What to do when you wake up at 4:30am
This week’s question comes to us from Kio Stark:
What do you do when you accidentally wake up at 4:30am?
During the early days of the pandemic we all learned about biphasic sleep, which is just sleeping in two shifts. We found out this was fairly common at one point in human existence. You’d sleep for a bit in the evening, get up for a bit, maybe see if the neighbors were up, maybe go for a wee walk, have a nip of whiskey, do a little casual fornicating, and eventually end up back in bed for your second shift. We were all very excited to find out about biphasic sleep because we were all doing it again.
Maybe coincidentally, but probably not, biphasic sleep seemed to have its heyday during the middle ages when people were worried about The Plague.
Anyway, we were very excited to find out that waking up in the middle of the night (screaming optional) had a precedent. Except this time around the options were different. Going round to the neighbors to see if they were up was widely discouraged, even though they probably were (and 4am stoop hangs would’ve been kinda cool). But if you live in America your neighbor probably has a gun. So don’t do that.
As the pandemic slowly faded (or rather, as giving a shit about the pandemic faded) most of us went back to sleeping through the night, mostly. Or at least back to our personal patterns of insomnia. Which for me means waking up at 4:30am once a week, like clockwork.
And of course, the first thing I do when I wake up is to reach over and pick up my phone to see what time it is. At which point, I’m now holding my phone. (Here’s where we’re going to take a long parenthetical: Look, I could be one of those people who tells you to keep your phone in another room when you go to sleep, but let’s be honest. The people who tell you to do that are the same people who post photos of their perfect meals, perfect drinks, perfect pets, and perfect families on Instagram. And while you certainly don’t owe anyone a peak into your personal struggle, making people believe you’re immune to the struggle is its own level of toxicity. And no, those people don’t keep their phones in the other room while they sleep. It’s right there under the pillow. We are all fucked up, please and thank you.) So… I’m now holding my phone. And I’m seeing that it’s 4:30am.
This is when I need to be honest with myself. Am I going back to sleep?
If it seems like I might, I’ll pull up something boring on my phone to read. No news. No social media. Find an incredibly boring topic that you have no personal involvement in. Personally, I’ve found that reading about baseball puts me right back to sleep. It’s very boring. For you, it might be reading Below Deck recaps, or watching AlertCalifornia webcam feeds, or honestly anything written by an academic. Get an app on your phone that takes your right to that kind of stuff, while allowing you to skip the news. The news is a lot. (And stay the fuck of NextDoor or you will find out which of your neighbors are also awake, and the most racist.)
Sometimes it’s obvious that I’m not going back to sleep. And because there’s another human being next to me and she’s still asleep, I get up. I might grab a book to read. I might catch an episode of Homicide with my earbuds in. I might wash last night’s dishes. What I don’t do is check email, look at the news, or go anywhere near social media. (Your ex doesn’t need to see a 4:30am timestamp.) I’m still open to the possibility that I might go biphasic and sneak another hour of sleep.
The important part here is listening to your mind/body, or whichever combination is running the show. If you’re up you’re up. Fighting it isn’t gonna help. It’s only going to add more feelings/chemicals to the mix. The only thing worse than being up at 4:30am is being up and worried about being up.
There’s very little you can fix about the world at 4:30am.
🙋 Got a question for me? Ask it!
📖 I've seen people talking about my old book, Ruined by Design, again.
⚛️ Maybe it’s because we’re firing up Three Mile Island to generate AI girlfriends for incel techlords. Sure. This industry is a cesspool.
📚 The Design Is a Job zine is still for sale. It comes with soap.
🔥 Seriously, the AlertCalifornia webcams are fun. And part of the state is almost always on fire.
☮️ RIP Marcellus Williams, who was murdered by the state.
🍉 Please donate what you can to the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund.