I’ve Started Star-Staring Before Bed — it helps..

I’ve been struggling with sleep for a very long time now. Going to bed, getting up, sleep quality, regularity and so on. So for the past few weeks I’ve been meditating, or at least fully “unplugging” for at least 20 minutes before bed. Just allowing my thoughts to wander. To resurface, to complete. To just be there with quiet and my own brain for a little while.

But I was bored staring at the walls of my living room. So I’ve started opening the curtains to look at the night sky.

Various modern electronic distractions don’t help with sleep of course. The TV, the computer, the phone. Just one more post, one more episode. The continued scrolling and watching feels doable even in a fatigued state. One can even get stuck there: there is even a meme on YouTube Comments about findings stuff thru the algorithm at 3am. Why not show it at 9pm, huh, YouTube? Or even 9am? Media companies culpability in mass sleep disruption is something we’ll have to discuss another time.

Certain jobs don’t help either. I previously had a job that had a shift pattern: earlies, middles and lates. Starting at work as early as 4am and the latest finish at 12:00 midnight every 3 weeks. When do you sleep? Some nights I didn’t. Even though I had dozens of people’s safety in my hands. It doesn’t makes sense. Safety goes down. Performance goes down. Friendliness and customer service goes down. Retention goes down. Why were they always hiring even tho they paid people to train? This notion of shifts comes from an inhuman era which viewed man as just another machine to be turned on and off at will and stored away on a bed - like putting a machine back on a shelf - at the pleasure of the corporation. “But it’s standard in the industry” I would hear. They didn’t want to hear that that meant that the entire industry had to change. All of it.

I quit that job. My sleep improved. Life was better. Despite being poorer. But my sleep wasn’t fixed.

My sleep hadn’t been perfect before of course — I’m not blaming the job exclusively. I loved games and would stay up late playing them. I loved the vast trove of information and entertainment on the internet and would stay up late following rabbit holes wherever they would lead me. I loved binge watching TV shows too and would… you know… tell myself that sleep was fungible. Compressible. Deferable. Catch-up-able. That a stiff coffee and “I’ll be fine”.

I was a zombie a lot of days.

I’d ended up doing all-nighters even where none were necessary. Perhaps a bad habit I first picked up under the pressure of university deadlines. I was young then, I thought I was fine. When it “worked”, and nothing too bad seemed to happen, I hit those deadlines even when the grades slipped, I learned the wrong thing: that day-sleeping was “fine”. Who needs sunlight in the era of the electric light? Everyone. It turns out. Everyone still needs it.

My sleep schedule was broken, then fixed, then broken again. I had to change something. In fact, I had to change pretty much everything.

I changed my old bed, I changed my old mattress, I had to get new pillows, new bedding, new duvets. It was long past time anyway. Then I had to toss those duvets and pillows too since somehow they kept the humidity in and made me sweat. The pillows were too soft, too thin. I bought a daylight alarm clock and a white noise maker. I started sleeping with the window cracked open for air… did you know humans need air even during sleep? Many houses don’t seem designed with that in mind!

I even changed houses — but that wasn’t really to pursue sleep, even though I think it did help. I started going for walks. At least once a day, sometimes twice a day. Then I started exercising more, lifting weights. Building muscle. Checking my diet. Having my last meal of the day earlier — 4 or 5 hours before bed.

Everything was different, the sleep was better. Energy was better. Mood was better. But it’s still missing something. I’m still staying up too late. Getting up a little late and out of sync with the sun and the rest of society. There was still something wrong, a belief that I shouldn’t have: that I could still watch tv, or use the phone, or look around the internet, switch it off, and instantly switch off my brain and body and go to sleep too.

Of course not, right? I am not a machine. We’ve established that. I don’t have an off switch. But I do have a daily rhythm. When I’m doing something before bed, my mind still continues until it can wind down on it’s own. The thoughts still race, thinking about what I’d seen. So that happened in bed. Tossing, turning, thinking, lying awake. Half an hour — an hour, getting back up. Maybe more TV will fix it? Sir… what are we doing?

I gave myself a curfew: I had to turn off all electronics some time before bed. I tried an hour. Felt too long. Currently I’m on at least 30 minutes before bed. So what do I do in that time? Now there is a gap in my schedule of… nothing?

Long ago, I had been interested in meditation. But somehow it’s not something I ever really found a moment in my day for. Now, I had finally made space. So it slotted in easily and naturally. For perhaps the first time in a decade I was sitting, quietly, not without thoughts — I’m not at that level and perhaps never will be — just letting the thoughts flow with as little judgemnet as possible. Without trying to direct it too much. That’s sort of how you do it, right?

In the darkness of the night, with the lights off, with just the neighbourhood lights trickling in for the faintest of illumination, I felt faintly bored. Not an emotion I get too often these days to be honest. Always there is a distraction to hand. Unless you make for yourself space in which to be bored — as I had.

Traditionally, with lights on in the house, we would keep the curtains closed for privacy, warmth and comfort. It wasn’t that cold that evening, and no lights were on. So I opened the curtains and just looked out. Stared at the stars. I didn’t have strict rules of meditation anyway. I just had to make space, in time, for my mind. Staring into space in that time somehow made sense.

First night I didn’t get many stars, to be honest. I got a haze obscuring them. But the night view of the neighbourhood was calm and different than the day view. Then I did it again the next night and got some real stars. Then the next.. And I started to wonder… why didn’t I do this already?

The night sky is accessible and universal. Our ancestors would have had even better views without city light pollution, I thought. Somehow I still yearn for that view sometimes. I suppose some people in rural areas still will have better views than I do. Staying inside all day, and all night, without even looking out, doesn’t seem right?

So why not try looking at the sky, taking in the view. In the evening, before bed? Even if it doesn’t really help me or you sleep, we can still do things for the pleasure of their own sake. It feels calming to me, so I’ll keep star staring. Or star gazing! At least for now anyway. My sleep routine is still a work in progress and this is just one of so many things I’ve tried.

Maybe we need to talk about caffeine some time.

🙂

-R