The title of this blog post pretty much says all. Throughout my life I've struggled, more often than not, with my sleep routine and with that struggle comes the downfall of my productivity, namely making YouTube videos of course...

I miss the days of being a little kid in primary school, where you didn't really have many responsibilities to take care of. You got to see your friends at school, be around other people in general and be social and yes, get homework I guess (although I've always been a firm believer of banning homework by the way, home time is OUR time, not back to ruddy school time!) - Obviously, school has its own roost of issues, chief among which is being bullied of course but still, the number of responsibilities was lower and as a result, I had a pretty solid sleep pattern as a kid. To be fair, that was thanks to my parents mostly... I wasn't exactly what you'd call a "morning person" - Sadly, that still rings true today in my adult life and it's only gotten worse as time has gone on.

For me personally, I find that my sleep routine and my ability to be productive go directly hand in hand. If one goes downhill, so does the other literally 100% of the time. I live alone in a detached house, and you'd imagine that'd give me the freedom to record videos overnight if needs be right? Nope... there's some strange mental barrier that stops me from wanting to record at night, perhaps that's because I associate the night with chilling... but not necessarily sleeping sadly!

The last couple weeks in particular have been rather difficult. On this occasion, it was because I'd finally mustered up the motivation to overhaul my website here. I worked on overhauling and updating the website for 5 hours straight... from midnight. I get motivation and inspiration to do stuff at strange times, yes. But as you have worked out by now, that took me up to 5am without me even realising it'd been that long! Since then, I've basically been nocturnal and I've simply been unable to snap my routine back into a "normal" routine... you know, one where I'm actually able to see daylight?

I must be one of the only people in the world who isn't a morning person but truly wishes they were. On the very rare occasions I do manage to get up at, say, 6am, and go for an early morning walk, the other folks walking are so friendly and always say "Morning" - That's who I want to be!

As far as I can deduce so far, there's a few reasons for me not being able to maintain a good sleep routine...

1. I don't really exercise outside of going for walks every now and again. Even that has taken a backseat though, the walking!
2. My mind races with thoughts at night typically. It's unable to shut off as a result
3. Some of you will know that I lost a family member earlier this year and as much as several months has passed since then, it still plays on my mind, as I imagine it would for anyone out there who's suffered loss of family!
4. Constantly worrying about my YouTube career in one way or another. Perhaps a series isn't performing as well as I'd like, perhaps I'm not particularly enjoying a series I'm doing but would face a potential backlash if I tried to move on, that sort of stuff!
5. Living alone means it's WAY TOO EASY to fall off your routine if you've little personal discipline, which, unfortunately, is indeed the case with me

Needless to say, the lack of videos during the month of November is because a combination of creator burnout and a lacking of a good sleep routine. At the time of this blog post being written, I've started talking half a sleeping tablet each evening at a "normal" time, say 9:30pm in an attempt to slowly get my body to get used to sleeping "normally" again so believe me when I say I am trying just about everything to correct this issue. If even this fails, it'll be time to draft in the professionals I think, go see a doctor about it or a sleep specialist!

Anyway, look out for more videos my friends, there's plenty more to come. I've slowly and cautiously been returning to video making, I'm trying to get back to the plan I made in the previous blog post so keep your eyes peeled! <3