As someone coming off a week of sleep-deprivation, I am definitely experiencing firsthand the way a lack of sleep affects one’s mind and body. In my younger years, I could pull an all-nighter with the best of them, functioning quite effectively off 5 or 6 hours of sleep. But those days are behind me. I’m not a teenager anymore. I am not a pleasant person to be around when I don’t get my 8 hours, lol. Early to bed, early to rise is how I live my life, my sleep schedule so regular that I don’t even have an alarm clock in my bedroom. My body just gets up around 7-ish every morning, all by itself. Unless something happens to throw my schedule off.

It all started Monday when I brought the new kitty home. My new, 7 month old, nocturnal kitty who kept me up all night wanting to play. Not cool. I finally got to sleep around 3am, only to have the phone ring a short while later at 4:30am. It was Dena, alerting me that baby Isabel was finally going to grace us with her presence 🙂 So up to Vallejo I go… A long day in labor and delivery, but turns out it was another false alarm, so back to Santa Cruz… As soon as I return home, I head directly for bed, sleep the only thing on my mind. I got maybe 3 hours in before kitty is all up in my face (literally!) wanting to play. Seriously, this cat seems to like sitting on my HEAD. Have you ever tried to sleep with a cat sitting on your face? Anyways, to make a long story short, I haven’t gotten a good night’s sleep all week, and it is starting to wear on me mentally and physically. I feel the second cold of the season coming on, and as someone who doesn’t get sick often, I am beyond annoyed at my weakened immune system.

Faby told me about this article she read in TIME magazine about the effects of sleep deprivation. The author, Sora Song cites a 2003 sleep study’s results:

“The human brain is only capable of about 16 hours of wakefulness [a day] … When you get beyond that, it can’t function as efficiently, as accurately or as well.”

She goes on to say that:

“What most people don’t realize is that the purpose of sleep may be more to rest the mind than to rest the body.  Indeed, most of the benefits of eight hours’ sleep seem to accrue to the brain: sleep helps consolidate memory, improve judgment, promote learning and concentration, boost mood, speed reaction time and sharpen problem solving and accuracy.”

No shit.

Before I read that article, I was suffering through the sleep dep, continuing to stay up late working, trying to squeeze some productivity out of every waking hour. It’s no wonder I find myself staring at a blank page for hours at a time, not producing anything but a steady stream of frustration. What I should do is just Go To Bed.

And on that note…

Ever catch yourself walking by a mirror and gasp, wondering “Where the hell did THAT come from???” lol Well, my habit during winter is to hunker down and hibernate, so I accept the fact that over the holidays I’m going to gain a little ‘winter weight.’ Now that the temperatures are starting to warm and the skies are beginning to clear, I’m realizing it’s time for me to get off my ass and get moving again. Cardio. Yoga. There is no time like the present. It will be swimsuit season before we know it and I may be in the Islands as early as April.

So it’s time to start riding again. Spent all day yesterday cruising around town on my bike. The Groundhog may have signaled six more weeks of winter, but it was gorgeous and sunny in Santa Cruz…

My ride started up at UCSC, looking down at my lovely, little ocean town.

Then I rode down into town and North on Highway One towards Wilder Ranch…

Then back into town, cruising along West Cliff…

Even stopped at Steamer’s to watch the surfers for awhile… There was some kind of surfing competition going on…

It was a great day and being out in the sunshine really energized me. I think its time to shake off winter and start thinking about the ways we can prepare for the coming of Spring. It’s the start of a whole new cycle of birth and renewal!

Well, its been over a year now that I’ve been doing this writing thing (seriously), and I’m starting to notice some of my cycles/patterns. Like the writing/editing/reading pattern. After I meet a writing deadline, I switch hats and go into editing mode, which involves looking at the manuscript in a completely different way. When writing, the focus is on expansion, and when editing, the mentality is slice, cut, shave… I’ve discovered that after I finish a major edit/revision, I need a break from writing altogether. I find myself spending my “work” time reading, which I suppose is still technically work if you think about it as studying your contemporaries and researching your competition. 😉

I’ve resumed reading NEVA HAFTA, which I had to abandon halfway through about a month ago to read about HypnoBirthing. Anyways, it’s funny how one can’t fully ‘shift gears’ overnight. Here I am soaking in the bathtub, trying to enjoy my book, when I hit a paragraph that makes me want to reach for my red pen, lol. My mind is still in editing mode, and I just want to axe every stray “that” and rearrange complete sentences… And it’s not even my book! LOL! Will I ever be able to read like a normal person again???

(Not to say that Edwardo’s book is riddled with bad grammar, which it’s not. His writing is very strong. I’m just stuck in editing mode.)

Anyways, critical twitching aside, its nice to be a consumer again. I believe reading makes people better writers, and I try to devote as much time to reading as I do other parts of my career. When my mind if sufficiently decompressed from the stress of overwork to meet a deadline, I will pick up the pencil again and get to it. Full circle…

Freakin’ FINALLY!

Oh my God, if you even knew how hard I’ve been working the past 3 days… This thing took way longer than I would have liked to get shipped, but what can I say, sometimes life gets in the way. I totally would have met my Monday deadline too if I hadn’t spent over eight hours in the car this weekend, driving back and forth from SC to SF for the Hypnobirthing classes, and then up to Vallejo on Monday for a “practice run” of Isabel’s birth 🙂 But alas, Dena wasn’t really in labor, and so back to Santa Cruz I went for the final pushes of my own personal labor.

I am so happy right now I want to throw a party. It’s DONE. No more editing, no more revising. It will soon be in the mail and I can forget about it and move on to other things. Like writing the next book. And finishing Edwardo’s, lol. I feel like a huge weight has been lifted off my shoulders, and I seriously wanna dance around or something corny like that, lol. Man. And its a LOST night? Life is good.

Alright, this is my first night “off” in awhile, so I’m about to get to it. Just wanted to share the good news 🙂