Sounds like a personal problem

Am I only the only one who has this problem? It seems like everytime I have to wake up earlier than my normal routine I can't sleep the night before. It never fails and the following day is subsequently ruined as a result.

I usually wake up around 7:30 and roll into work around 8:30. This morning I had some lame training session to attend meaning I had to be at work at 7:30. The training was pretty much a complete waste of time in case you were wondering, but there were donuts and it's never wrong to pretend like you care about advancing your career when you know the boss will be there. Anyway, waking up earlier enough to make it in at 7:30 is not a big deal to me. Due to my poor diet, lack of fitness, and just overall malaise I find that I'm tired all the time. This sounds like a bad thing, and it probably is with one exception, I can fall asleep whenever I want. So if I have to go to bed at 10:30 because I have to get up early it's never really an issue. Then Eric Syndrome comes into play.

I talked extensively about Eric Syndrome in an earlier post but I haven't figured out how to link to individual posts on my own blog yet because I'm dumb. Eric Syndrome, briefly, is my innate ability to mess things up, not on a catastrophic level, just enough to make my life more annoying than it has to be. So how did it come into play yesterday? I'll tell you. My roommate/coworker plays on a softball team with another coworker. Occassionally when they're going to be missing a few players they ask me to play because they know it will be easy for me to just catch a ride with my roommate (also I like to think it's because I'm money at softball, but I doubt that's the case.) Yesterday he asked me if I could play. The correct answer would have been, sorry Mitch, I can't tonight, Monday Night Football is on and the Redskins are playing and I've been super excited about this game for the last 8 months. Naturally I said I would play. Why? Because Eric Syndrome kicked in right at that moment and I turned into and absent minded tard and forgot that I love football and rarely, if ever, miss a Redskins game, much less a Monday night game, much less the first game of the year. Lucky for me I have mans greatest achievement of the last half century to save me, Tivo. I can still watch the game but my plan of going to bed at 10:30 is shot.

So I get home and watch the game, finally get to bed around 12:30 or 1:00 which gives me about five and a half hours of sleep if I'm lucky, not bad. Of course now I'm kind of pissed because the Redskins lost and I don't fall asleep right away. Once I can't fall asleep immediately it usually means I'm not going to fall asleep for a while. I think that I start concentrating really hard on getting to sleep because I know I only have a few hours and the act of intense concentration actually keeps me awake longer. Then the bed starts getting hot, so I get uncomfortable and start squirming around trying to find a cool spot on the bed. Then I have to turn the pillow over, then switch pillows altogether, then the the blankets off, it just an endless cycle of uncomfortableness. It really just turns into an abject sleep disaster. I'm actually a very sound sleeper, I usually fall asleep as soon as my head hits the pillow and sleep straight through the night and wake up ready to go in the morning. Last night I tossed and turned eventually falling asleep sometime around 4 a.m. for a little under 3 fitful hours of sleep. Which is probably why I'm about to stab myself in the ear with a pencil just so I can leave work and take a nap.