I’m the most productive at night. People sometimes ask if that’s a genetic thing, but I can promise you it’s not – I come from a family that Needs Sleep. A lot of sleep. However, I usually do just fine on 4-5 hours.
It’s because I grew up in the hospital.
It’s a notorious fact that hospitals don’t sleep. They are all miniature versions of cities. Hospitals are tiny, insular cities, little villages within themselves, that don’t ever shut down.
Sure, they dim the lights on the patient floors around 8 pm and get “quiet” until dawn or so, but they always have an underground current of movement and they are never still.
So naturally, growing up in them, my body adapted. I can’t ever be in a quiet room, which is something that my husband hates. I always have to have sound and lights (typically the television), 24:7. If he shuts the television off and I’m not in a deep, nearly dead sleep, I wake up and turn it back on.
He needs sleep. He loves quiet. He loves dark rooms. The man is my complete opposite when it comes to sleep, and sleep is what we fight about the most. Not necessarily sleep itself, but issues that surround it. The noise. The lights.
I use the time between when he falls asleep and I fall asleep (anywhere from 2-4 hours to do things just for me. Watch a tv show he hates. Read. Work on my book. I don’t talk to many people that late, so I usually have my phone on silent, face down.
Bottom line: making the best of an odd situation is typically the only thing you can do.