Staying Up Late

I am not a lover of going to bed early. Not one bit. It is boring, I miss out on all sorts of things with my friends and it feels like I'm being too responsible. Deep down inside I LOVE to stay up late. I don't know why but something about being up at all hours of the night is fun for me. It doesn't matter if I'm with one friend, seven friends or by myself just wasting time, it's fun. I would say I have always been this way and it got worse during the years I was living and going to school in Logan. The last semester I was there it got a lot better; I had a lot on my plate and I couldn't afford to stay up late, I needed the sleep. Then I went to China and although there were a few nights that I stayed up late with the girls, more often than not I was in bed no later than 10:30. I have maintained, for the most part, this bedtime since I got back.....until recently. The last month or so I've found myself staying up later and later but instead of getting strict with myself and going to bed early, it just keeps getting worse. Despite the fact that I am getting on average less hours of sleep than usual I feel just about the same at work. Whether I sleep 9 hours or 5, I have the same amount of energy at work and after, so I guess going to bed late doesn't really matter then does it? Wrong.

My energy levels may not seem to suffer because of lack of sleep but there are two very important things that do tend to suffer when I get into this bad habit and that is 1) my scripture study becomes either really short or nonexistent. 2) my nightly prayers seem to go on forever because I fall asleep half way through and I never end them, or as I am laying in my bed talking myself into getting on my knees, what seems like 5 minutes later, my alarm clock rings in the new day.

Now I know there just HAS to be a solution for this. I can move my scripture study time to sometime earlier in the day so I don't have to worry about it as I am crawling into bed. So that solves one problem but as for the other, I'm not really sure what to do. I don't mean to not say my prayers. I just need more self discipline I guess. OR I could just go to bed earlier so that when I pray right before bed it will be at a decent time when my brain is actually on and functioning. And that brings us full circle; back to going to bed early which as I explained before, is not my most favorite thing in the whole world. (sigh)