With Trump eager to create turmoil I'm up early to bare witness to the demoacry fighting back. I think of Donald Trump and I'm reminded of Kaiser Wilhelm II. Both men had a ludicrous sense of their brilliance and leadership abilities. The former nudged Europe into world war. Where is Trump taking it?
The night before I'd watched David Attenborough on iPlayer, saw the Greta Thunberg documentary then fell asleep only to wake as the yacht I was taking across the Atlantic hit one large wave too many and capsized.
I need to find a way to turn my brain off at 10:00pm and not permit it to splutter back into consciousness before 4:00am the next day - or preferably 6:00am (at least).
I am trying yoga and light exercise. For the second time, it happens with each lockdown, I have jiggered my left leg. First time round it was the knees, now it is the achilles heel. What did I do? I went on a walk
So, promising not to post here excessively anymore I might direct you to a proper blog post in my other place > Reflections On E-Learning where I used a series of interviewes on The World at One (BBC Radio 4 on 5 January) where, as they do morning day and night, at some point, bring up education and what a fudging mess that has been made of it. 'Students wanting to study ...'
Could The OU, overnight, do for Secondary Education what it is has done for HE over the last 50 years + ? Not a big ask. But what is needed now are courses that can be completed remoteley (at a distance as we used to say) and are gain accredited assessment and certification at the end. Roll on home schooling.
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Hi Jonathan
I can sympathise with trying to get your brain to close down at a decent hours without being wide awake in the early hours. I am fed up with looking at the clock about 3am ish. with no chance of falling back asleep.
Judith
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I think the 'Well-being' people will say don't drink coffee, exercise properly and have a warm bath and a cup of hotchocolate before you go to bed
I do try, I even take a very boring book too!
Getting to sleep
Jonathon and Judith
I have the same problem with turning my brain off but I have found if I meditate at 10pm, anything from 15 minutes to an hour, I can turn my brain off and make it ready for sleep. I do not know whether this will work for you but it might be worth a try.
Further, Judith, I saw an Indian guru on You tube last week advocating that the human soul is programmed to wake up a 3am and that we should use the hour to meditate. I also often wake up at this hour and had the same problem of getting back to sleep and then feeling tired when it was time to get up, but I have found a short meditation gets me back to sleep. The only thing is if I wish to be up by a certain hour I do have to set an alarm as meditating at this hour causes me to sleep until about 8.30-9.00am.
I hope this helps you both.
Happy New Year and best wishes
Georgie
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Thank you Georgina. I will certainly try meditation. So far my rule is now devices! So phones and iPads are banned in the evening. I will read a book until it bores me to sleep - the problem is I guess that the books are not boring at all! Usually something on AI replacing educators, or lessons from the First World War or other such light reading matter! I dream vividly that I am working online so naturally worry the next day what I might have said or done. Mid week is the worst, usually Tuesday or Wednesday nights - this week I doubt I got 3 hours sleep on Wednesday as my head was construction a narrative to think what AI will do to education and humanity over the next few months, then years, then decades and centuries .... I ended up with androids colonising the moon.Six hours sleep :)
I slept through nearly six hours unbroken last night. The solution appears to be to stay up far later - we went to bed at midnight having binged on films or TV featuring Omar Sy. We nearly kept going through the night. He is such a joy, it was so good to laugh as much as we did, though frustrating that Lupin left us on one heck of a cliff-hanger.
Six hours sleep or a tad less. I think I was prepping content for The Western Front Association social media pages at 5:45am and got off that by 9:00am. My days, my mad, mad days. The WFA is escapism though, I reason, like doing a crossword puzzle - everyday, amongst other tasks I research or refresh research already started, on someone who served during the First World War. I really got to know Alfred Kemp, boy scout and bugler from Wadhurst who had enlisted age 15 in March 1914, tried, without success to get sent to France that year and succumbed to pneumonia on this day (16 January 1916).