The Sleep Revolution

I have been in Paris for a week now, in a tiny little hotel room with a fold out couch for a bed.  It's not an incredibly comfortable foldout bed, but you wouldn't come to that conclusion if you'd looked at the hours I've been logging on it this week.

Over the past 15 years, and more intensely the last 7 or 8, I have had chronic insomnia.  Or that is to say I thought I had insomnia.  What I know for sure is that over that time I have averaged 5 - 6 hours of sleep a night.  I was the type that would lie awake in bed for hours trying to get to sleep each night with little luck.  That all changed when I moved East.  Now I have trouble staying up late, even if I wanted to.   It's all I can do to stay awake once it get's dark out. 

For those who know me well, you know that I am a notorious night hawk, rigidly so.  Years of trying to change my sleeping pattern yielded no results and mountains of frustration and exhaustion.  So what happened?  Well, that's a good question.

A number of events happened in close succession after I left Canadian soil to cause this radical change in my sleep schedule.  The most obvious of which was the jet lag, and the exhaustion that comes along with any serious duration of travel.  This knocked me flat on my ass for the first couple days, leaving me sleeping for 14 hours a night.

I expected the hearty helpings of sleep to pass quickly once I had shifted into the new timezone's schedule, but this is where the rest of the previously mentioned "events" took their toll:

• I haven't had a sip of caffeine since I arrived.  Not a drop of cola, not an ounce of tea. And stranger still, no desire to resume the habit.
• I am without distraction.  I have left behind all of the things that would normally keep me from bed.  No movies, no TV (at least in a language I can understand) and an internet connection too slow to stream anything.
• I have no work stress to think about.  Work is amazing and wonderful, but it has yet to present me with a pile of worries and problems.  

When you put all of these things together it is a potent sedative in the later hours of the evening.  Combined that with a warm meal and bang, I am out like a light by 10pm (and that's stretching it, last night I could have been sound asleep by 9).

I expect this will change a little over the coming weeks and months.  Work will eventually become stressful, and I will travel as a part of my work, almost necessitating some form of caffeine intake along the way.  that said, I've tasted the good life and I an not going to let it go without a fight!

Viva le sleeping!