Do you have trouble falling asleep? Do you have a ritual? Do you always sleep through your alarm, or do you lie awake waiting for it to go off?

Does your mate have the same sleep habits that you have? If not, how do you handle it?

-- Anonymous, March 24, 2000

Answers

Heather, my wife has always been early to bed, early to rise, I am 180 degrees out. I worked 3rd shift much of my life and was able to shuffle my life to be able to do something in the morning, something in the middle of the day or something in the evening. So we managed to cope and raise kids and be happy. My feet still fit a limb and I ask the proverbial question, "Whoooooo?

-- Anonymous, March 24, 2000

I seem to go through cycles; I'll go to sleep quickly for months on end, and then suddenly I have weeks where it takes forever to get to sleep. My husband is a true morning person, although he does "sleep in" until 5:30, instead of getting up at 4:00 the way he did when I moved in with him. I'm usually up before 6 during the week (and Saturdays, when I have to get up and go get groceries) and on Sundays I occasionally sleep until 7. If I sleep any later than that, I feel I've wasted the day away.

We also sleep in separate beds, on opposite ends of the house, but it's more because we don't sleep well in the same bed, than differing hours.

Having him on the other end of the house means that I can turn a light on and read on those nights I have difficulty falling asleep, too.

-- Anonymous, March 24, 2000

My wife and I definitely do NOT have the same sleeping habits...but it works out for the best.

I'm a morning person. I wake up at four-thirty, take a shower, lay out Eric's clothes, do a little email, see what bonehead mistakes I did on my entry last night and correct them, wake up Brian, then wake up Eric, and last but not least, wake up Barb. Barb is NOT a morning person.

If I didn't wake up, no one would wake up. I HATE alarm clocks and never set them. I just wake up at the right time. (I go to bed around eleven, eleven-thirty, or thereabouts.)

It's not unusual for me to get up about two-thirty in the morning and find she's still at the computer. The nighttime is HER time. She can do things with the least distractions, much as I do it in the early morning.

Oftentimes she comes to bed and---not meaning to--wakes me up, since it's close to the time I wake up anyway, say in the three-thirty or thereabouts time. To me it's early morning, to her it's late evening. The kids, of course, are asleep.

For her, oftentimes, it's a good way to end the evening...it gets her wonderfully relaxed afterwards...and for me, it's often a GREAT way to start the morning.

Al of NOVA NOTES.

-- Anonymous, March 24, 2000

We don't have anywhere near the same sleep schedule. Barry's up most mornings at 4 for work, so he goes to bed really early. If I go to bed much before ten or ten-thirty, I'm awake all night. We have fought a little about it -- when we started living together we always went to bed at the same time -- so I try to go to bed with him a couple of nights a week, and he tries to stay up with me.

Mary Ellen

-- Anonymous, March 24, 2000

I aim for bed after ten. There are weeknights I stay up to midnight or 1, and I regret them. I get up at 6 (really 5:53, because I set it fast) by virtue of an alarm clock that I have to get up to turn off. When I've been getting enough sleep (and exercise), I often wake at 5:59, and I like that--it means I've slept enough and that the alarm won't rouse Rich (who goes right back to sleep anyway).

I fall sleep quickly and continue to sleep heavily. Occasionally I'll wake during the night, usually after a nightmare, and go right back to sleep. Rich often tells me what I tell him in my sleep and it's even less coherent than my waking speech. Also he tells me that since he was bored last night, he got out the pots and pans and beat them over my head with a spoon. I sleep thoroughly. If pots and pans don't wake me up, though, the first flail of a night- frighting cockatiel does wake me, immediately.

Before 1991, I didn't always fall asleep easily, and I would read or thrash or lie tensely, but the only time I have been noticeably, protractedly insomniac was when I was clinically depressed starting that year, and afterwards I have been so consciously aware that trouble sleeping indicates trouble elsewhere that I do whatever I can to make sure I fall asleep fast.

Because our dishwasher was so loud and directly next to the study area and open to the living room, we ran it at night. I brush my teeth, turn the dw on, and go to bed with a book. I read until I can't keep my eyes open, turn off the light, and am asleep almost immediately. I've read sleep advice that says the bed/room should be only for sleeping and sex, but reading hasn't affected my sleep pattern--yet.

Rich doesn't have my same sleep habits--he'll go to bed much later but get up only an hour later, and on weekends he can sleep until 9 (7 is usual for me), unless we're going skiing, in which case he wakes easily at 5. How do we handle it? Because I sleep like the dead, his bedside light doesn't bother me, and because I dress with very little imagination, I can gather an outfit in the twilight of the pre-dawn bedroom without artificial light.

-- Anonymous, March 24, 2000

For a long while after the ex left me I had trouble going to sleep. I'd be up till two or three in the morning watching television when I still had to be at work at 9. It got to the point that I could NOT go to sleep without the television on. I've seen every old episode of Cheers and Murphy Brown as a result.

It took me nearly a year to get out of that habit. I still like to fall asleep with the television on, but it's not a requirement any more (don't tell Dave! cause he hates it). These days I'm lucky if I make it to the bed before I fall asleep.

My usual going to bed time is 11, but I wish I could stay up later. I'm a night owl and I would prefer to stay up late and get up late. When I lived close to work I could do it, but now that I'm commuting 45 minutes I really have to get out of bed. It doesn't help that I need to be to work by 8.

It's a rare occasion if I sleep past 7 or 8 on the weekend. Generally the dogs get me up and once I'm out of bed I'm up for the day. I can take a nap later, but I get all screwed up if I sleep late.

I'm a snooze bar junkie. I hit it for nearly an hour every day. I have to set the clock an hour earlier than I want to get up.

Dave's schedule is pretty similar to mine. He sometimes goes to bed a bit later than me and he sleeps later than me, but it's mostly simiar. Except for the weekends -- if I let him he'll sleep till noon every weekend day. He can sleep through the dogs and the phone and the alarm clock. His alarm clock wakes me and then I wake him.

I sort of like that he sleeps in on the weekends and I get up. It gives me some alone time in the quiet of the morning. I can read the paper or go for a walk and not feel like I'm wasting the time. But I am not a morning person. I'm just a night person who's dogs get her up.

And we solved the bed hogging, cover stealing problems by getting a King Sized Bed. I've got my own area code.

-- Anonymous, March 24, 2000

My husband and I are both confirmed night-owls. We'll stay up 'til three in the morning (on a week night, too!) watching Open University programmes and repeats of 'The Ascent of Man' (we stay up late, but hey! we're well educated...). The worst, was when Channel 4 ran a series of Bollywood films - we didn't see bed til oooh, five thirty?

Of course, we're both rubbish at getting up early too, and I must confess to total boggling incomprehension of people who can rise at five or six am. What does that time look like? Oh, and the alarm - set four times. Three for when we should get up, and one for the very latest I can possibly rise and still make it to work for a respectable hour. Guess which one gets me up?

b

-- Anonymous, March 24, 2000

I always feel like a loser if I go to bed before midnight on a weeknight or two on a weekend. I know it's not really logical, but it's all part of my wierd "25 crisis.. oh my god I'm getting old" that folks are talking about on Pamie's site.

-- Anonymous, March 24, 2000

Having hooked up with nightowls for most of my life, one of my deciding criteria for the next boyfriend was that he be a morning person. I was through with tiptoe-ing around in the mornings with the blinds drawn, wasting the best part of the day. It's important to me to be greeted with light and air and music and smiles and kisses in the morning, rather than bleary-eyed, sullen, light-fearing trolls in their murky caves (although I'll admit that I was always enthralled with Kim Rollins' description of her dark green bedroom with the blinds that kept out *all* the light). My current (and theoretically permanent) sweetheart and I mesh quite well. We are usually in bed by 11 (but we *wish* we were in bed by 9:30 or 10). We wake up without an alarm (I'm with you on that one, Al) anytime between 5 and 5:45, and are usually at work by 7 (we catch the bus together to downtown Seattle). Weekends we sleep in, but "sleeping in" means 7:30 or 8.

It's quite, quite perfect. Our studio apartment is on the top floor of a three-storey building, far above the houses around us, with windows to the east, south, and west, and we never lower the blinds. We sleep with the window closest to our bed open. One of us gets up and puts the water on to boil for tea and that gets the morning started. Our bathroom has a west-facing window, half of which is in the shower, so we can watch the Olympic mountains turn pink with the sunrise (*if* they're out) while performing our morning ablutions.

The other sleep habit we have is showering before bed (watching the sunset this time). Whoever showers first gets more time to read in bed before lights out, but when I'm the first one in bed I'm often asleep before he joins me. And, to answer an earlier forum question, we don't wear anything. Bed definitely feels like a clean warm haven, with no sheets to tangle in, just a comforter with wool inside of it instead of down; the wool wicks away moisture and is, for the most part, the perfect temperature year-round.

When I am deeply stressed about something, I'll wake up several nights in a row at the exact same time: 3:07 or 2:43 or something. But that hasn't happened for a good long time.

-- Anonymous, March 24, 2000

i go to bed when my body tells me to, and i wake up when it wants me to. usually on week nights, bedtime is 1230am and it's wakies at 8am. the weekends are a mess. my body dictates my sleeping habits and my job allows it. however, my wife is always snoozing by 10pm and up at 5-6 am. as if our sleeping patterns weren't opposite enough, when she wakes up, she is always in a great mood. when i wake up, i'm not in a bad mood, just don't talk to me. i am sure all the above will change when we have our child-yikes.

-- Anonymous, March 24, 2000

Between 10:30 and midnight. That's a compromise so that I can get up in time to get to work sometime between 8:30 and 9:30am.

If I don't go to bed by 10:30-11:00 getting me out of bed before 8am is a chore and a half.

My "natural" bed time seems to lean more towards 2am. I will get sleepy around 10:30, but if I don't go to bed by 11:00 then i'm wide awake until 1 or 2am.

-- Anonymous, March 24, 2000

I'm a night person, but I've converted myself into a faux morning person, starting when I had to drive an hour to work. The earlier I left, the better traffic was and the better it was for me to go to the gym in the morning and be finished for the day.

I go to bed at 10:00 on weeknights. I take a melatonin every night at 9:00 so I'll be sleepy at 10:00. No, I don't know what the long term effects of this are - probably negative. I have many getting ready to sleep rituals and never read in bed. The room must be dark, all lights out. I must put on chapstick. The pillow must be a certain firmness (it goes on trips with me.) I wear earplugs. Having fussed with all that, I go to sleep pretty quickly. I always wake up at least once to pee. When I sleep in I wake up multiple times and if it's starting to get light, I put on my sleep mask.

I almost never wake up before the alarm, unless there's something very exciting in store that day. On weekdays the alarm goes off at 5:40 and I usually hit the snooze bar. On weekends, unless I've set my alarm for some reason, my husband has been instructed to wake me at 10:00 so I don't waste the whole day. Otherwise I could sleep 10 - 12 hours. When I was unemployed and could sleep as much as I wanted, I did end up sleeping about 10 hours every night.

He has about the same sleep habits that I do. The one beef I have with him is that even though I tell him I'm starting to get ready for bed, he starts getting ready about the time I'm actually getting into bed. It's hard for me to drop off knowing he's going to be coming in and pulling the covers around, etc.

We have a king size bed but our blankets are some lesser size so we do have some conflicts about that. I think we should just bite the bullet and buy some king size blankets.

-- Anonymous, March 24, 2000

I'm both a night owl by nature (most of the women in my family are night owls) and nurture (even as a small tot, my parents kept me up late with them). So going to bed before midnight (usual bedtime when I have class at 10 a.m. is 1 a.m.ish) is virtually impossible for me unless I happen to be ill. If I don't get to sleep at least half of the morning away, I'm just not happy. Mornings are way too cold for me to like them anyway, to be honest. This is a huge problem lately, as a series of classes I have to take this year start at 8:30 and run for 3 1/2 hours. I'm a big cranky tired mess until 10 every day. I probably take an hour to fall asleep at best, and if I have to wake up early, my body is all too likely to awaken at four or so and not get tired until seven when I have to get up, or some other perverse problem of that nature.

Currently mateless, but when I was with my ex we basically managed to go to bed/get up about the same time, though on the rare times I didn't have an early class to go to he usually wanted to get up earlier than I and do things. But now he says he's waking up before dawn lately (due to medication)- uch.

-- Anonymous, March 24, 2000

I'm a late night person. Quite often I don't go off to bed until well after two AM (closer to three last night). Unlike many people, though, I have no job or similar thing that I need to get up at six for, so I'm not usually up and about until between nine and ten. Only when I absolutely *have* to get up for a certain time do I break this routine, which I slip back into quite easily. Funny thing is, I was looking over an old diary from when I was still in high school, and from that I can see that once upon a time I got quite worried if I still wasn't in bed by about eleven PM. These days if I go to bed at 11PM, that's not just early by my current standards, it's absolutely miraculous

Tonight We Sleep In Separate Ditcheswhere candles are burned at both ends

-- Anonymous, March 24, 2000

Your story sounds so much like mine--except I guess I'm Jeremy, and my hubby is you. . . I am restless at night and seldom get to bed before midnight. I think I like the solitude and quiet that is only found at that hour. I do have to rise at 6:30 a.m. or so to get the boys off to school. The hub, however, is passed out cold by 10 pm, if not earlier. But no matter what time he goes to bed, he finds it impossible to sleep past 5 a.m. (And I would love to be able to sleep all day!) The best trick I have found that helps him to sleep longer--I moved the clocks away from his side of the bed. We discovered if he wakes up, but doesn't know what time it is, he is more apt to relax and go back to sleep until the alarm sounds. If he sees the time, his mind races and he starts freaking out that he'll never get back to sleep. I, on the other hand, am thrilled when I see it is 5 a.m. Hallelujah! More time to sleep!

-- Anonymous, March 24, 2000

I forgot to tell about Sabs' sleeping patterns -- we both tend toward "night person" but the difference is that Sabs doesn't need as much sleep as I do.

No matter what time he goes to bed at, he wakes up 6.5 to 7 hours later. I need a solid 8 hours, 9 is even better.

Sabs could sleep through WWIII, I get woken up by the slightest sounds that are out of the ordinary.

The cats usually start pounding on the door around 7am, which wakes me up, but doesn't always get me out of bed if I haven't had enough sleep.

-- Anonymous, March 25, 2000