I’m currently wrestling with the issue of not feeling like I have enough time to do everything I want to do. There are a couple of reasons for this. The first is that I’m not waking up as early, ever since the clocks went forward. I keep setting my alarm for 6am or even earlier but I’m being woken up, clearly in the middle of a REM cycle, because I’m just hitting snooze and going back to sleep. This morning I did that for about an hour so it was 7 by the time I finally got up. That’s around 2 hours later than I was getting up over the winter. Weirdly, I seem to naturally wake up earlier in winter than summer. I think it’s because with the dark evenings I naturally fall asleep earlier, and so I wake up earlier. I’ve been having a lot of trouble sleeping lately, even leading to me having to nap in the afternoons because I’m literally not able to keep my eyes open any longer. Which is just making the problem worse. Last night I thought I went to sleep pretty quickly but it would have been around 10:30 or even later, and so 5:45 was only 7 hours later. So it’s not quite enough time. But when I’ve tried to go to bed earlier I’ve just tossed and turned for hours before falling asleep.
The other thing is I’m trying to increase my running mileage. And I think that’s making me more tired and contributing to not being able to get up as early. So I’m basically losing 2 hours from my morning some days, and at least one hour every morning. And yes, in theory I could just move everything back an hour or two, but in practice that can’t always happen, if I have some fixed appointment. Plus, I just automatically start to get anxious is my “morning” routine is starting to take up more and more of the morning. I also prefer to do most of my work in the morning, as well as any running and/or workouts. Because I’m trying to run more, I’m needing to add back in some morning runs one or two weekdays, and so that’s an added pressure. Plus I’ve added two leg workouts back in but I don’t want to lose the yoga that I have been doing maybe 3 or 4 days a week.
So I’m trying to add in quite a bit of extra stuff into my day. I’ve also had quite a lot of work to do as a volunteer for my running club, which should hopefully die down again soon, but it just happens to have come along at exactly the same time as the extra running and strength work AND my freelance work picking up again after a period of less to no work.
So quite possibly I genuinely have less time because I’m trying to put more things into my schedule. I was hopeful that my No TV challenge would balance this out, but I’ve actually not noticed that so far. I’ve found that sometimes I’m just actually too physically tired to do anything other than watch TV and play iPad games. I’ve tried to substitute reading and sometimes it works, as long as it’s not something I really need to concentrate on. Also a friend is coming to visit in two weeks and this is the first visit from anyone for absolutely ages, maybe even years, so I’m a bit stressed about getting the house in a fit state for a visitor. Again, more work, more energy, more time.
It’s great to have fun stuff to do but unfortunately at the moment all I can see is the effort and time I’ll need to put in, which is a bit sad really, isn’t it, and not at all how I WANT to feel.
So how do I turn this round? I’m trying to deal with the inability to go to sleep early by setting my alarm in the hope that I’ll eventually be so tired I fall asleep earlier. The problem is at least two nights a week I end up staying up later due to running in the evening, which I can’t or don’t want to change. So that tends to disrupt things. I don’t want to reduce my writing. It’s hugely beneficial and making me feel really happy. I don’t know if I know what the solution is actually. I’m not sure if it’s a question of actually physically removing tasks, but more a question of changing my attitude. I can just keep taking baby steps and trust that it will work out ok in the end. So today I am a bit later with things, but I can be happy that I’ve written another blog post and I can trust that the rest of my day will flow in the way it’s supposed to, and there’s no need to worry.
Actually, just on that note, I do find that often when I’m worrying about everything I have to do, just writing it all down neatly so that I know I won’t forget to do it can really help. Often when I’m most anxious I discover that it’s because I haven’t carried forward tasks from the previous weeks into today’s week in my Bullet Journal. Just going through those past weeks, and either crossing out stuff I no longer think is important, or carrying stuff into today’s weekly spread, is often enough to ease my concerns. Another thing that can often be a cause of stress is when I know I have something urgent or important or where someone else is waiting on me for an answer or an action. Sometimes just doing one smallish task is enough to make that anxiety go away.
So that’s a little account of how I’m feeling a bit time-poor at the moment and what I’m doing to ease that feeling and get back to feeling good!