Is This Going to be a Blog About Sleep?

This is not my cat.  I don't even know this cat.  It is a photo of a cat provided by Pexels.com, a free photo site. Weirdly, I don't have any pictures of my own cat sleeping and he's not as cute as this one anyway.
This is not my cat. I don’t even know this cat. This is a photo of a cat provided by Pexels.com, a free photo site. Weirdly, I don’t have any pictures of my own cat sleeping and, besides, my cat is not as cute as this one anyway.

It’s been almost a month since I started this blog and I haven’t made noticeably great changes in my life. My sleeping habits are still pretty bad. I thought I’d start with establishing the first basic habit of going to bed ON TIME and getting up ON TIME, but so far I have had only haphazard success at best. How can I move on to other good habits (eating healthy, working out, paying bills on time) if I can’t master the first habit?

I handled this dilemma in my usual way. I did some old fashioned Googling about it and thought it over during my morning commute.

My staying up late habits are solid and longstanding. Very longstanding. My Tumblr is called Mama Stays Up Late for a reason. I’ve been a night owl my entire life. I’m not really going to be able to change that just by saying so. If that were possible, I would have done it already.

I’ve so often felt discouraged by the common claim that it takes 21 days to form a habit. That has certainly never worked for me (although that may be because I don’t think I ever done anything 21 days in a row.) But, I read an interesting article today by James Clear that explains how a habit actually takes 2 – 8 months to form. If I felt discouraged by thinking it takes 21 days to form a new habit, I should feel thoroughly demoralized to find out it could take 10 times that long! But, I’m not. I feel kind of relieved. It’s much more realistic to me to aim for a gradual lifestyle change that will pay off as an ingrained habit in a few months.

But as for now, I do have some SLEEP to attend to. I missed my 10:00 pm bedtime by a couple hours. Unfortunately, I cannot miss my wakeup time by a couple of hours!

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