http://www.judithhanson.co.uk/sites/judithhanson-public/files/styles/large/public/Insomnia.png?itok=_a59xTjJwas your sleep last night?" />

I’m not a good sleeper, hard to fall asleep and easy to get disturbed. When I finally fall into sleep, I think I get into dreams, lots of dreams. I actually feel I dream all through my sleep, because whenever I wake up, in the morning or in the middle of the night to go to washroom, there are 2 or 3 episodes lingering in my mind, fresh and vivid.  The dreams make my mind active and hard to get back to sleep again. I ‘m pretty sure there are dozens lost in between that I don’t remember.

If my husband is in bed for 8 hours, he gets 8 hours sleep. If I stay in bed for 8 hours, I get about 5 hours sleep. The next day you wake up feeling not refreshed, and the whole day you go around with a muddy brain not able to think or concentrate on anything. The night wasn’t efficient, the day wouldn’t be productive. Sounds a scary story.

To get a good 8hour sleep, I need to spend much more time in bed, if I have this much more time with me. My idea is that everybody gets 24 hours a day, but I feel I actually get only 20 hours. The other 4 hours are gone to nowhere, because I wasn’t sleeping, I wasn’t doing anything. The time was just lost, gone.

I always wonder how people like my husband can fall into sleep the way like they can control their mind. Like there is a switch. If he needs to sleep, he just switches his brain to off. And they, both my husband and my son, don’t go to washroom in the night. That’s so not fair. My dear husband always tells me to not think anything, just close your eyes and sleep. I hate him saying that. It’s like I have the switch too like he does, but I’m not built with that switch. I can close my eyes. That I can do. But I am really incapable of closing my mind.

On bad days, I feel I spend hours waiting and trying to shut my brain to fall into sleep. Sometimes I feel I don’t really sleep at all, tossing and turning all night between sleep and awake. That’s what I think. It can be wrong. Because something tells me it actually isn’t that bad.

If you are doing math questions, the calculator says a different number from you mental calculation, you will probably listen to the calculator. If you feel something wrong with your health, but the machine tells you there is nothing wrong, you probably want to listen to your own body. As to sleep, I don’t know whether I want to listen to the machine or my own feeling.

I got an exercise tracker, called fitbit. It also tracks your sleep, how much you’ve slept, how many times you woke up, how many times you turned over in bed, etc. According to this little fitbit bracelet, my sleep is not at all that bad. On the night that I think I was probably awake till dawn, the little bracelet tells me that I felt into sleep just a little after 1am. And it shows me that I actually have many nights sleeping 5 or more hours straight without even moving a muscle. It’s hard to believe. It tells me that my washroom routine happens mostly either one hour after I fall asleep or 1 hour before I get up, instead of right in the middle of the night of what I suspected. This little thing tells me I don’t toss and turn as much as I thought I do.

Good news is that I feel better when I get up tired but my bracelet says my sleep was good, and I go through the day not feeling dizzy or light headed. Did I have a good sleep last night? It seems it doesn’t matter that much as it did before. This little thing might be helping me improve my sleep.