You Ask, I Answer, Take 3

Today's question comes from Christianne, who asked:

Are you a morning person, night owl, blend of the two, or something else entirely?

Well, it's 11:30 at night as I'm sitting down to get this post ready for posting, so I'm not sure if that gives the answer away?

By natural inclination, I'm absolutely a night owl.  My ideal schedule in the world would have me turning out my lights somewhere between midnight and two am, and not crawling out of bed or needing to be functional until eight to nine hours after I finally turned the lights out and fell asleep.

To be honest, decades of chronic insomnia has probably made me into the night owl that I am.  I figure, if you're not going to sleep, why just lay there?

I've never been a morning person.  If I'm working in a position where I need to be at work in the morning, I adjust my going to bed schedule accordingly, but my best work definitely happened in the later morning hours.  In fact, I'm so not a morning person that I'm not even a breakfast person! Unless we're talking about breakfast for supper, in which case I'm totally on board, unless you're serving me eggs.  (I have texture issues.  I'll eat eggs if they're scrambled or in omelet form, with enough other ingredients to disguise the fact that it's actually an egg.  But I digress...)

I would say that typically, if I'm on a student sleep schedule, or my ideal sleep schedule as described above, my best and most functional hours of the day probably start around 7 pm, or even later.  I was not a "write a term paper during the day kind of girl".  I was definitely (and am still) the kind of student who tended to start assignments sometime after supper and then work straight through the evening, with little breaks for food or whatever, until I finished it, usually sometime after midnight.  I'd give them a quick polish the next morning, and be off and running.

Lately, I've implemented a new bedtime routine on the advice of someone I trust, that is supposed to help ease my chronic insomnia.  It involves spending the final hour before turning my lights out with no screens - no cell phone, no television, no computer.  This is challenging for me, since I'm used to working online or watching television dramas while working on other projects until I'm ready to fall asleep, and then turning the lights out and beginning my nightly dance of dreaming, sleeping and waking.  Bedtime wasn't consistent or predictable.  Now my night owl ways (and my aversion to change) are being challenged as I try to predict when I'll want to go to bed.  As I try to cram that "one last thing" in before turning off the laptop or television or both, and going through my routine of quiet prayer and thinking and reading for that last hour of the day.  It's putting a kink in my night owl unpredictability, but if it actually makes a difference in my insomnia challenges, then I'll celebrate it, I suppose.

Thanks for the question, Christianne!

Keep them coming y'all.  I'm totally having fun answering these, and the directions they're taking are surprising even me, and I'm loving it!

What about all of you?  Morning person? Night owl?  Something totally different?