sleep deficit

I've been waking up late—way late—these past couple of days. I think I'm laboring under a sleep deficit as I adjust to my new life at Dongguk University. Since the start of the semester, I've been averaging about 4.5 to 5 hours a night of sleep. Part of the reason for the deficit is not only that I'm learning the ropes at a new place of work: it's also that my Namsan hikes take over two hours to do. (The recent 26.096K-step walk took almost four hours, as I had hiked about twelve miles.) The hikes are draining, but because they're exercise, they also leave me unable to go to sleep right away. Exercise at night is often not recommended for this very reason: it can energize you before bedtime. But given the type of exercise I'm doing, I find it's much more pleasant to hike at night, without the summer heat and the annoying crowds, than during the day. Perhaps that'll change come winter, when the fair-weather pussies abandon the mountain paths and leave them to us chug-along introverts.

The problem with sleeping in is that you're left with fewer productive hours during the day. This is different from what I've written earlier about my sleep habits: as I've noted a few times before, my normal tendency, during vacation, is to go to sleep late and to wake up late, but to get about the same amount of sleep, per night, as a regular person—about 7 or 8 hours. Before the current Chuseok break, I was "undersleeping," and now that I've got a few days off, I'm radically oversleeping, which is not a good thing, given how much I have to accomplish before school starts back up this coming Thursday. It also doesn't help that I'll be gone all day tomorrow on a trip to the coast, and that I'll be working for large chunks of the day, at my other job, on Tuesday and Wednesday.

So today is it, as far as getting things done goes. And I've already woken up late. Most reliable prediction of what's going to happen, then: I'll get about 50% of my to-do list done today, and the remaining 50% will be done, in bits and pieces, over the next three days. Damn you to hell, sleep deficit!


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