Food vs. Sleep, or I Can't Win!

Yesterday being a fast day which happened to start unusually late in the morning, I set my alarm to get up before dawn (6:09 am in my area) and have breakfast - and especially coffee. I hoped thereby to avoid my usual caffeine withdrawal headache, not to mention afternoon hunger pains. In this, I was mostly successful, but I neglected to consider one of my other foibles/quirks, regarding my ability - or rather my occasional lack of same - to sleep through the night.

For some reason, whenever I know I absolutely have to wake up by a certain exact time or else, I simply cannot relax all night long. This is the way my brain works, and I seem to be helpless to change it. What's strange is that I don't have this problem when I just generally have to get up early, which in fact is nearly every day. Thus, even though I always go to morning minyan (at least since Feb 2004), which of course starts at a fixed time, that by itself does not cause my sleeplessness problem. I think this is because I have the safety valve of knowing it's OK if I come a few minutes late to minyan, or even go to a later one if I really oversleep.

But whenever I have to catch a plane, or for some other reason simply cannot sleep later than a certain moment - even if that time is no earlier than I normally get up every day - I find myself waking up all night long. It's as if my subconscious is frantic that I will miss the deadline.

So Monday night before the fast, it was every half hour from 3:00 am on. And yesterday, instead of my usual caffeine headache, I walked around all day like a zombie. What a tradeoff.

Boy, I'm glad I don't carpool! Within a week or two I'd be driving off the road.