al-waqt

I have good news and I have bad news. The good news is today I stayed awake after I prayed Fajr. I was feeling great and like I had already attained a big victory. I was up listening to a beautiful recitation of the Qur’an by a recitor from Sudan. I reviewed my To-Do List for the day and later on in the week. I responded to a few emails for work. I was on a roll… and then it happened (here comes the bad news).

I had a terrible idea to try to take an early nap. To make a short story long, I laid down around 4 hours after I woke up in the morning. I initially did this because my eyes were feeling tired but actually I think I was just still waking up and I think it would’ve been better to do some exercise to wake me up, but I had a brilliant idea that if I take a 20-30 minute nap then that will wake me up!

So I set my cell phone alarm to go off in 30 minutes and put my head on the pillow, giving me at least 10 minutes to fall asleep. In most cases once my head hits the pillow I fall asleep within 5-10 minutes. However this morning I experienced possibly the quickest 30 minutes in my life go by as I laid down wrestling with myself to go to sleep. Right when I drifted off the alarm goes off on the phone and I was so surprised that I said outloud, “No way it’s already been 30 minutes!”

But I was determined. I set the phone alarm again for 40 minutes, giving myself 20 minutes to fall asleep this round. I must have laid there awake another 20 minutes though before I actually fell asleep, which means that my plan to set the alarm ahead 20 minutes for me to fall asleep worked but honestly by this time I really wanted to sleep more than 20 minutes. To sum it all up, when the alarm went off I turned it off immediately and fell back asleep for about 3 hours, which some people may not even consider to be a “nap” anymore. That brings my total amount of sleep today to 7 hours, one more hour than yesterday.

As I said before I rarely experience this feeling of having difficulty falling asleep. So what was the cause? If I had to pinpoint it to anything, I would say that perhaps it is due to the cup of green tea I drank after I woke up around 6 am. So now I’m thinking that maybe caffeine does have an affect on my sleep! The other cause I am thinking could be that I put too much concentration on trying to take a nap. Usually when I take my afternoon nap I don’t even have to think about it, rather it just happens. But this time I consciously tried to take a nap and I ended up just laying there like it was some minor form of torture.

When someone fails at something, they can still attain success within that failure if they learn from their mistakes and they are prevented from falling into the same hole twice. So the two lessons I have extracted from my morning mishap is:

• If I feel tired after waking up in the morning then I should exercise instead of trying to take a nap. This should give me enough strength and energy to last until the afternoon when I can take my normal nap.

• Be more conscious of when I drink anything with caffeine in it and try to look ahead to what I plan to do within the next few hours. If I intend to sleep in the next few hours then it is best to just drink decaffeinated tea, water and/or juice to quinch my thrist.