For about a year I've been treating sleep as very important.
I've always known I'm the type who needs a lot of sleep, but for a long time I didn't prioritize it because work was busy. The vibe was: sleep whenever you can.
The trigger to rethink habits was a conversation with an acquaintance about a year ago, which I wrote about in "I tried improving my sleep".
Without enough sleep, the brain's load gets too high.
I know there are people who sleep little, stay in great condition, and work with high vitality. I honestly envy them, and I did try to copy that for a while — but I can't.
For me, "sleep quality" at the moment of waking matters, but sleep duration still has the biggest impact; other factors include bedtime before midnight and pre-sleep routines (digital detox).
Now when I feel down, irritated, or off physically, tracing the cause usually lands on "not enough sleep."
It's not an exaggeration to call it the "religion of sleep": whether good or bad things happen, sleep is the trigger.
Related to that, something I noticed.
For example: wake at 5:00 a.m., work from 5:30 to noon. (I'm writing this blog at 6:00 a.m. Basically I put no meetings in the morning.)
If I finish tasks by around noon, the kind of focus needed to sink into work is mostly gone.
It doesn't recover until evening when the day fades.
In other words focus is finite. Meditation, exercise, baths can restore it somewhat — but they don't reset it.
Afternoons are for meetings, exercise, shopping, cleaning.
Meetings use focus too, but unlike solo work they can scatter thinking in a relaxing way, and conversation itself sometimes reduces stress. (Depends on the meeting, of course.)
When night comes I do another block of work and start preparing for tomorrow.
If I go out for dinners or travel at night, fatigue piles up and I get irritable — then I think, "Ah, I'm irritable because I don't have enough sleep; I need to sleep."
I also quit alcohol recently. I don't drink except on special days. I don't know why I didn't realize sooner that dinners without alcohol are fine.
And just as focus is finite, I think "mood energy" is finite too.
Even when work goes well, not celebrating too hard seems important.
A lot of my work is marketing-related, so when acquisition goes well or a client thanks me, I'm truly happy deep down.
But it's a dopamine-ish happiness, and I tend to get too high.
From experience, emotions have something like a biorhythm — when mood goes up, it seems to come down by the same amount.
So I try not to raise mood too much either.
Looking back, I may have overvalued "raising your mood as a good thing." It's certainly not bad, and with people it does matter.
But when mood is down, overeating, buying something, or exercising just to force a better state may also miss the essence a bit.
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