My Incapabilities of Sleeping Early

And The Dumb Logic That Keeps It Going

I have this strange Stockholm Syndrome relationship with poor sleep.

With a day coming to a close, my circadian rhythm has my sleep time at around 10-11pm, which is pretty early by New York standards.

Despite feeling the heaviness of my eyelids and my body begging to sleep, there’s still an unquenchable lust to stay awake.

I’m not sure where my gallant resistance against my biology comes from.

Maybe it’s the innate desire to experience more life: the realization that staying awake is more exciting than temporarily being a dead body for 8 hours;

Maybe it’s because I was never good at sleeping as a kid, often preferring clandestinely playing video games and reading in bed under the covers.

Maybe it’s because of my productivity-pilled-David-Goggins-who’s-gonna-carry-the-boats-hustle-your-face-off tendencies which perpetually devalues sleep.

After being satisfied with my bold resistance against the inevitable, I eventually saunter to bed, implicitly linking the fullness of life to the quantity of time inflated by late nights doing only God knows what and not to the quality of time actually doing identifiable, memorable, and meaningful things.

When my alarm rings the next morning, all this gusto I had the previous night of being excited about being awake can no longer be found.

Never mind wanting to experience life; I rather roll around in bed, in a dream-like state of semi consciousness where time dilates and my to-do’s cease to exist.

Corralling the courage to escape my bed, I go through my typical morning routine feeling tired and grabbing for a cappuccino. Soon it hits midday and I cling onto a Coke Zero.

Wired with caffeine, I get this strange sense of pride for grinding regardless of the amount of sleep I got the night prior.

Here, my incentives are skewed. In my masochistic stubbornness, there is more glory in making progress while having poor sleep and being tired than there is while being alert and having great sleep.

I subscribe to my own stupid rendition of the “warrior” ethos, as if my sleep deprivation is somehow equivalent to that experienced by Navy Seal recruits during Hell Week.

I gravitate towards being ok with poor sleep, even if it objectively dulls effectiveness, reduces attention span, and negatively impacts mood.

Very quickly, the phrase “I should get more sleep” morphs into “I should drink more caffeine” and muttered affirmations of “I should lock in now.”

Eventually, when night hits, I find myself again driven by the excitement of being awake and repeat the cycle again by pushing my bedtime.

It’s embarrassing how much bad sleep I get given how much content I consume around sleep, biohacking, and life insights.

No amounts of Huberman Lab, Diary of a CEO, and Modern Wisdom podcast episodes on sleep and read-throughs of Matthew Walker’s Why We Sleep can convince my caveman brain to not think “let’s stay up lmao.”

There’s infinitely more discipline required in sleeping at a proper time than there is in working or staying up.