Something interesting has started to become apparent over the last few days. I had fallen into a pretty solid routine of heading to bed by 10pm or so, and getting up at the crack of dawn between 4am and 6am. It was practically clockwork.
For the past couple weeks we’ve had a guest staying with us, so I’ve been enjoying staying up a bit later with him, and then usually after he calls it a night I stay up a bit longer to wrap up various things. This has had me heading to bed anywhere from 11pm to 1am – closer to my “classic” bedtime of my pre-Soylent days.
However, I still wake up by 6am or so and am just UP instantly. I’ve gotten very used to this since starting on Soylent, and I actually really dig it. I have so much more time because of this (not to mention not having to stop & prepare food several times per day).
But here’s the interesting bit. Since I’ve been staying up later lately and getting up early, I’m finding that my body is pretty dang tired. I feel physically underslept, something I’m perfectly familiar with and isn’t terribly surprising.
What is surprising, is that my mind isn’t underslept one single bit! I’m mentally as alert as I’ve ever been. Normally in the past when I’d be low on sleep, I’d have “brain fog” and not be thinking really clear, have a hard time focusing, etc.
Not so now. Even though I’m yawning and my body just kinda wants to go lie down, my mind is relentlessly awake, focused, and productive. It’s a very odd thing since I’ve had the opposite many times… where I caffeinate or otherwise stimulate my physical body in order to get going, but my brain takes a while to catch up and isn’t really cooperating. Now I have the reverse!
Gotta say I think I prefer this though, since mood is so much a function of the mind, and when my body is all energized by my brain isn’t into it I tend to be pretty damn grumpy and irritable. But now my mood is excellent, I just feel a little weary, physically-speaking. I’ve no doubt that a little nap would do the trick, or getting a good full night’s sleep to catch up. But frankly with my mind this awake, I’m not sure I’d be able to nap anyway if I wanted to.
Guess I’ll just go have some more Soylent. It’s lunch time anyway. 🙂
Great news!
I often need to try and pull late nights to catch up on sudden extra work loads or unexpected problems. I found that with my brain so foggy I often make costly errors, which means I have to work extra slow and careful, which takes more time, which REALLY wrecks me for the next day.
Vicious circle.
My first order of Soylent should be arriving in 12 weeks or so (another delay), and I really hope I experience just half of what you folks have.
This change alone would be a huge help to me.
Yeah, the way I feel in the mornings now is SO different from how it used to be. Although it’s funny… I’m so used to “the new me” now, that it no longer seems special when I get up in the mornings. I have to consciously think back to how I remember my morning routine being pre-Soylent, in order to know for sure that there’s a difference!