[PunchyPlay]

Thanks for the advice AlfiRey, you explained all that very well.

After thinking about it for a while here's my plan for the future, hopefully I can stick with it.

Shoot for 5 days of work a week with 2 days off. So assume I only do 5 hours of poker the days I play thats 25 hours a week, 100 hours a month, 1200 hours a year (rough estimate). 5 hours would be the minimum I would play each day, most likely I'd do more, but even with just that it's a substantial increase (especially over this year). Actual hours for the year might vary depending on things like moving, vacations etc though.

Now if for whatever reason I can't get to sleep one night and I'm up late I can plan for the next day to be my day off. This way I can wake up tired (say 5-6 hours of sleep), stay up until 2 am and force my schedule back to normal quickly. One thing I haven't researched in regards to this is sleep aids like melatonin, those might help as well.

I think the key for all this is to just stay much more disciplined about it all. It will probably be rough at first as I've never been good at keeping a schedule but maybe with time it will settle into place naturally.

I think your advice on doing activities that relax you before sleep is also a great idea. Often I'd be getting ready for bed and turn on conan and end up laughing so hard I'm wide awake. Or I might play some intense game and the same thing happens.

I'm glad I made this thread, it's helpful to get all my thoughts written down like this.