There are sixty-three days left before law school orientation starts, a month and handful of days until I move to Minneapolis, and I have some really important stuff to take care of. I, of course, have to deal with all the forms and fees and everything that goes along with matriculating into law school, but I have some less-official but equally-important business to attend to: changing old habits and cultivating new ones.
Top on my list of priorities is to get my sleeping habits in line. I tend to be a night owl, but staying up until two or three (or five or six) probably won't be the ideal schedule for law school. And trying to start waking up at seven in the morning after months of going to bed around that time seems like it would just make getting a successful start in law school that much harder. The recent trip to Minneapolis actually forced me to wake up at a normal-person time (we had to start driving at 8-9am to get a full day of driving in), so I'm already on a much better cycle than I was a few weeks previous. Still, with a couple of months ahead of me and all that time to potentially screw up this great sleep schedule I have going, I'm a little worried. Right now, I'm staying with some friends who have 9-5 jobs and are up and about in the mornings, but soon I'll be left to my own devices. I need to create some sort of plan to keep this up.
I've experimented in the past with various ways to wake myself up the morning, but approaching my schedule that way may have been a little misguided. No matter what wonderful intentions I have the night before, no matter how many individual alarms I set, my brain in the morning never has my long-term best interests in mind. I'm frustratingly good at stumbling around in the morning, turning off multiple alarms without really waking up. But all of this comes back to being able to get to sleep on time at night. Even when I am on a normal-ish sleep schedule as I am now, my bed time tends to creep later and later, and I think I'm going to have to put some strict measures in place to stop that happening in law school. The first (and probably most important) of those being: no computer in bed. The bed is for sleeping, not drowsy Pinterest or Tumblr-browsing.
Also important, and this kind of goes into another post I intend on writing, is exercise. I'm not planning to start triathlon-training, but I want to set aside time for regular physical activity, if only to break up the monotony of sitting and reading all day. There's been some recent research that indicates exercise and sleep quality are linked (though there are some interesting responses to that claim too), so it's possible that it might contribute to feeling better in the mornings. I haven't been very active since had reconstructive ACL surgery a few years back, but this lull before the 1L storm is probably the best time to start up again. More on this later.
Somewhat-related link:
Above the Law - You Guys Aren't Getting Enough Sleep, Are You?
I'm a fellow soon-to-be 1L and can't remember how I stumbled onto your blog. I can say that the sleep thing is on the top of my priority list as well, and am so glad to see someone else talking about it. I've got a 9-to-5 job, but my bedtime still manages to creep later and later until, inevitably, I'm going into work on less than an hour of sleep. I'll be interested to see how you do adjusting/maintaining your sleep habits.
ReplyDeleteYeah, it's definitely something I'm going to work hard to avoid. It's good to know that someone else is in the same boat! GL with sleep and law school and all the fun moving stuff. :)
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