"Okay, It's Time For Me To Go To Sleep Now!"

I'm doing better these nights than I used to.  I was a good sleeper for a long time, right through the night. Then I hit a certain age (can't remember now which it was) and I started having weird nights.  Like the time I woke and found it was getting darker, not lighter, only to realize I hadn't slept through the night at all, only part of the evening.  So I had to go back to bed and try again.  And then I was getting to bed so early that when I woke up, I felt as if I'd advanced a couple of time zones and was somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic.  I mean:  I'd wake at 3:45 and feel it was time to get up.  That would be okay if I were in Nuuk, Greenland, where it would be 5:45, but I obviously wasn't in Nuuk, Greenland.

So I began following a few practices to get myself through a night without feeling like the next morning's left-over salad.  For one thing, I didn't have anything to drink after a certain hour--including a nice cup of tea or hot chocolate.  I curtailed evening TV, preferring to read instead ... and evening phone calls so I wouldn't keep hashing the call over in my mind afterwards when I really wanted to start shutting things down. My hope was to keep my evenings as free from distraction as possible.

So, my program includes:

• No liquid after a certain hour.
• Not much alcohol regardless of the hour.  (Wine, especially, seems to wake people in the middle of the night.)
• Nothing sugary after supper. (Otherwise, it just perks me up.)
• Preferably no phone calls after a certain hour.
• Nothing loud so that I can transition into the night. 
• No caffeine ever.  Any tea or coffee has to be decaf.
• A dark bedroom which includes a black shade for full-moon nights.  (Also no TV or electronic equipment in the bedroom.)
• Oh, and a good book to read once I'm in bed which can soon enough put me to sleep regardless of how interesting it is.

Of course, there are still nights when sleep is elusive.  Sometimes, as I'm lying there around 1:30 or 2:00, I call out to the night (as if it had control over things), "Okay, it's time for me to go to sleep now!!"  In other words, get on the stick, please, and help me do this thing.