I woke up last night (this morning? whatever.) at about 4:00 because I was really hot. I dragged myself out of bed to adjust the AC, only to discover that neither my husband nor I had “shut down” the house before bed. This means that the kitchen light was still on, the door to the screened porch was open, and the cats had potentially escaped. After I rounded up the kitties (no easy feat since I wasn’t wearing my contacts or glasses), locked the door, got a drink, turned off the lights, and went to the bathroom, I headed back to bed. I woke up about an hour later, and realized that in all the mayhem I had turned the air down too much, and the bedroom was freezing. So I got back up, readjusted it and went back to bed. Again.

Today, I developed a headache around noon, so I popped a couple of knock-off Excedrin. Then around 9:30 or so this evening, I started having extreme pain in my very lower back (almost my tailbone) that was radiating down my legs. I took Ibuprofen, which helped a little, but not entirely. Since standing, walking, packing, etc. were out of the question, I settled down with Shape magazine and stumbled upon this blurb:

Before you stock up on aspirin, get some quality shut-eye. A new Johns Hopkins University study found that women whose sleep was disrupted multiple times in one night experienced significantly more bouts of pain the next day–like headaches and backaches–than those who snoozed soundly for eight hours. “Disturbances to sleep cycles seem to impair your ability to process and cope with pain,” said study author Michael T. Smith, PhD.

How completely weird. It’s normal for me to have trouble sleeping. In fact, typically I’ll have trouble for a few night in a row until I’m so exhausted that I sleep like the dead for a couple of nights and finally feel rested, which leads to more trouble sleeping, and the whole thing starts again. I’m also no stranger to headaches (which I generally blame on barometric pressure) and backaches (which I generally blame on work). But I wonder if my sleep cycle has something to do with it?