I listened from the book The Sleep Solution by Chris Winter this idea about how rest is also good for you even if you can’t sleep. That helped me reduce my worries about what exactly to do when you wake up in the middle of the night. Soon after that, I actually fell asleep.

So lying in bed in night, wide awake, might be OK, possibly even better than doing something else. The book even suggested that planning out everything that I wanted to do might actually be a good activity during those wide awake moments.

The worst enemy of sleep is that worry about not getting enough sleep. Looking at the clock and seeing it’s 3:30 AM AGAIN. Removing the goal of going to sleep actually allows you to fall asleep.

Isn’t that some non-striving Buddhist thing? Maybe those monks sleep really well.

There’s myths about the artist who stays up late at night and then with a stroke of brilliance paints whatever is our new Picasso or something like that. The tortured and starving artist myth needs to be put to bed (wow, that’s a pun!).

I’ve also been reading My Plastic Brain by Caroline Williams. From her own personal self-testing, creativity was inhibited by the prefrontal cortex’s way of narrowing on things, planning and also worrying that comes with it. In that way, it seems like the most creative artist would be one that was free of stress, deadlines, and sleeping 9 hours of deep sleep every night.

Sadly, I don’t think that artist actually exists, at least they won’t in my lifetime.

So what to do? I guess it goes back to recognizing that reaching “half-way there” might be ok. It’s dropping the standard because the lower achievement is also good.

It’s that same dreaded question for creatives: “So what are you working on next?” Maybe we could allow ourselves to say that we weren’t working on anything right now, to our querent and to ourselves.