Sleeping late

I’ve slept late the past two days—until after 7:00 AM. (That might not seem late to you, but it’s late for me. Also, I’d gone to bed early both evenings, before 9:00 PM, so we’re talking a solid 10 hours of sleep each night.)

This usually means stress. When I’m under stress, I need more sleep.

It’s not necessarily stress. The time just changed, and it may simply be that I’m sleeping until dawn, as I always do. Checking the almanac, sunrise today was at 7:07 AM. So that’s actually a pretty strong contender. Maybe I’m worrying about nothing.

Still, over the years, I’ve noticed that needing extra sleep is often an early sign that I’m under stress. In fact, it’s often the first sign. More than once, it has been greatly to my advantage that I noticed the oversleeping early, and used that clue to spot the sources of stress that had been accumulating at levels just beneath my notice. It let me address them before they blew up into problems. (Another early sign is getting annoyed at bad drivers around me. When other people’s bad driving starts aggravating me, it almost always means I’m actually stressed about something else entirely. That symptom has not yet appeared.)

So, because of my history with spikes in the need for sleep when I’m under stress, I’m looking around for possible stressors. There are plenty. I’ve got a bunch of things to do (the taxes, renewing my passport). Progress on the novel remains slow as I continue plowing through the already-written part. We just got notified that the new owners of the apartment complex are raising the rent by a lot (and want to charge for a bunch of stuff that was previously included in the rent, which would be okay except that the infrastructure to meter that stuff doesn’t exist, so they’d just be making up numbers). Finances are perennially tight, with returns to capital being what they’ve been since 2007.

So, I’ll take steps to address a bunch of those. A few are very small tasks, and have only been put off because they’re multi-step projects (get picture, fill out form, send it in) and I haven’t been organized to get all the steps taken care of. Others, such as investigating other apartments, are obviously huge sinkholes of time.

Stress is cumulative. Hopefully, taking care of some of the little things promptly can free up some energy to take care of the big things more calmly.