Salon post: Sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleave of care...

[jenett]

Welcome to this week's salon post. I get us started with a couple of questions, but feel free to bring up totally different things if you'd rather.

(This is a public post, feel free to encourage other people to drop by, just note the 'if posting anonymously, include a name people can call you in responses' rule.)

Topic of the week
It feels like everything I'm reading is about sleep recently - okay, and I'm most of the way through Dr. Matthew Walker's Why We Sleep which is being recommended in a lot of those conversations.

So, my question for the week is "What works for you about sleep" and I'm sort of deeply curious about what people's preferences in bedding and making bed comfy are, if there are parts of that you're willing to share.

What I've been up to
Still on "Trial of a Timelord" in the Doctor Who rewatch (I have been dipping into other things, notably QI, which is also on BritBox, which is a weird clever British quiz show. (elisem and her husband introduced me to it last year.)


House rules:
* Consider this a conversation in my living room, only with a lot more seating. I reserve the right to redirect, screen, and otherwise moderate stuff, but would vastly prefer not to have to.

* If you don't have a DW account or want to post anonymously, please include a name we can call you in this particular post. (You can say AnonymousOne or your favourite colour or whatever. Just something to help keep conversations clear.)

* If you've got a question or concern, feel free to PM me.

Comments

[solitarywalker]

The thing i have that particularly works for me is a heavy wool blanket. Just one, which is all that is needed. Warmth and weight without bulk. In the past i've had layers of various things, or a thick down duvet, which provided warmth just fine but lacked the satisfaction of simple wool.

What does not work for me very well is the bed itself, which is too soft; i'd rather a firmer mattress.

Another thing that works for me is sleeping when i'm tired, as opposed to at any particular time. Getting up in the morning for work of course doesn't work for me, but if i have a good stretch without that restriction, so i can just do my own thing, i sleep better when i sleep and feel better when i'm awake.

[jenett]

I really love the stretches when I don't have to get up for work.

(I can set my work schedule within reason as long as it's consistent, but unfortunately, traffic patterns mean that if I want my 5 mile commute to be under 40 minutes, i really need to leave the house by 7:10. I am very not a morning person, and I'd be a lot happier going to sleep around midnight or 1 and waking up 8 hours later, but I cannot figure out a way to make the logistics work.)

I've taken to taking a week of vacation a couple of times a year in which I stay home, sleep on my preferred schedule, and do a lot of writing and household stuff, which is glorious.

[solitarywalker]

If it's a matter of traffic (and the weather's not too bad) maybe biking the 5 miles would be faster than driving?

[jenett]

So many chronic health issues make that a bad idea for me. (I toy with it occasionally, as a desire: they're working on a bike path that would mean almost the whole way could be bike paths, not roads.)

But lung issues mean there's a fairly narrow window in spring and fall when being active outside works at all for me, and the fatigue and stamina issues mean that trying to do that kind of thing would leave me not all able to work when I got to work. Which would be a problem.

(I might, with a lot of careful planning and making it a Big Project for an extended period of time, work up to being able to drive one way, bike the other, and alternate where the car is. But it'd involve a lot of health stuff going right for an extended period, including stuff like 'don't get a cold' which seems a tad unrealistic to plan on as a commuting option.)