Colm O'Regan: One Simple Trick That Irish People Born In 1978 Are Waking Up To
This Comedian Has Discovered An Easy Productivity Hack (Doctors Hate Him!) Pic: Denis Minihane.
This column will seem like clickbait. You know the ones where you’re on a website and there’s an ad with the headline, “This One Trick Doctors Don’t Want You To Know About”.
(And then you click into it, for the same reason you click on articles that promise “30 Celebrities That Have Let Themselves Go Something Savage”).
Except the doctors do want you to know about it. They never stop going on about it. The Simple Trick is: get enough sleep. I don’t.
There is no excuse for it. A few years ago there might have been a pukey child to watch. But these days, touch wood, they’re relatively, puke-lite.
While I’m eating my village’s entire winter supply of crackers and cheese they are blissfully asleep and have been so for four hours.
When we’ve stayed up too late watching a TV Show called We Can’t Find The Remote Control Before It Goes To The Next Episode, going in to check on the children is an admonishment to us.
We’d been giving out to them early in the evening. ”Go to bed! You need your sleep!” and then we stumble after they’ve had half a day’s sleep-work done and look at them.
Draped around their beds as if their dreams involved battling dragons. Not hunched over like I am in my dreams, which mainly involve admin.
And yet still I can’t get to bed. My wife has a very clever way of putting it: Whatever you’re doing at half twelve, ask yourself would you get up earlier in the morning to do it? If the answer is no, then don’t do it.
But the thing is, maybe I would get up earlier in the morning to read online beefs about Squid Game: The Challenge.
Apparently, this is all about Revenge Bedtime Procrastination - sacrificing sleep for ‘personal time’. Very common among parents and people who work in HR.
We’ve spent so much of the day dealing with other people’s questions, problems and inability to read instructions that we want to just spend time where no one is asking us anything.
I see the effect the following morning. If you don’t want to feel bad about yourself, try to minimize the amount of time you spend looking in the bathroom mirror with your child. The operative word is ‘haggard’.
Photos are not too bad. For a start, the child won’t have a straight face in them and will pull a ridiculous gurn for reasons best known to themselves.
But winter morning bathrooms are like having a clothing shop changing rooms from the comfort of your own home.
My face next to the brand-new faces of my children looks like when you buy shoes and you try on the new pair and then come back to your old pair. They look like the shoes of an Old Dublin Character of the fifties.
So I need to get more sleep to stop looking like Forty-Coats. My only hope is the Fitbit.
I have one now because I like it to be slightly difficult to check the time.
The Fitbit is tracking my sleep and my sleep score is that of a high-powered CEO who works hard and plays hard.
He’s up till 1.30am because he has to zoom Singapore to catch them at opening bell.
But I am not a high-powered CEO. I am watching Singapore’s opening bell but it’s on Euronews. Even The Chase has gone to bed.
The FitBit tells me my sleep deficit is about two hours a night. In order to catch up I’ll need to be Rip Van Winkle.
I can't pretend any longer. It’s time to use this One Simple Trick That Irish People Born In 1978 Are Waking Up To.
Have a bit of cop on.
