It’s Not 42

By Jamie DeBree 2026/05/23 Weekly News

It’s 2:29am on a Saturday morning, and I really should be sleeping.

Story of my life, as they say.

One of my challenges for this year is to get at least 6 hours of sleep every night. I…did not do that in the first quarter, so I vowed to really double down in the 2nd quarter.

I started sleeping 6 hours a night. I forced myself to pare down my bedtime routine, set my alarm clock slightly later, and put my phone in sleep mode half an hour earlier.

An amazing thing happened. Not only was my head clearer during the day*, I was making better decisions, getting my writing time in/making good progress on drafts, and I even lost 5 pounds doing exactly the same amount of movement I’d been doing with less sleep. I was focused, motivated, and doing really well. All because of…90 minutes more sleep? Could it really be that “easy”?

I don’t think I fully believed that sleep alone was the key, so I didn’t think much about it when we adopted Honey, and I ended up getting quite a bit less sleep because first she cried/whined through the night, and once she stopped that, we found out she’s a “morning dog” (she’s only 2, so she’s still a puppy), and she was getting me up way earlier than I’m used to (I’m a night person, so mornings are not my thing at all).

Pair that with only a few weeks left of Colbert on TV after the news, which I wanted to watch, and…yeah. Back to only 4.5 -5 hours of sleep a night, interrupted by a puppy who needed to go out earlier.

As you’ve probably surmised, my motivation dropped, my mind has been less focused, I’ve not been making great decisions (Jill Shalvis novel ’til 2am? Why not? I’m not sleeping anyways….), my writing is stalled, and my weight loss completely plateaued again. It’s become very obvious that sleep – or enough sleep, anyways – is definitely the key to nearly every part of my life being either mediocre and stale, or moving forward and doing the things I really want to do as well as I want to do them.

If you scroll back up and find the asterisk in this post, that’s where I stopped and decided I really had to go to bed, telling myself I’d finish this post in the morning. Of course my morning went late, the dogs needed attention, the husband needed attention, and I’m now finishing this post when I should be running errands (which I’ll do right after I post this).

The thing is, I made a promise to myself that I would keep up the blogging this time, and do whatever I needed to do in order to make that a reality. And when I’m getting enough sleep, it’s not an issue, because I make good decisions, stick to my daily plans, and get things done on time. Last week I willfully and knowingly allowed myself five more days of less sleep/less productivity because I wanted to watch the last week of The Late Show, and I don’t regret that decision, but I’m determined not to let it derail my goal to be more consistent with blog posts.

Now that that’s done, I am determined to get 6 hours of sleep minimum during the week again, starting Sunday night. Honey is sleeping better now, and I’ve decided to meet her half-way, so instead of going to bed at 1am and getting up at 7am (and being woke up by her around 6am), I’ve started getting up at 6:30am, which seems to be an okay compromise for her, and she “lets” me sleep that late without whining. So starting Sunday night, I’ll be going to bed at 12:30am instead, which will still give me plenty of time to write and read first, as I’ll not be watching TV past 10:30pm any longer. It will all fit together nicely.

In any case, the last few months “experimenting” with sleep has really proved that I *can* get a lot more done than I’ve felt like I could, if I just take a full 6 hours “reset time”, and I can even lose weight if I just let my body have the rest it needs. So many women have pointed out to me that they’ve needed less sleep as they age, but they’re also people who were sleeping a solid 7-8 hours a night all the years I was doing just fine on 3-4.5 hours per night. Apparently I’m backwards, and now need more than I used to, but it’s all good.

Sorry Douglas Adams, but as it turns out, “42” is not always the answer. For me, the answer to life, the universe, and everything is apparently “Sleep”.

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Tagged on: alertness, decisions, douglas adams, focus, health, motivation, productivity, sleep