How To Find The Energy To Write A Blog Post When You Are Tired
As I have written in other blog posts recently, I struggle to find the time to write blog posts because of my job, family, and other time commitments. If I could choose the ideal time to write, it would be in the mid-morning, but that time is taken up with work. When I look at my day realistically, the time left available to me to do discretionary things such as writing is at night before I go to bed.
Roughly 9:30pm onward is the time I can sit down and punch the keys to produce a blog post. The trouble is that I feel very tired that late at night. Not so much physically tired, but mentally tired. As if I'm just not operating at peak creativity. And I really need to feel at least a little energized and creative to be able to write. If it were some routine physical task, I could do it while exhausted, but something like writing takes more of you to do.
But I really want to write more, so I need to find a way to make that time work.
At first I looked into taking a quick nap around that time so I could wake up recharged and ready to write. Apparently lots of famous geniuses and highly productive people utilized naps in their routine in service of their goals and work. Lots of the articles I read on the subject named Albert Einstein, Nikola Tesla, and Leonardo Da Vinci as regular nappers.
I figured if it worked for them, it was at least worth a try. But napping turned out not to work for me. I can easily fall asleep, but waking up from the nap is the hard part. If I set my alarm for 20 or 30 minutes, I hear the alarm and wake up, but I feel even more exhausted than when I started the nap. And when I'm that tired I just give up on the writing and go back to bed for the night.
I have tried going for a walk around the block to wake me up. I enjoy the time walking. It is peaceful and relaxing. And I need the exercise as well. But it doesn't really wake me up, so that tactic is a bit of a wash.
I have tried drinking some coffee (cold brew coffee is my favorite) between 7pm and 9pm so that the caffeine has time to work by 9:30pm. That strategy has been very effective and really helpful. I have been routinely able to stay up to 11pm without feeling too drowsy, and even push on to midnight or later on occasion.
But my most recent experiment has been to see how some light exercise helps me stay awake. I do some walking squats around my living room. A few jumping jacks. I do a bit of stretching on the floor. Nothing to get me winded or sweating, but just enough to get the blood flowing. This strategy has also been extremely effective.
Different things can work for different people, so you should try each of these and more to see what you like, but if I was to recommend a plan to someone trying to stay up at night to do some writing, I would say to drink coffee and do some light exercise and stretching. Not too revolutionary. Pretty basic and common sense type stuff. But I'm glad I went through the steps to test each thing out to see what would actually help me stay up so I could accomplish my writing goal.
Those two things have helped me end a months long blogging break. And I hope they can help me keep up a consistent blogging streak.
Do you have any other tips or tricks to pushing past feeling tired? How do you motivate yourself to write when you don't feel like it? Let me know in the comments!
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