For nearly seven months straight...

[hmpf]

I've been getting up early in the morning to go to work (even if it wasn't paid work), etc. - and falling asleep at fairly 'normal' times. Now, barely a week into proper unemployed life, I'm already severely insomniac again, and completely unable to get up in the morning. In fact, I've been unable to visit the appropriate agencies because I haven't been able to make myself get up at a time when they're open (which is usually between 8 and 12:30 or so in the morning). It's not the depression often attributed to the unemployed - in fact, I kind of dread finding a job more than being unemployed at the moment, although I do know a job is necessary. My sense of self-worth and so on are not tied to having a job. It's quite simply an inability to submit to a normal diurnal rhythm without some *strong* outside force. As soon as the responsibility for my sleeping pattern lies only with me, with no pressure from an employer to get me out of bed, it decays.

This wouldn't be so bad if it really were the case that I can do everything I want and need to do in a given day at night just as well as in the morning. But of course that isn't true. I want to make jewellery, and that's noisy - so that's something I can only do during normal 'business hours'. Same goes, of course, for all the necessary bureaucratic stuff of daily life, especially unemployed life. There's even the fact that I *like* mornings, I like daylight, and I want to go for walks in the park and so on - and I won't be getting much daylight if I only get up in the afternoon, now that it's autumn. It gets dark early, here.

This is exasperating. I don't know what to do. Can somebody please force me out of bed at, say, 9:30 a.m.? That would be a more than humane time to get up by anyone's standards, yet I can't seem to manage it (and I can't seem to go to sleep before 6 a.m.)

Comments

Nah, no depression. Just year-round sleep problems.

[hmpf.livejournal.com]

(If I sound a bit depressed here sometimes that's because for much of the last three years I've been stressed out - and for more than a year now I've been looking unsuccessfully for a job. Neither is really conducive to an overly cheerful mood. But while I'm absolutely horrible at dealing with stress, I deal better with joblessness than some - so I'm reasonably confident I will not sink in the swamp of despondency or something, now. *g*)