What Dreams May Come.

It’s Time to Address the Elephant in the Room : The Elephant of Poor Sleep That Is.

One of my potential failure modes, and the one that iv’e never addressed, is my chronically poor sleep which has been caused in part by years of internal rotation shifts and the simpler reason of me drinking far too much coffee and way too late. When my partner (Jackie) developed PMR (Polymyalga Rheumatica) a couple of years ago I wondered if one of the things that had caused it was her increasingly poor sleep when she had to work night duty. In my turn it was probably the appalling duty rota in the final career phase of my time as a specialist nurse that pushed me into early retirement.

Even worse, I suspect that years of working mixed shifts – what we call internal rotation – was one of the factors that ultimately led me to having a series of strokes. For sure my biscuit consumption and occasional bouts of hypertension didn’t help plus i’m at the downstream end (genetically) of two parents that both suffered strokes in later life and although neither one died directly because of a stroke they were both affected by them. It’s fairly well known among many shift workers that the best work pattern is to follow the body’s natural night/day cycle while somewhat worse is to work permanent nights and worse by a long way is to work a pattern that includes night and day shifts in the same week : welcome to my life as a senior specialist nurse.

When I retired, first time around, it took two years before I started sleeping normally at night – only to go back to a part time job even if only for a few years. Now, I should have no trouble sleeping but my sleep is worse that it’s ever been : I put that down to a combination of the prostatitis that’s making my life miserable and the fact that I drink coffee in the evening. My last drink of the day is often as my partner comes home from her long day shift and that’s often 9pm.

In my great push towards some degree of health, fitness & strength I fastened onto the simple notion of dealing with one big thing at a time : the first thing, for me, was to stop eating biscuits totally and I think iv’e managed that. Then came basic exercise in the form of a simplistic walking regime that has since gradually evolved into something a lot more effective. Now, the biggest single problem I have to deal with is poor sleep. Last week, as I write, I cut back my coffee drinking to having my last mug at or before 5pm : lo and behold I had a heavy night’s sleep. This week i’m experimenting with bringing that forward to 2pm : thus as I write i’m having my last coffee of the day.