Insomnia!

I'm not a good sleeper. I've written about that before. I'm not sure if I have ever been a good sleeper. I know that for a long time I thought sleep was a big waste of time and tried to do as little as possible of it, and that as a teenager and into my twenties I wished that I didn't need to sleep. As I've aged I've come to appreciate sleep more; thus I'm more aware of it just not happening for me. My entirely non-medical and non-professional diagnosis, based on reading various websites about insomnia, is that I suffer from intermittent insomnia, which falls somewhere between transient insomnia and chronic insomnia. I've also written about how I'm making at least some effort to work on that by laying off the caffeine in the afternoons/evenings, though I've not been entirely successful with that (Hello, lifestyle change takes time!). There are other things that I do, like not exercising too late in the day, not eating too late etc. But there are things I don't do. Supposedly you shouldn't read things that are too mentally challenging at night as it gets your mind working. That just is not going to work out for me, as I like to read a lot, and being a literary snob, I don't like reading mindless books. There are other things I don't do. The one that is in my mind most lately, and it has been a lot lately, as I've been up late a lot lately, is that if after 15 or so minutes you don't feel like you will fall asleep, you should get up. You need to train yourself to associate your bed with sleep. If you spend most of your time in bed not sleeping, that won't work. So up you should get. Or up I should get. But I don't. I know full well that it is good advice and I should follow it, but I'm too attached to the idea of sleep. I feel that somehow, despite years and years of evidence to the contrary, if I lie there for just a few more minutes, I'll fall asleep. I don't know what changed tonight, but I finally got up. So here it is, 2h45, and I'm up writing this. Isn't there some saying about being careful what you wish for?