So my body decided...

[alexandraerin]

...that we're not done sleeping during the day and being awake all night, after all. I started to crash at around five in the evening and ended up going upstairs at like 6:30 or so. I was woken up a little bit ago by what I thought was a huge fight between no less than two cats, but it was just Dorian having found his favorite toy (a rainbow streamer ribbon thing) and was playing with it in the dark. So that's like four hours or less of sleep but I was only awake for 12 hours before that and I feel pretty awake right now, and I will probably crash pretty hard later.

When? No one knows.

I'm making a decision to cut my caffeine intake way down*. I had it down to some coffee in the morning and the occasional soda when eating out back during my Good Sleep Period, but as I started to sleep worse the soda started creeping back up so that I could spend less time feeling like a zombie. And right now, I have realized, my caffeine consumption is at my high school levels and of course that works against me as I try to get my sleep back under some semblance of control.

Caffeine's tolerance mechanism means that there's a bit of a ratchet effect... it's easy for your consumption level to shift up, hard for it to shift down. I'm going to be doing this gradually. My plan to structure my week and my work days better will help me here, because I'll be able to work this in to it.

*(Note: Anybody who says "You shouldn't drink caffeine at all if you have a problem sleeping!" will get punched in the throat by a bear made out of ninjas who are each in turn made out of many smaller LARGER bears. My caffeine dependency is a response to my insomnia, not the cause of it. If you don't live my life, you don't get to judge the chemical measures I use to stay functional.)