I’m like inches from caving on the whole abstaining from caffeine thing. I’m sure I’m wasting so much mental energy trying to resist excuses my body keeps throwing at me why I should cave in. It’s pulling ALL kinds of reasons why

.. it’s a silly experiment, not helping my sleep situation, not harmful for me, not a big deal, needed for a quick boost to get something done, needed to aid digestion…. you name it and I’ve thought of it.

I really won’t be able to tell if it helps my sleep/exhaustion situation unless I really stick to it for multiple weeks AND have no other variables in the mix messing with my stats. Quite honestly, that’s probably impossible. Take last night for example.

I stayed up later than I should because it’s the only time I was going to get quality time with Jim. Then I was up at 4 am taking care of my daughter who got sick in the middle of the night. This resulted in a 5 hour sleep. No bueno!

Now it’s about 8:30am and I’m super tired. It won’t matter if I have caffeine or not if I can’t somehow fix the behavior patterns. To be fair, the 4am wake-up is rare now that my kids are older, but if it’s not the kids, it’s the cats or my bladder or my brain.

I can say that quitting drinking anything after 7pm has made a positive impact on my situation and so has kicking the cats out of the bedroom. Those changes are easy and also easy to keep doing. I even had a few nights when my Fitbit gave my sleep a “good” score.

The Fitbit app used to just report the length you were asleep and in different sleep stages. Now they have this algorithm that spits out a score. I have consistently fallen into the “fair” category, with a “good” score (anything above 80 I think) being quite elusive.

I haven’t had an 80+ night since I stopped the caffeine and my brain is even using THAT against me. It’s saying “see, it’s not helping”. And “caffeine in the morning won’t hurt your sleep at night”. And “you had a rough night and it would be a nice warm treat to help wake you up”.

Man, I could really go for a coffee right now. Ugh!!

My plan this morning is to try and distract myself with activities until it gets to lunchtime which is when the craving starts to go away.

Really… this caffeine thing is small potato’s. I mean, life is good. But the sleep and exhaustion are real problems I need to figure out. I feel like I’m living with a chronic problem that I’m going to have for the rest of my life. Then I think that it’s probably just my age. And then I think that fucking sucks. AND THEN I THINK (wait for it)….

Just have a coffee and you’ll feel better. 😂

There you have it folks. My Friday one-track-mind brain dump. Good grief!

Time to Jam.

~Miss SugarCookie