wakeup, especially on workdays when there’s a cap on that phase in the morning, and since I often fire up Remember the Milk in support of addressing that concern, is it any wonder that my later sleep is often fragmented and terminated early?
How could I miss making the connection between my frequent inability to stay asleep in the wee hours of the morning before a workday begins and my complete inability to go to sleep at all on a night before an early-morning flight? The phenomena feel very similar: no conscious anxiety, no distress—just alertness. The basic problem is not one of light exposure or working out too hard or the suitability of the bedroom environment, although those things do have an effect. It’s that I start every day, or at least every workday—the phenomenon is less acute on weekends and pretty much disappears while on vacation—understanding that I’d better get cracking on my to-do list right away lest I eat into DiamondBack time, feel a mid-evening grumpiness about “not getting it all done,” or both.
What to do then? Reengineer the morning is what. Last decade, in response to five early-morning flights leading to five involuntary all-nighters, I made a personal policy of refusing to book early-morning flights. I haven’t had an involuntary all-nighter since. This decade, in response to a suspicion that list mode is leading to sleep fragmentation and early terminal awakening almost every day, I’m going to make a personal policy of leaving my computer, a good proxy for my being in GTD mode, off until after breakfast.
Time-sensitive, formally externalized expectations, like flight bookings and to-do lists, demand alertness. That’s not a bad thing in general, but it is a bad thing for sleep.