: Bleh.

I need to pull myself together again. The last few days have been absolutely terrible. I don't know why, but each day have been worse then the one before.

Last weekend I had a LAN, and it was awesome. When the LAN was over, I decided that this week I'd try to work out a little bit every day. Instead of two massive sessions a week, I'd try one small session every day. It started out fine, I managed to do a one short session on Monday, and a slightly longer one on Tuesday. I really pushed myself, though, even though for some reason my heart rate just wouldn't go up on the last cycle set. On Wednesday I just did not have the energy to jump on the bike, so I just did some push-ups. The rest of the day I barely did anything. And then yesterday was just awful. I spent most of the day on the couch, I even fell asleep for about three hours at one point. I just didn't have any energy, didn't want to do anything. I absolutely hate feeling like that.

I'm still not feeling too good today. I think I need to get outside. I have to go shopping anyway, something I really should've done two days ago. Hopefully that will make me feel better.

: No early riser.

I've noticed something new about my sleep-pattern recently...

During the last few months, I've had my phone set to wake me up rather early in the morning. I started off at 9am for a quite a while, then about a month back or so I moved it back to 8:30. That might not be considered very early to most people, but to me it is. Anyway, that's not the point, as that is working out rather good. The problem occurs when I for one reason or another wake up earlier than that. Particularly earlier than 7am. I don't know what it is, but it seems that around 7-7:30 is some sort of "tipping point" for me, possibly related to my sleep disorder.

Say I wake up at 7:45. That's all good, I'm up and feeling fine and can go about my day like any other. There's really no difference between then and 8:30, no matter if I went to bed at 11pm or 1am. But then say I wake up at 6:45, like today. I wake up feeling fine and well rested, ready to handle just about anything. Then two hours later, I'm so tired again I feel like I'm being tortured having to stay awake. It doesn't make sense that that one hour affects me that much. Particularly as I can go to bed at 1am, wake up at 7:45 and feel good all day, but if I go to bed at 11pm and wake up at 6:45, I feel awful. That's one more hour of total sleep, and it's still killing me. Light and weather doesn't seem to affect it either, it happens just as much in summer and winter, on bright sunny days and grey rainy days.

I've been thinking about this, and I think it's very likely that it is related to my sleep disorder. I think about 7-7:30am is my "falling asleep" time, where my body normally wants to fall asleep and relax. If I'm already asleep then, it doesn't have any effect, and I can wake up just after and feel well rested. But if I wake up before that, then it will affect me, even though I've used the melatonin to "jump-start" the same process only a few hours earlier. I know my sleep pattern is very delayed, I've known for several years now even though it wasn't diagnosed until just a year and a half ago, but I guess it's so delayed that the effect of the melatonin pills I take has essentially worn off by the time the real process is supposed to begin? It's really the only thing I can think of that explains this weird phenomenon.

I don't have anything to base this off, other than my own experience. I don't know if this is what's actually going on, or if I'm way off. It's just annoying, and I wish I could prevent it somehow. I guess I'll have to ask my doctor the next time I'm there what she thinks.