Barely slept last night but was so tired I couldn’t focus. There’s an email I want to reply to but I’ve had to leave it because its words just were not going in to my head. Now that there is daylight and I’m full of tea, I find this which might help either of us if this happens again:

Regardless, those hours of wakefulness at night can be spent in panic or paralysis, or you can do something productive about them.

“What is insomnia, but the gift of more time?” says Michael Perlis, associate professor of psychology and director of the Behavioral Sleep Medicine Program at the University of Pennsylvania. Perlis is not advocating for purposely losing sleep, but if faced with short-term insomnia, he says, it’s best to treat the time productively rather than tossing for hours in bed. Think of insomnia as an opportunity to get stuff done.

How to Turn Your Insomnia into a Productivity Tool – Jane Porter, Fast Company (21 January 2014)

Porter’s full advice boils down to not spending too long trying to get sleep, grab a pen and do some writing work instead. She has a point of course but right now I dread to think what peculiar words would’ve come.