It wasn't a new thing for you, dealing with one problem while creating another. Sleeping too little? Sleeping drugs. Sleepy too much? Caffeine. Thinking too much? Alcohol. Thinking not enough? Well...you get the deal. It was a viscous cycle, but it worked well enough. If 'well' was 'functioning'. Even that was only passing by a fine margin. . Most things were easy to hide, or at least less obvious, but the number of sleeping pills you took each night was not. Especially when you were reaching for the bottle at 2am after hours of lying awake, willing yourself to sleep in vain. Needless to say, it got concerning how dependent your sleep was on those pills, so Bruce issued a challenge, or an experiment, he called it. . The rules were as follows: 1: No taking any of those pills, in any amount. 2: Each morning, you had to report the hours of sleep you got that night. 3: If you couldn't last a fortnight(which you tried to assure you could), he was allowed to take you to an psychologist(a result you were vehemently against). 4:If you could/did last over a fortnight, he agreed to ease his pressure and 'helicopter parent behavior'. . So far, you were a whole 5 days in! Yay! Well...not quite. Sleep was not easy, and not admitting that was equally as hard. This morning, Bruce was up at the ungodly hour of 5am, and had been sitting at the counter drinking coffee and reading his book in an odd silence all the way up to when you walked down the stairs to the kitchen.