I am up, wide-awake at 3 a.m. My legs feel like they have bolts of electricity shooting through them. I have had a problem sleeping for years. My insomnia is caused by a number of factors. Part of my challenge is I feel more creative late at night. But it gets old some times, not being able to sleep.
There seems to be an epidemic of sleeplessness. In our band on Sundays we have young players and two of the five suffer from severe insomnia. One of the band is nineteen the other twenty-six. They are troubled and tormented by their lack of sleep. So it isn’t just old guys that can’t sleep.
There are a few occupational hazards that compound my challenge. Speaking publicly fills my body with adrenaline. I feel like I could be up for days after I speak. The other is hearing of other people’s problems. Another person’s pain can keep me up a few hours. I have learned to budget how much pain I can take on from other’s lives. I experience helping nightmares where I am partly awake and partly dreaming. It’s horrid.
I have tried writing down my dreams. I stopped because they weren’t of any biblical quality. They were mostly about forgetting to wear my pants to work and such things. Some times I have dreams about how I might not be ready financially for retirement. I usually wake up realizing I am not ready and the dream hasn’t helped me any either.
So here I am up at 3 a.m. needing to be up at 5 a.m. to catch an airplane to D.C. I am tired of not sleeping. And so I am writing a few pieces. I thought I would share my challenge with sleep because so many seem to suffer from insomnia. The redeeming quality of my insomnia is it will go away in a day or so. I know a few tricks to overcome it I will deploy and I’ll be back in sync.
Nighttime is a great time to pray. I have taken many nights of sleeplessness as a call to pray. David did a lot of nighttime praying as did Jesus. It is a great time to pray when all is in the process of temporary death before the light brings things back. I journal these prayers. I have to say I have many more answers from these nighttime prayers than daytime prayers.
I have found a few keys that help with sleep most of the time:
1. Don’t drink caffeine after four o’clock
2. Try to not watch a really good TV show after eight o’clock.
3. Have a regular time you go to sleep.
4. If you’re not sleeping make it a pleasant experience.
5. They tell you to take naps. But most of the greet insomniacs were inventors and lived off of naps.
6. I think we can learn a great deal from our Latino brothers about siesta.
7. If you organize your schedule in a way that matches the rhythm of your life, it helps.
8. Don’t eat rich food after six o’clock
9. Don’t drink alcohol after dinner, either.
10. Watch a lot of sugar-based juices. You will be trying to burn it off in your sleep.
11. Read your Bible it’s a quick way to sleep.
12. Hard exercise helps greatly but I find if I exercise after five it keeps me awake.
13. Get some headphones and listen to music (this works the best for me).
My young music protégés both can go four days and longer with little sleep. Once I begin to not sleep that’s the way it goes for me. I will go without any more than twenty minutes of sleep at a time for a couple days at least. This triggers a core issue I have which can make me far too creative and energetic but it’s agonizing. I have to sleep or I turn into a pumpkin in many ways.
And then there is traveling amongst travel zones. I do this at least every five weeks regularly. It gets me every time. The trick is to get on the time of the place you are visiting. You feel like heck but you do end up sleeping better the second night. If you do sleep.
What got me going tonight were four things. First, I watched a Showtime show. It was on late. It’s a movie about a murderer. In some ways it’s cute but it other ways it’s gruesome and troubling. It’s a long story to share with you its socially redeeming qualities so we will just leave it at that. Second, I spoke two particularly difficult messages today. It depleted my energies to the point I didn’t have enough energy to rest. Third, I ate a large Turkey sandwich at 7:30 at night. I just can’t do that anymore Fourth; I sleep with a radio set on talk radio softly at night. The background noise helps.
But lately the radio has had news about Wall Street. The fact that we are likely to not have any more Fords or Chevys was the topic tonight and that the alternative is printing a bunch of money according to some pretty bright people. Tonight they were talking about farmers being forced to count livestock as producers of CO2 and therefore will likely be charged taxes for having too large a carbon footprint. This means food will be more expensive if the crazies get their way. I have a feeling history is going to smirk on Al Gore’s armies but the hungry in our time will suffer.
I need less news and more ignorance. But I read three papers on my computer. I read several blogs everyday. I listen to network news on the set and my computer. And eat big sandwiches. I need to make some changes. And in the mean time it might be time to exercise again and reach for the Ambien. They say once you get in the habit of sleep it’s hard to break.
I once preached through Norway and only slept an hour a night and spoke all day and all evening every night for two weeks. I was buggy by the time the tour was over. I went to the hospital when we landed in Germany and told them I hadn’t really slept for over ten days. They were concerned and handed me a few pills and told me get to my room and get into bed when I took them and sleep for three days until I remembered how.
Talking to other sleepless people doesn’t help. It only makes it worse for me. I begin to stay up worrying about them. So don’t write me about yours. I am contending in prayer that in not many days we will see that things haven’t been as bad as they say they are now and we can all go back to work rebuilding our retirement then we will sleep all night again.
