After a good few years of having a sleep regime geared around waking at a time most suited for work as a milkman, a postman or a television freelancer (in the UK for instance, most football grounds were no more than 3 hours away from our Birmingham home, driving early in the morning and late at night), my sleeping pattern has grown accustomed to waking me at 3 am, or thereabouts, even if I’m not working early. It’s a real pest.
And a fairly recent 3-month, double stint of mixing a 24-hour Reality show, with a solo early morning departure for me from the crew hotel 6 days a week, has only reinforced this habitual wakefulness in the wee small hours.
In the diamond and copper mines of South Africa, where blasting frees the ore into manageable boulders, the highly dangerous practice of hand-placing the gelignite charges ceases between 3 and 4am. (I know this from reading Bryce Courtney’s stunning book ‘The Power of One’.) That period is known as ‘the dead man’s hour’, as heart rate, respiration and blood pressure sink to their lowest levels, and reaction times are dangerously sluggish. (It’s also a fact that many people die in their sleep at this time.)
Annoyingly on that long Reality job, with an alarm set every day for 4am, (and a second at 04:05 in case the first one failed) I would invariably wake at 03:08, or 03:16… Which was too close to the alarm to get properly back off to sleep; and so I can say with certainty that there is definitely something different about that hour in my own circadian rhythm that concentrated every anxiety and insecurity I could possibly have felt, into those first minutes of lying there, alone in the darkness.
So I would remember the guiding words of ‘The Hitch Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy’ – “Don’t panic!” and bring to mind the words of a business coach I trusted implicitly, when they would say: “Fear is simply False Expectations Appearing Real.”
Two silly phrases, but they really helped.
By the time 5 o’clock arrived, and my bus left the hotel reception for the production base, I’d started to feel normal again. I was the only passenger at that time of the morning, and as I was the last mission of the night shift for the drivers, it was their time to be quiet and sombre, for all of the above reasons.
But you’re never alone when you have a coach to draw on, as and when you need to. Knowing they understand what you’re going through, because they’ve experienced it first hand, really counts.
The waiting list and details of my coaching content, including how to download my free eBook on the benefits of coaching for creatives, awaits you here:
www.soundproducer.com.au/coaching
(If nothing else, it’s something to read in the middle of the night.)
