396. Sometimes you just need to sleep

Due to the timezones that I need to overlap with for work I’m often on a call between midnight and 1am. This can be followed by another call at 7am.

When you also take into account that I actually wake up at around 5.30am to feed my twins I’m lucky if I can get 4 hours sleep each night. I probably average around 3–3.5 hours.

Of course to make up for it I will often have a nap in the middle of the day. Although that nap will sometimes be more than a nap as it lasts for 3–4 hours.

Or there are days like today (Saturday) where I go back to sleep after the early morning feeding of the twins and plan to get up at around 10am. We’d planned to take them on their weekly day out. However once 10am came around and we gave the twins their 10.30am feed it became apparent that I wasn’t going anywhere but bed again.

I was exhausted so my wife suggested that I go back to bed to get a little bit more sleep and we could take the twins out after lunch. So I followed her advice and went back to bed as suggested. I knocked out as soon as I lay down.

As much as I wanted to have a full day with the twins, my body couldn’t do it. I just needed to catch up on my sleep.

Sometimes it’s just something that we need to do, even though we already have other plans in place. Sleep is important to our well being, both physically and mentally; yet many of us take it for granted and are quick to sacrifice our sleep.

I do it far too often. But once in a while I’ll realise that I need to just knock out for a while even though it disrupts my day, because if I didn’t things could become a whole lot worse over the longer term.