What if you are too tired to Write?

As full-time authors, we sit alone at home when we have our daily work to do. We have deadlines to meet and daily goals to achieve. No boss urges us to work. What do you do when you’re so tired that writing just doesn’t work today?

Day tiredness is a problem I’ve always had to struggle with.

I was always to blame for that myself. I know that I need at least seven hours of sleep to be well-rested and to have enough energy for the day.

But I sleep at most five to six hours a night during the week.

All the good tips on the Internet and in books, which say that you should go to bed earlier to get more sleep, are of no use to me, because I don’t live alone.

My wife comes home from work between five and six in the evening. Often we go shopping together. Then we cook and eat. If I went to bed every evening at ten o’clock to get enough sleep just to be productive the next day, it would be at the expense of our relationship.

When should we spend time together and talk, if not in the evening?

I’ve managed a lot of my daytime fatigue now without prolonging my night sleep.

I have been taking vitamin D, magnesium, resveratrol, curcumin, and OPC for several months now, which has made me fit and awake all day long.

But these are the regular days. Then again, there are days when I am dead tired after getting up.

Either there was a party the night before, or I woke up in the middle of the night and couldn’t get back in. Things that reduce our sleep to an unbearable level happen from time to time.

None of us can prevent ourselves from being terribly tired on some days when we are supposed to be productive.

Panic is the wrong reaction

When I used to have days when I had to reach a specific goal, but I was so tired that I could hardly think, I panicked.

I felt helpless and stressed. If I couldn’t write at least three thousand words for my new novel and an article today, my whole schedule would start to falter.

It would be unrealistic to skip a day’s work and catch up the next day with tomorrow’s work.

So on those days, I forced myself to sit at the laptop and write. The result was always the same: It took me twice as long as usual to do the same job, and the quality halved.

Also, the stress I put on myself made me even more tired. A bad mood came up, and when my wife came home in the evening, I was in a bad mood and obnoxious.

To panic and force oneself to work doesn’t work. It also damages our health and social relationships.

So what can we do instead?

Sleep is not a luxury, but necessary

In our modern performance-society, sleep is often still regarded as a luxury. Those who sleep during the day are considered lazy and unproductive.

In the world of work, most employees can only dream of being able to sleep during working hours, although this is possible without problems in Japan, for example.

There, the term inemuri is used to describe sleep during working hours.

The realization that daytime sleep can significantly increase the productivity of employees is already gradually gaining ground in Western culture. Still, it will take a long time before it will be shared and accepted to take a nap in the workplace.

But we as home workers do not have a boss who tells us what to do and what not to do. In many points, this is a disadvantage, as written above. Nobody urges us, and there is no social control. This makes it easier to procrastinate and harder to meet deadlines.

But when it comes to our sleep patterns, we have a significant advantage over employees. We can use Inemuri for ourselves without asking anyone for permission.

Too tired to write? Then sleep and write when you’re done

For some weeks now, I have been fighting my daytime tiredness not with coffee, but with sleep.

At first glance, this may seem counterintuitive. If tiredness prevents us from working, we wouldn’t expect it to help us give in to tiredness. We usually do everything to ignore the fatigue or to overcome it with some tricks.

But the most obvious way to get rid of fatigue is to sleep.

My typical working day now looks like this: I work from eight in the morning until noon. Then I eat something and then sleep for twenty to thirty minutes. After waking up, I treat myself to a little coffee, and then I work without any problems from one o’clock in the afternoon until four o’clock.

During this time, I manage my daily workload reliably. Before, when I didn’t have a nap, I sometimes didn’t finish my work until six or seven in the evening because I needed a lot of my strength to stay awake.

So that’s how I usually work. And then there are the days I mentioned above: the days when we got much less sleep the night before than we typically get.

On such days, I am already incredibly tired after getting up. When such a case occurs, I vary my regular working routine.

As soon as my wife has gone to work, I lie down on the sofa and sleep. Sometimes the twenty to thirty minutes that I would otherwise sleep at midday are enough, but sometimes I also need an hour or two — depending on how severe the lack of sleep was at night.

But then I go to work and usually manage to finish my job by five in the afternoon.

So if I listen to my body and give it the sleep it needs, I can do my job even though I sleep during the day. I would even say that I can only do my work on such days because I have slept.

Takeaway

From my own experience, I can only recommend every freelancer, full-time author, and home worker to deal with the topic of sleep differently in the future than society is doing.

Have the courage to take a nap. Allow yourself to sleep longer during the day if the previous night was too short. Do not be afraid that your productivity will suffer. The opposite will happen.

Nowhere is it written that we have to do our sleep in a single block at night. Day sleep is not our enemy. He can even become our best friend.

Try it. It has already saved me many working days that would otherwise have been lost.

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