A Night Owl’s Guide to Staying Up All Night

What to Do When You Can’t Sleep

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Panel 1
Celeste: HONESTLY, DON’T YOU EVER, LIKE, GET BORED OF SLEEPING?
Panel 2
Rose: DON’T YOU EVER GET BORED OF BEING AWAKE?
Panel 3
Rose: I MEAN, WHAT DO YOU EVEN DO ALL NIGHT ANYWAYS?
Panel 4
Celeste: UHH…
Panel 5
Celeste: I GUESS I’LL JUST DO THE DISHES WHILE THESE DRY

Source: My Brain 03 | Penelope Peru Photography P³

If you can’t sleep, lying in bed, hemming and hoeing over how many hours you have left to get in some sleep is the last thing that will help. It’s time to tire yourself out.

Exercise

While you can’t exactly go for a jog around the neighborhood at 3 O’Clock in the morning without raising a few eyebrows, there are plenty of light and simple exercises you can do from the comfort of your own home.

Drop and give me twenty! Strengthen your core, legs, and triceps through workouts such as sit-ups, squats, and pull-ups. You could also try a little yoga.

Exercising allows you to kill two birds with one stone. Keep it up regularly enough and you may notice parts of your body becoming a bit more toned. Getting up and getting active might also tire you out enough to get some good quality sleep, after the initial release of adrenaline and other hormones your body produces while working out.

Clean

Similar to exercising, cleaning gets you up and active. In fact, even just engaging in light cleaning may burn as many as 140 calories, according to LiveScience. Knocking out your laundry or scrubbing the counters is productive and may just put you to sleep.

Night time is perfect for cleaning, anyways. Chances are, no one else is awake to interrupt what you’re cleaning and no one else is awake to mess up whatever you have just cleaned.

The only downside is you can’t be too loud. If you live with others, it may be best to hold off on vacuuming until daytime. Try to avoid banging around too many pots and pans if you decide to do the dishes in the wee hours of the nights.

Cleaning is also busywork, so it doesn’t require too much thinking. You can’t exactly mess up while cleaning – and if you do, you can always reorganize it the following day.

Read

Reading is rapidly becoming synonymous with a good night’s sleep. While some drift off at the sight of a book, other’s swear up and down that a chapter or two is all it takes to get a good night’s rest.

It’s an undemanding and somewhat “boring” activity that may relax you enough to lull your body to sleep. According to research conducted by Dr. David Lewis, reading is more effective at reducing stress than music, tea, going for a walk, and playing video games.

Reading does require some level of light, which could disrupt your sleep cycle by inhibiting the release of melatonin. However, if you’re already awake, I’d say it’s probably not the table lamp throwing off your circadian rhythm.

Work

If you can’t sleep, you might as well be making money while you’re at it.

In the first issue of The Burgundy Zine, the article How to Make Bank Without Ever Leaving the Bed details the endless ways to reap the benefits of working online.

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How to Make Bank Without Ever Leaving the Bed

Source: The Burgundy Zine Issue #1: More Money, First Issues | The Burgundy Zine

Some of the websites mentioned include Upwork, Freelancer, Fiverr, and Indeed, which are wonderful platforms regardless of your field of expertise.

For those who are artsy fartsy, your hobby could evolve into a lucrative side business thanks to platforms such as Etsy, Sellfy, Shopify, and Redbubble.

If you’re a writer who’d like to follow in my footsteps, I can’t recommend ghostwriting for Verblio enough.