The more I reflect about happiness, and what factors contribute to or detract from my happiness, the more I’m convinced that getting enough sleep is absolutely crucial.

It’s so tempting to stay up late: the time between my older daughter’s bedtime and my own bedtime is one of my very favorite parts of the day. I spend time with my husband, I catch up on work, I read, I watch TV, I talk to my sister in California on the phone…all things I love to do, and all things that are hard to do during the chaos of the day.

But now, if I’m sleepy, I go to bed – even if it’s only 9:25 p.m. (which is when I went to bed last night). Once I started paying attention, I realized the dramatic difference between a day when the alarm jars me out of a deep sleep and the day when I wake up on my own, before the alarm sounds.

For a long time, if I woke up in the middle of the night, or if one of my children woke me up, I’d go up and work in my office for an hour or so. I love working in my dark, quiet office, when I know that the rest of my family is cozily asleep. But I’ve realized that although I love working like that, and it’s great to plow through a bunch of work uninterrupted, I pay too dearly for it the next day.

Sleep, sleep!

The days are long, but the years are short.