I've never been a good sleeper.  Even when I was younger, it always took me well over an hour to fall asleep--pretty unusual for an 8-year-old.  But my brain just doesn't shut off.  Even if I'm not worrying per se, I can't stop thinking.

As I've gotten older, my circadian clock has shifted to be ever later.  I can fall asleep fairly easily as long as I don't head to bed until at least 2am.  A lot of times, later.  I've tried forcing myself to wake up early in the morning in the hopes that then I'll want to fall asleep earlier.

Nope.  Didn't work.

Just as I haven't yet mastered the art of intuitive eating, I apparently having mastered intuitive sleeping.  It seems obvious that you would fall asleep more easily if you're really tired.  You would think, right?  Not always, though. 

I don't think that being an extreme night owl is wrong or bad, but it's not always convenient when you're trying to keep regular work hours.  I had hoped by having a little less sleep for a few days that I would get tired earlier.  Except I didn't.  If I just stayed up until I really felt like going to sleep, I'd be up until the middle of the night.

Which has ultimately led me to the conclusion that I need more structure to my sleep schedule.  On the one hand, going to bed earlier means that I will probably be tossing and turning for many hours.  On the other hand, if I don't start going to bed earlier, then I'm never going to actually start getting to sleep earlier. I just get so insanely frustrated when I'm utterly exhausted, but my eyes won't stay shut.* Sleep meds just don't work for me, either.  If they do help me sleep, they turn me into a total zombie the entire next day, which sort of defeats the point of taking them.

Right now, I'm just hoping that more concerted efforts to sleep right will help.  Otherwise, I'm getting seriously frustrated.

*Sometimes, I have difficulty sleeping because I'm still hungry, but even when I get something extra, I still can't sleep.

I finally feel I have a moment to breathe.  I've been so busy the past few weeks that I really haven't gotten to just sit back and take a breath.  The upside is that I really do love my job, and so extra work isn't always a bad thing.  But I've been generally feeling stressed and utterly exhausted.  I usually wake up in the morning and feel ready to head right back to bed.

The ongoing insomnia isn't helping anything, either.

Still, I'm exhausted. 

I know I need to regroup for a bit, in order to face the next round of work, and the next round of recovery work.  I've written before that my work is a huge motivator for me in recovery.  For one, it gives my brain something to think about besides weight and calories.  And my identity is very tied up in what I do, so it gives me something positive with which to affiliate myself.

Because of this, and the fact that I work from home, makes it very easy to overwork myself.  Overwork isn't really any better than overexercise, and I'm psychologically and behaviorally prone to both. The other factor is financial--I had a couple of slow months earlier this year, and I can't afford more of that.  So I have anxiety driving me both to keep up financially and also to prove myself as a legitimate science writer.

I have plenty I need to do tomorrow, but I am also making a conscious effort not to overdo it.  To relax with TV show reruns in the evening and crochet, or read, or play with my cat.

So, yes.  Breathing.  Breathing is good.  I can't work if I burn out, and so working less now will let me do more later.

At least, that's what I'm telling myself.

Thank you all for your kind and wonderful comments on yesterday's post.  They were really helpful for me.

What I've come to realize over thinking about this awful fatigue and hypermetabolism mess is that I need to practice some serious radical acceptance.  Not that I expect that this will eliminate my fatigue, but hopefully, I can scrape up a few scraps of energy that I was wasting on resisting and fighting the current state of events.

So what do I need to accept?  Several things:

1. My need to eat a lot. My mom tells me most people would kill for my metabolism.  I tell her they don't need to bother, as I'm perfectly happy to give it away upon request.  But there's not much I can do about how much food I'm burning off right now.  It's just reality.  It's what I need to do to get better, it sucks, but there's also no real alternative.
2. I'm not going to be as productive as I usually am. This one is really hard for me. I generally hate on myself if I'm not constantly busy. It's fine when I have the energy, am engaged in life, and can plan in some breaks.  That's not my current life.  Again, it's unavoidable.  I'm lucky in that my work schedule is pretty flexible, and a couple of short months financially aren't going to be the end of the world.

I still don't feel good about these things, but I feel a smidge better. 

It's hard for me to just "accept" something.  I generally try to fight it, or change it, or subvert the system if there's something I don't like.  I'm not naturally very zen.  I'm anxious and high-strung, I don't like to just "be," and I don't generally take things in stride.  So radical acceptance is a very new concept for me.  New, but helpful.

What's something you're looking to radically accept? Share in the comments section!

Every night, the same thing happens. I mean to blog, I really do, but then I sit down at my computer and I'm just too stinking tired to write very much.  All I want to do is go to bed, preferably for a very long time. Plan B is to see if I can chug some Animagus juice and become my cat.  It's pretty much the same, I'd say.

Having such a mismatch between my drive to get things done and the energy needed to carry them out is really frustrating.  Usually when I'm extremely fatigued, I'm either so driven by anxiety and OCD that I don't even ask if I have the energy, or I'm so depressed that I don't care if I get anything done.  I'm fundamentally a very driven person, and I usually can summon the energy to do what I need to do on a pretty consistent basis.

But over the past few weeks, I've just been utterly drained.  I rarely make it through the day without a nap.  I feel like all I do is eat, sleep, and work.  I've done some crochet, yes, and I do try to watch at least one TV show a day, even if I am catching up on email while watching.  And it figures my book club picked A Tale of Two Cities for this Saturday's meeting. This isn't a piece of literature that can be described as a "page turner." 

I easily slip into mopey, woe-is-me moods.  I feel like I have no confidence, not because I'm actually lacking in confidence or drive, but because I don't have the energy to summon confidence.  Screw life goals, I just want a nap.  I want my email to stop pinging me with new messages, I want my editors to stop requesting another set of changes.  I want to wander around Target and not worry about how much work I need to be doing.

I wish I could just accept the fact that doing the extra eating and recovery work means that I might not be able to function as well at work and that's okay.  But that doesn't come easily to me.  In fact, it doesn't really come at all.  I don't look at my grades in grad school in the depths of my ED and think "Imagine how well I could have done if I wasn't sick!"  No, I think that I should have done better and worked harder and maybe tried to get more studying done while spending hours on the elliptical machine.

I can tell myself that I'm doing the best I can, and even though I get that it's true, I also feel that this still isn't good enough.  And then I realize that I don't have the energy to try harder even if I could, so it doesn't really matter.  The spoon analogy does help here. I'm using extra spoons at mealtimes and on recovery stuff, so it makes sense that I have fewer to "use" with work and other things.

I guess the moral of the story is that I'm tired of always equating fatigue and proper rest with laziness.  And when you're constantly fatigued, it's a pretty crappy situation to find yourself in.

Recovery is tiring.  Exhausting, really.  Between ED stuff, and my job, and trying to juggle everything else, I'm really just drained.

I'm trying hard not to resent my recovery--and the time and energy and money it consumes--but I'm not always successful.  It's hard, in the day-to-day slog of meal-snack-meal-snack-meal-snack, to take pride in my accomplishments (I ate! On my own! With no one watching!).  I resent that I have to eat.  I resent that it takes so damn much effort.  I resent grocery shopping and dishes.  I resent people who get to buy smaller-sized clothes and brag about it.

Yep.  That positive around here.

It's frustrating.  I want to be "over it," like a cold or the flu.  I want to put my illness behind me.  I want to look at a menu without first identifying the lowest-calorie, lowest-fat items.  I want--heaven help me!--to have a stinking clue what size I actually am.

I know the solution isn't "give up," but rather "keep going."  A nap helps provide perspective. So do kittens and friends.  For that matter, blogging about it helps.  Letting these feelings fester isn't good.  I know my support team doesn't like hearing that sometimes I want to pull a three-year-old-style temper tantrum and just say "Screw recovery!!!!"  But pretending that everything is all happy and shiny and unicorns pooping rainbows doesn't help, either.

I have been working hard to stay on the right path. Have I always been successful?  Well, no.  Not always.  Despite having many moments when I'm bloody well sick of anything related to recovery, I have to take a deep breath and ask myself: what are your other options?

I think about this.  Mostly, I don't like the other options and I know it.  In the quiet of the night, as I let the slow thud of my heartbeat lull me to sleep, I forgive myself for such heretical thoughts.  I think: tomorrow is another day.  Tomorrow I will get up and fight the good fight all over again.

And then I do.

Between the move and everything else that is going on in my life, I feel like I am juggling about 10 million balls, trying desperately to keep them all up in the air at the same time.  And I suppose not just keep them up in the air but keep track of where each ball is at any point in time.

If this were actual juggling instead of metaphorical, I'd be screwed.  My coordination is essentially nil.

Despite the metaphorical nature of my juggling, it is nonetheless exhausting.  I want to blog many nights, but I'm either too tired to actually put my thoughts into coherent sentences or too tired even to form thoughts, period.  I think back to my college days, when I lived on four hours of sleep and turbo-charged black coffee.  I was miserable and depressed, but I can't help but get jealous at the old Carrie who got so much done.  And then I feel lazy in comparison.

Considering I was neither mentally healthy (the OCD rituals were much of what kept me awake when I wanted to drop) nor do I really miss being that 18, 19, 20-year-old Carrie, I don't know why I haul out that old yardstick.  But I do.

One of the many topics I've been working on in therapy, from the first time I ever saw a psychologist over 10 years ago now, is "being gentle with myself."  Basically, it means sleeping when I'm tired, eating when I'm hungry, and so on.  As much as I know that not pushing myself to write in the wee hours of the morning is a victory, I still feel insanely guilty when I do lay my head upon my pillow.  As if the Forces of Lazy have somehow won a massive victory.

The years of abuse from the anorexia combined with the inexorable forces of aging have played no small role. My body simply won't let me push it that hard.  It falls asleep standing up.  It finds a way to sneak in a nap.

I took a power nap for about 30 minutes this afternoon, and I know I should be popping the champagne or something, but it makes me feel squeamish and guilty.  Sort of like when I eat something and it's not actually meal or snacktime.  My body doesn't follow a clock exactly, blah blah blah.  Logically, I get it.  But emotionally?  It's a whole different story.

I think it comes down to one word: should.  I shouldn't be hungry, I shouldn't be tired.  I have these internal rules about "appropriate" times to eat and sleep.  Feeling hungry or tired at "inappropriate" times really messes with my head.  I do love traveling, but the experience is often jarring for the first day or two, largely because my body clock is often thrown out of whack.  I do well with schedules.  I can become way the hell too attached to these schedules, yes.  But I also need them, probably more than most people.  Free time scares the hell out of me because I have no idea what I should be doing.  I've gotten okay with "me" time--reading, watching TV, crocheting, farting around in the kitchen.  All of these are fine.  But a block of time that I don't know what to do with?  Total freak out.

So I'm blogging about how I'm so damn tired I can't seem to work up the energy to blog, and here I've written a novel.  Figures.

I'm also falling asleep at the computer, so I'm going to call it a night.

I think that self-care is a big part of recovery.  That being said, my history of adequately caring for myself is generally bad.

If you are friends with me on Facebook or follow me on Twitter, then you have probably heard me whinging about my awful cold.  The terrible I-think-I-just-swallowed-glass-shards stage has passed, and now I'm into trying to figure out how to get through life with five gallons of snot sloshing around in my skull.

Not fun.

So instead of blogging tonight, I'm going to take a bit of my own advice and practice good self-care.  I am logging off the computer and getting some extra rest. 

With that, I'll talk to everyone in the morning.

My therapy sessions this week were unusually productive, yielding several important insights. I spoke with my dietitian at length to start integrating "enjoyable activity" into my life, and I got the go-ahead to begin yoga and walking, so that's good. Along with that came the dreaded meal plan increase, which irritated me (more food? Seriously?) but not as much as it might have.

The food-related insight has several different parts. My food was increased not only in preparation for my increased activity, but also because I wasn't sleeping well. Before my appointment, I was attributing my rise in insomnia with caffeine carelessness or anxiety or whatever. I never thought I might not be sleeping well because I was, you know, hungry or something. Case in point: last night I was up late reading and then I couldn't fall asleep. I didn't really feel hungry, just that my brain wouldn't shut off. I went downstairs and had some mommy time, and then she suggested I get something to eat. Despite my protests that I was fine (and I seriously thought I was), my mom cut me a slice of zucchini bread. And as soon as I started nibbling at it, I realized: Oh. I was hungry. After, I didn't fall asleep right away, but I eventually drifted off.

So the one insight is that even non-perceived hunger can keep me awake. It's a sign that my body really does know what it needs. The other insight is that I'm trying to look at the food increase not as just more to eat, but as a tool to help me sleep better. I'm still not thrilled about it, but I guess that's okay. I don't need to like it in order to eat more.

The other insight came during my therapy session, as my therapist and I discussed my ongoing body image woes. I can't not see myself as anything more than a jiggling ball of lard. And all I can think about when I'm in public is that people are staring at and disgusted by) my quivering thighs. I mean, aren't they giving off aftershocks that can be measured on the Richter scale? And I also brought up how I still have no clue (subjective or objective) what I really look like, especially when it seems I'm constantly watching the National Skinny Person's Convention while I'm waiting to be crowned Miss Blubber. I understand, on some level, that the evidence for this is pretty negligible. I know that the size of my shorts and jeans (Size X) is well below the population average and only contains one digit. Ergo, I'm far from fat. But looking at myself or looking in a mirror, and Elvis and rationality have just left the building.

So my therapist turned the question around a bit. "What would you say if I told you to guess the approximate size of someone who is five foot five and wears a Size X?" Well, I'm five foot five, and my shorts were Size X that day. Yet when I heard it coming from someone else, someone who I know isn't going to bother me with BS, I was able to realize this: "I'd say that person was pretty thin."

And my therapist, bless her red-headed, caffeine-loving heart, said: That person is you.

Although I still have several pounds to go in terms of weight restoration, I am currently about the same size I was before I relapsed. The Size X shorts are still kind of loose, but not freakishly so. So that is me, at my normal healthy weight, and that's just fine. Anyone else would call me on the thin side of average. I've told myself before, "I wear a Size X and people who wear Size X are not fat," and it never seemed o hold much weight (uh, har har) in my brain. But evaluating myself the same way I would evaluate other people, I can better understand that I really don't see myself accurately.

The point of this insight is not Holy Revelation, Batman: Carrie is Thin! It's not so much that I'm seeing myself as thin that makes me feel better. It's that I have a concrete clue to hold onto that just may help me perceive my body accurately. Not that it always works (it doesn't), but it's a way to remind myself that objects in the mirror are smaller than they appear.

My body has been freakishly tired lately, and last night I did something very unusual for me: I went to bed early. I was in bed at 10:30, and asleep by 11. Not only that, I didn't wake up until 10:15 this morning. I slept right through the night. Well, Aria woke me up once climbing all over my pillows and such, but otherwise, I slept right through the night.

And to top it all off, I took another nap this afternoon for about an hour and a half.

Even though a part of me knows I needed the rest, most of me feels pretty guilty. My apartment needs to be picked up. I have another tasks that should be accomplished one of these days. Instead, I slept.

Yes, I know, I will probably be more efficient at these tasks now that I am rested. I get that. But I also get that this is not rational, so rationalizing things with me probably isn't going to be all that effective. Like my old high school history teacher said: if you didn't reason your way into it, I can't reason you out of it.

I have had issues with sleep way before my food issues cropped up. One of my college friends called it, jokingly, "sleep anorexia," and I think there's some truth to that. The deliberate lack of sleep was due, in that case as well, to OCD. I was compulsively studying.

It sounds odd, right? I had all As for the semester (as always- I've never once gotten a B+. You'll know if I do because the world will stop and you will hear a sound something akin to Edvard Munch's "The Scream."), but I was absolutely petrified that there would be a question on a test that I wouldn't be able to answer. So I studied for hours each day. I had to log over 40 hours a week. Yes, I kept track. This was also independent of class and lab time (over 20 hours) and a part time job (over 20 hours). I color coded my notes, copying them out perfectly. One mistake and I had to chuck the page and start over. I memorized chunks of my biochem textbook. For a calc exam, I had to re-do every homework problem until I could do it--you guessed it!--perfectly.

I was a miserable anxious mess.

Lots of people pride themselves on being the most stressed, or being able to go with the least sleep. There's an appeal there, a sort of I-have-more-guts-than-you kind of thing. A willpower kind of thing.

Now, I don't want a job that will force me to work long hours. Partly, I don't want to give up my routine, I don't want to have to eat out all the time because I'm never home to cook, and I don't want to be too busy to exercise like I do. I also do my freelance writing and blogging and Etsy stuff in the evenings, so maybe it really isn't all that different. But all of that work has just lost its appeal. For all of the 11 years of education I've had since middle school, I worked myself to the bone.

Yet I can't shake those last vestiges of that thinking- the idea that I need to be productive, that I'm lazy if I let myself sleep. I don't know if there's a solution. I think I need to simply be more like Aria, who I can guarantee doesn't feel guilty for eating OR sleeping!

The new ad campaign for the Sealy Posturepedic mattress is "A Better Six."

The commercial goes something like this:

People need about 8-9 hours of sleep, but they're lucky if they get six. So why not get a better six hours of sleep? And the Posturepedic mattress is supposed to give you a fantastic six hours of sleep.

Maybe it does. I don't know- I've never tried one of these. But if you need eight hours of sleep and you're only getting six, the best mattress in the world isn't going to make you more well rested. A crappy mattress (like the ones I had at camp or college) can make eight hours of sleep feel like six, but a good mattress CANNOT make up for much needed sleep. It can't.

I find it appalling that our culture accepts and even encourages things like not sleeping enough and not eating enough. It's a subtle competition among some of the people I know, especially when we were in school.

"I only slept five hours last night."
"Lucky- I only got four!"
"Wow, I wish I could do that."

And on and on the conversation goes. Please note: I was the one getting four hours of sleep. That stress on my body eventually made it give out.

I see the "Better Six" mattress like the faux diet food out there. Those 100 calorie packs of Oreos? Don't taste anything like an Oreo. Frankly, they're not bad. But they're not Oreos. By a long shot.

And six hours of sleep isn't eight. No matter what kind of mattress you have.

Please note, kiddies, that this is not Rest in Peace, but Rest and Peace. I am not entertaining any morbid thoughts. At least not for the moment.

Last week, I worked mostly 11-hour days, plus a 2 hour commute since I'm now living with my parents (le sigh) and it's much further than my old apartment. So basically, leave at 7am, get home at 7:30 pm. Eat, blog, shower, sleep. In just about that order.

This weekend I struggled mightily with ED thoughts, a struggle I am still trying to fight my way out of. I am counting calories. Again. I have been trying quite hard to stamp this nasty little OCD habit out, but the anxiety...well, I do what I can. I have been maintaining in my target weight range, and am now utterly terrified of moving out of that range. Even though there's still quite a ways to go for me to be above range. I think a pound, a pound, it's not that big of a deal, it could be water, it could be clothes, it could be that I'm growing my hair out or that I didn't shave or who the bloody hell knows what. I keep trying to justify it to myself in my mangy little head when I realize: WHO CARES??!! It's one pound. That's all. One measly little pound. Why do I need to justify it? According to my mom (who supervises my food intake) I'm not eating too much. Not that this makes me believe her, per se, but I suppose she's seen me on some nasty Snickers benders, so at least she has a point of reference.

So it goes like: Eating=good. Bare cupboards=bad. Empty stomach=bad.

Hey, this math minor of mine (and basically a Master's degree in applied biostatistics) does come in handy.

All of this led me to think that maybe my lack of proper rest and sleep last week has something to do with my current struggles. I don't think it really caused them, but I do think I don't have quite as much energy to fight the ED thoughts.

I hate that I need about 9 hours of sleep per night. That's, like, so much wasted time when I could be reading, writing, crocheting, beading, etc. I know the body needs it, but there are also just so many things that I want to do. Add in that I royally hate my job but can't think of any better way to bring in some money, and you have my life situation right now. I go into work tomorrow, my first time since Friday, and I'm wondering about how my Loser co-workers are doing. I'm going to bring in chocolates in a little Easter basket and they better not vote those ones off my desk or I'm going to have the Easter bunny leave some teeth marks in their collective asses.

So. It's time for me to get moving so I can get some rest. This is, of course, to your disfavor because I do my best ranting and raving when I'm cranky.

Oh well. Deal with it.