Well, my first week of trying to get eight hours of sleep every night has actually been quite successful! Even if I go so far as to measure it by actual hours slept (rather than by effort like I had originally planned) I did pretty well. Here, take a look:
Unfortunately, despite all of this sleeping I still caught a cold. On Monday night I started developing that tight feeling in my throat that indicates something bad is about to happen, and that continued all through Tuesday but didn’t materialize. Until Wednesday, when I woke up feeling terrible. I considered staying home (i.e., at the hotel) rather than going to the office, but I had a lot going on so didn’t feel like I had much choice. Fortunately, Wednesday was definitely the low point of the cold and it gradually got better from there. On the one hand it sucked to be sick; but on the bright side, it was a good excuse to go to bed early a lot! #SilverLining
Because I was sick, I was generally yawning up a storm by 6pm every night, which meant that if I wanted to go to bed at 8 or 9 it wasn’t hard. And I would hazard a guess that getting all of that extra sleep is what helped me to (mostly) kick this cold. I still have a bit of a sniffle, yes, but my sore throat is gone and I’m definitely feeling more alert and with it then I was in the middle of last week. This year I feel like I’ve gotten sick a lot more than in years past (thanks for nothing, flu shot!), and I would attribute at least some of that to the fact that I haven’t been getting enough sleep for a while. Hopefully by focusing on it in April I can make this my last cold of the season!
But here it is 10pm and I’m still not too tired, so maybe this challenge will be different (and harder) now that I’m healthy? I’ll check in next week and let you know!