Finding what works

Since about 2016 I've suffered from a completely random sleep schedule. I blame it on an antidepressant (my Dr. and I) tried that had me sleeping 20 hours a day. Ever since then I've been plagued by nights of insomnia with all the benefits that brings. *eyeroll*

But I've tried a lot of things to correct it. What finally seems to be working is leaning into my lab rat tendencies: I love logging things. 

My system of incentives and rewards is kind of silly - it started before COVID when I was in a deep depression of inertia. After months of literally doing nothing for as long as I could per day, I realized it couldn't go on and decided to use my Franklin planner and all kinds of themed stickers (Etsy loved me) to nudge me to resume more of a normal adult life. I don't use stickers or task schedules in the planner any more, though I do jot down what I've accomplished at the end of each day, along with other notes. 

A couple years ago I started a "cats' meal log" so I could feed the cats at fairly regular intervals, and those types of repetitive tasks really blur together and mess with my memory, so keeping a log really helps. Since late last year I also started using it as a sort of tracker on when I get up in the mornings. It works because feeding the cats is the first thing I do when I get downstairs in the morning. (Sadly, it's just "cat" now since we lost Luna in January.) 

And today I've hit a homer: I was up before 11 a.m. every day this month. This is a pretty big deal for me; the last time I accomplished this was *last* April. Simple goal: get out of bed before 11 a.m. every day. Because of my random sleep sync, this has been really hard. But ta da, this month's cat meal log:​

This is the meal log for when and what I feed Lucerne.* These repetitive tasks are way too easy for me to blur together, think I've already done it, or re-do it before the task needs it. This helps me keep Lucerne on a pretty much 4 - 6 hour meals schedule. A few months ago I also started using it to make an incentive for my regularization of my sleep schedule. That's the color-coding. 

I change the color scheme monthly. Now I'm going to up the ante and not count anything after 10 a.m. 

I don't know why these childish challenges work, like the massive sticker rewards I set up to drag me out of my depressive inertia a few years ago. ​They just seem to. For one thing, this log (and the one I keep for the daily litter box cleanout) scratch my old lab rat itch, lol. And this "Get Up!" tracker is succeeding in getting me to go to bed earlier - I tried doing the other way around, but if I'm not sleepy, going to bed earlier doesn't help at all. I don't set an alarm very often - I just try to get 6 - 8 hours of sleep a night. If it's at all light when I wake up I check the CPAP screen; if it's close to 6 hours, or more, I get up. I think Lucerne's signed up for the program - now he starts nagging me to go upstairs around 10 pm - I'm not there yet but I'm getting there.

*My mom had a stash of these old ledgers which I love. I decorate them with stickers & doodles and I love filling up the pages with helpful stuff. I took the meal log to the vet's with us yesterday and she was surprisingly impressed! She even took a photo for Lucerne's file of the page where I'd stuck the labels from all of the different cat food companies whose foods I'm currently tracking to see which ones he seems to like the most! She liked the pages where I've been tracking the cats' weights, which I get every few weeks just to try to spot problems looming. Sadly, Luna's illness went so fast I didn't notice if she was losing weight. 

So I just wanted to celebrate this step forward. 

I'm such a nerd.