The Long Sleeper and the Monkey Mind

I have always been a long sleeper.

Long sleeper is the term for someone who needs more sleep than most and has been that way since they were a child. A long sleeper needs 10 to 12 hours of sleep to feel fully rested, and when they don’t get this, they feel sleepy during the day.

I have been a long sleeper since I was a baby, it being an old family story that I happily slept through the night as an infant and had to be made to wake up in the morning. I was also a grumpy morning person even then.

The problem is, long sleepers like me live in a world where such requirements for sleep are seen as abnormal. Typical guidance for sleep is 7 to 9 hours a night, for most people this is sufficient as long as it is good quality sleep. For a person like me, it just means I am tired, tetchy, and unable to stay awake.

It feeds into a chronic cycle of tiredness that reaches a point where you wonder if something is seriously wrong with you. There never seems enough time in the day and you are always craving sleep. At weekends I can easily sleep much longer, with many long sleepers dozing off for up to 15 hours on weekends to compensate for sleep deprivation during the week.

Long-term, being chronically sleep deprived is bad for our overall health and can lead to numerous problems include mental fog, lack of concentration, low immunity, obesity, stress and anxiety, diabetes and even heart disease. The list of serious conditions that can be worsened by lack of sleep seems to be increasing with research and demonstrates just how important getting rest is.

Yet, conversely, we live in a society that places low value on rest. We are encouraged to work longer hours, to fill our spare time with intense activity and are viewed as lazy or undynamic if we prioritise rest. It is a pattern that is bad for our bodies, making us less productive rather than more and, for a long sleeper like me, it makes life extremely difficult because fitting in everything that is expected of me and getting enough sleep is impossible.

For most of my life I have been battling my body’s need for sleep. I have told myself if other people seemed fine with just eight hours a night, then why not me? I would set alarms for early in the morning to try to give myself extra time to do things and I would push myself to go out at night to participate in the various dog sports clubs I belonged to. I would convince myself I did not need ten hours a night. The result? Chronic fatigue.

It hit me hard during the pandemic of 2020. With all my usual activities put on hold and with a national lockdown meaning we could not leave the house, I found myself suddenly with a lot of empty time to fill. With all this enforced downtime, I assumed the exhaustion that dogged my every hour would now ease – I had just been sooo busy, after all. No wonder I was tired.

Only, it didn’t.

I realised what I thought was just being tired from doing too much had turned into Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. I had to reassess my lifestyle in a big way. I had to learn to slow down and allow my body the opportunity to rest and renew.

Here I am, two years on, and the CFS has ebbed, but it is always there in the background. If I try to push myself too hard it reappears and bites me. I can crash out for days if I am not careful. I have had to redesign my life, a difficult task when I also happen to be a driven, determined person who has so much they want to do. One of the reasons I ended up this way in the first place is because, through sheer determination, I pushed myself through my exhaustion over and over until my body could not take it anymore.

As I face the New Year, I find that my goals are not the ones I would have set a few years ago. Instead of resolving to do more, achieve more, succeed more, my New Year’s Resolution is to SLOW DOWN. Slow down in everything I do, from walking the dogs, to eating, even to working. Be in the moment, enjoy what I am doing and don’t rush through everything. I am asking myself to change the habits of a lifetime, but I am determined and part of this new me campaign, is to place priority on sleep, on rest and rejuvenation.

Sounds simple enough. I know I am a long sleeper and I need a good ten hours at night to feel functional. I have finally recognised that need and worked my schedule so that I can get that nightly long kip, where is the problem?

The problem comes from my busy brain, the one thing that seems to have not received the message about sleep. I might have prepped the schedule, I might have turned off all my devices, I might have the phone on do not disturb and tracking my sleep pattern, but the brain is not onboard.

I like the phrase used in meditation practices Monkey Mind. The monkey mind darts all over the place and has trouble focusing on one thing. It gets distracted easily and has difficulty shutting down and slowing down. It can be a nuisance at many points during the day, but especially at night when I am trying to sleep.

That is the moment for the Monkey Mind to go into overdrive.

“That thing we did today, remember that thing? Right now is the perfect moment to over-analyse it completely. It will only take one, maybe two hours.”

“You know what our friend said in that message earlier today? I am just wondering if it had a hidden message to it. I mean, we read it as a straightforward apology for not being able to go for coffee, but what if actually they no longer want to be our friend? I think we should discuss it immediately.”

“Can you hear that weird noise outside, like a scrambling sound? I mean, it is probably nothing, but then again… We should listen to it in silent fear until it goes away, no matter how long that takes.”

“You know how you set the alarm to go off at six? Ok, so just letting you know it is one o’clock right now, thought I better wake you to let you know that, in case, the alarm fails or something. Go back to sleep.”

“By the way, just giving you a nudge because it is two in the morning now, for the alarm thing. Go back to sleep.”

“Oh, its three o’clock now, you still got three hours.”

“Hiya, it’s just gone four. Look, I know I am waking you up every hour, but you don’t want to miss that alarm now, do you?”

“Hel-llllooo, its five now. Why are you groaning?”

Getting a good sleep rhythm going is like finding the Philosopher’s Stone for me. I am on a constant quest to learn the secret of a good night’s sleep and to sustain it forever.

To that end, I am finding ways to deal with my Monkey Mind and to get settled into a sleep routine that suits me, as a long sleeper, not a sleep routine that suits XYZ health guru on YouTube.

The plan is as follows;

1) have a set routine for getting up and going to sleep – this is one of my big battles because I often mess up my own routine by staying up later than I mean to or deciding to ignore my alarm. The trigger, ironically, usually comes when I am feeling more rested so I think to myself I can risk a little less sleep. This year, I am sticking to my routine and hopefully tuning my body into rest time and wakey time.

2) Meditation – I actually started meditation during 2020, not for my sleep, but as a general way to try to cope with the bizarre situation the world found itself in. I wanted to calm down my Monkey Mind as well and stop it darting all over the place. This year I am aiming to bring the mantras of meditation and mindfulness into other areas of my life so that a peaceful mindset is something I can nurture whether I am meditating or not.

3) Slow Down! – I have a tendency to get obsessed about things and have to do them right now, not later, even if this happens to be at midnight. It could be a project I am working on or checking an email about something. I can’t let it go and so I am always rushing to get things done. This year, I am consciously slowing down and embracing when something doesn’t get finished exactly when I wanted it to. Whether that is when I am painting or reading or responding to work. I am going to remind myself it is ok to let things wait until morning.

4) Take a step away from social media – ok, another obsession is flicking on my iPhone any moment I have going spare to check what the world is doing. That is Monkey Mind at work, but what happens is then I become involved in reading posts when I ought to be going to bed, or I read a story that gets me worked up and I dwell on it. No screen time after 7pm, it is a promise I am making myself.

5) Bullet Journaling – Bullet journaling is something I dabbled with last year then forgot about. This year I want to use it as a means of organising my task list and also my brain, so that I don’t suddenly awake at five in the morning with this terrible sensation I have forgotten something I needed to do. As long as everything is listed in my bullet journal, I don’t have to worry, and it takes one more task away from the Monkey Mind.

6) Enjoy the moment more – I think this one is very important. I spend my day rush, rush, rush and then I expect my brain to just shut off when I hit the pillow. I know it is not as simple as that, and I know what I need to do is reducing my rushing during the day, so that I can relax at night. Life flies by too fast, I want to embrace each moment and pause and notice that this is what I am doing. Right now. Nothing else. Just this.

I am hoping to stick to my sleep plan and to make 2022 the year I feel rested. There will no doubt be blips and hurdles along the way, but if I can make this change, I hope it will set me up for a healthier, longer life. As New Year’s Resolutions go, saying I intend to get more sleep does not sound terribly impressive, and perhaps that is why so many of us fail to sleep, because we do not put much value into rest. It is the wrong attitude. But I am not out there to change societies expectations for sleep, I am just working to change me. If I can conquer my sleep battles, what else might follow as a result? This year I am putting value into my downtime and every year after that.