Sleeping In Pieces

When a lot is going on during the day, my schedule, and my sleeping, becomes a total mess.

My sleep patterns are wierd to start with.  I am a very sound sleeper, and once I'm sleeping, I'm out.  I don't hear sirens, thunderstorms, the drummer next door, or anything else.  When I'm really tired, it's not unusual for me to sleep for 12 hours.

Getting to sleep is another matter.  There comes a point when I'm playing poker that I get tired and start making mistakes.  When I'm done with poker I might just sit and watch TV for four hours, because I'm too tired to play poker or study and make any sense of it, but I'm unable to get to sleep.  If a new World Poker Tour episode is on, I watch that, and try to learn at least a little bit from it.  That's the best that I can do.

I prefer to play and study poker with hours something like 4 P.M. to 2 A.M., but in reality doesn't happen very often lately.  What I would like to do is get up around noon, take care of a few things, then play poker until I get tired, but it never seems to work out that way.  And right now, the combination of being Available Guy, and being a one-car family, is really messing with my sleep.

A few days ago I got to sleep around 3 A.M, got up at 5 A.M., took my wife to work at 5:30 A.M., came home, couldn't get back to sleep.  I finally slept for two hours, got up, spent some time with my mother-in-law, and picked my wife up from work a little after 2 :30 P.M.

Yesterday Safelight was coming to repair our windshield, so the car had to be here.  The appointment window was between 8 A.M. and noon.  I took my wife to work at 5:30 A.M. then slept on the couch while I waited for Safelight to come.  I woke up around 9 A.M to go to the bathroom, and I was able to get back to sleep.

The rest is a little fuzzy, but the timeline was something like this:

Safelight called around 9:30 A.M. to confirm the appointment.  Then they called around 10 to give me another time estimate.  Around 11, they called my wife's cell phone, and she called me, to tell me that they were close.  The left around noon, and I picked my wife up from work at 2:30 P.M.

After getting my sleep in little pieces for the last few days, I went to sleep around 4 P.M. yesterday, I slept until midnight, and I finally feel like I'm caught up on my sleep.  Now it's 2 A.M. and I'm typing this because there aren't many SNGs running.

For someone like me who wants to plan, who in fact needs to plan to keep from falling back into bad habits, this has been difficult, but I've had to accept that I can't change it.  My wife makes more than I do, and I have have to protect her income by doing things during work hours so she doesn't have to.  I sometimes have to take her to work and pick her up, because we're a one-car family.

At least for now there can be no planning, in the sense that I know when I'm going to play, or for how long.  I have to sleep when I'm tired and can get to sleep, no matter what time that is.  How much I sleep has become more important then how much I play.

That goes against everything I know as a poker player.  Many of the pros talk about the necessity of using volume of play to overcome short-term variance.  Others say that either you should have a schedule, or you should always be available when the games are good, which usually means nights and weekends.

I hope that I can function reasonably well in a situation where, once again, I don't have much control of what happens.  This time it's not me being out of control, it's about that control being taken from me.  It's not a good situation when someone with ADD is unable to plan and be organized.  I'm scared that things are slipping away.  But I have to make it work.