Day 3: here's where it starts to get hard

I'm still on vacation, so it's not as hard as it could be.

But last night, I followed the rules: electronics off by 10:30, phone downstairs, lights out at 11. I kept thinking about things I wanted to just quickly check online, or emails I needed to send, but the phone wasn't there, so I didn't. (Lesson in impulse control: make it hard to follow the impulse. No way was I going downstairs in the cold to get the phone.)

I didn't really fall asleep til midnight though - just lay there.  Slept well til 6-ish, woken by cat (who claws noisily at the bed to get attention when she's hungry.) Bathroom break, and then lay there awake for a while - maybe a half-hour.  When I fell back asleep I was dreaming vividly (the main character looked a lot like the brother in Transparent) but when the alarm went off I turned it off and went back to sleep - I just couldn't make myself get up. Slept another full hour. So I probably got a total of 8 hours of sleep, maybe 8 1/2, but not contiguous.

 This is not the result I'm looking for.  Especially because I'm sleepy/foggy now.

Let's review, though: yesterday I had some wheat (triscuits) and a couple of glasses of red wine before dinner (I neeeeded it after a stressful meeting!).  Got minimal exercise (walking to the pond and back and another brief dog walk.) A second cup of coffee in mid-afternoon.  Overall, a lot of things that probably contributed to a more restless night than the previous. And the itching came back, at least a little.

Oh the itching. Some nights it's so fierce - for an hour before I go to sleep I'm scratching all over - scalp, legs, arms, back - the more inaccessible the spot, the more I have to twist and turn to get to it, the more often and powerful it will itch. Sometimes there's a vaginal or even rectal itch too.  I have never been able to correlate it to anything in particular - I thought it happened more in cold dry weather but I had it a lot over this past summer.

I'm hoping, through this experiment, to learn whether there's a food and drink correlation, or maybe it's some kind of neurological firing that will subside if my brain calms down from less time looking at the phone.

If I can solve the itching, and that's the only permanent change, it will be well worth it.