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NaBloPoMo post 7: Sleepless nights
Nov. 8th, 2012 01:14 amI'm not entirely sure this subject will hold a whole blogpost, but it's approaching one in the morning and I'd like to get Wednesday's blogpost out of the way, so it'll do.
Said subject is my sleep cycle/amount which I sleep, as I was chatting with someone at work, and it reminded me that my sleep levels/approach are probably a little strange, and well, whilst I'm now in bed, I'm writing this having had around three to four hours last night, and I'm not actually that shattered at the moment; I'm tireder than I normally am, but I could get up and do things if I needed to.
I've always found it quite hard to get to sleep. Some of that may come from too much time spent reading books in bed when I should've been sleeping as a child, but I think the reading came as much or more from being unable to get to sleep as the sleep issues came from the books.
As far as I can track it, the sleep issues come from two things. Firstly, I generally have a nose that is somewhere between 'mostly blocked' and 'totally blocked', and secondly, I find it very hard to quiet my mind, to not be thinking about interesting things or listening to things going by. This gets even worse if I'm insufficiently tired when I go to bed; I now actively avoid going to bed earlier than 11pm or so (barring huge tiredness from exceptionally long time away/lots of activity), because I'll then get some rest/sleep, but wake up and feel noticeably awake and unable to sleep from around 4-5am or so.
The other sleeping weirdness I have is that my 'wake up' instinct/pattern has become quite disentangled from my 'get up' ones. They used to be quite well put together; I developed them whilst I was in secondary school, initially needing to be woken by my dad shouting up the stairs, it slowly got to the point that I was fully dressed and either heading down or reading a book when he called up.
But then came Malaysia. A decade and a little more ago, I did six months in Malaysia as part of my gap year. And when doing this, for four of five working days a week, I was working 3pm to 11pm. I'm guessing that was partly because those hours they might have to pay the staff more, and it worked quite well for us as gap yearers, as it allowed us to go off to various places at the weekend, then get back late Sunday or early Monday, and get some sleep before work.
Which was nice. But the problem was, I was still waking up around 7-8am, every morning. Now, we usually socialised a bit with other staff; chatted, went out for a meal, or other stuff like that after work finished, so we were generally getting to bed around 1-3am. And that really meant I didn't want to be getting up at 7-8am. Particularly as there wasn't much to do; we generally had breakfast around midday, possibly going to the shops if we needed anything before work. So, I got good at lying in bed, quite aware of the room around me, but recumbent, resting, possibly half asleep. Weirdly enough, when I'm in the more half asleep part of that, that's the one time I seem to dream, and I'm not quite sure why.
And yeah, since Malaysia, I've never really been able to shift that wake up/get up disconnect, nor get myself into a point where I can go to bed at an earlier hour and sleep well. Possibly one thing partly to blame for this is six years as a student followed by another few years of mostly unemployment. In the absence of work to do, I tent to slowly slip towards noon to around 4am being the hours I'm up.
It doesn't destroy my ability to get up when I need to; when I worked as a traffic warden, needing to leave the house at around eight to eight thirty, I was alright with that and only quite rarely late, though those hours combined with the walking nature of the job did basically destroy me for doing anything other than the job, meals and an hour or so of email and webchecking in the evening.
So, yeah. I think what my body has become used to, over the years, is three to five hours of actual sleep, but also several hours of lying around, of half asleepness, and it makes to with that. I tend to sleep in quite heavily at the weekends (noon is usually my getup point then), so I probably pay it back then.
But I think the two types is also partly where my ability to do without sleep when I need to comes from; as long as I get one of the two types; either a few hours of actual sleep, or an hour or two of lying down, not doing very much, thinking some, then that keeps me going, and I just store it up and sleep longer later.
Said subject is my sleep cycle/amount which I sleep, as I was chatting with someone at work, and it reminded me that my sleep levels/approach are probably a little strange, and well, whilst I'm now in bed, I'm writing this having had around three to four hours last night, and I'm not actually that shattered at the moment; I'm tireder than I normally am, but I could get up and do things if I needed to.
I've always found it quite hard to get to sleep. Some of that may come from too much time spent reading books in bed when I should've been sleeping as a child, but I think the reading came as much or more from being unable to get to sleep as the sleep issues came from the books.
As far as I can track it, the sleep issues come from two things. Firstly, I generally have a nose that is somewhere between 'mostly blocked' and 'totally blocked', and secondly, I find it very hard to quiet my mind, to not be thinking about interesting things or listening to things going by. This gets even worse if I'm insufficiently tired when I go to bed; I now actively avoid going to bed earlier than 11pm or so (barring huge tiredness from exceptionally long time away/lots of activity), because I'll then get some rest/sleep, but wake up and feel noticeably awake and unable to sleep from around 4-5am or so.
The other sleeping weirdness I have is that my 'wake up' instinct/pattern has become quite disentangled from my 'get up' ones. They used to be quite well put together; I developed them whilst I was in secondary school, initially needing to be woken by my dad shouting up the stairs, it slowly got to the point that I was fully dressed and either heading down or reading a book when he called up.
But then came Malaysia. A decade and a little more ago, I did six months in Malaysia as part of my gap year. And when doing this, for four of five working days a week, I was working 3pm to 11pm. I'm guessing that was partly because those hours they might have to pay the staff more, and it worked quite well for us as gap yearers, as it allowed us to go off to various places at the weekend, then get back late Sunday or early Monday, and get some sleep before work.
Which was nice. But the problem was, I was still waking up around 7-8am, every morning. Now, we usually socialised a bit with other staff; chatted, went out for a meal, or other stuff like that after work finished, so we were generally getting to bed around 1-3am. And that really meant I didn't want to be getting up at 7-8am. Particularly as there wasn't much to do; we generally had breakfast around midday, possibly going to the shops if we needed anything before work. So, I got good at lying in bed, quite aware of the room around me, but recumbent, resting, possibly half asleep. Weirdly enough, when I'm in the more half asleep part of that, that's the one time I seem to dream, and I'm not quite sure why.
And yeah, since Malaysia, I've never really been able to shift that wake up/get up disconnect, nor get myself into a point where I can go to bed at an earlier hour and sleep well. Possibly one thing partly to blame for this is six years as a student followed by another few years of mostly unemployment. In the absence of work to do, I tent to slowly slip towards noon to around 4am being the hours I'm up.
It doesn't destroy my ability to get up when I need to; when I worked as a traffic warden, needing to leave the house at around eight to eight thirty, I was alright with that and only quite rarely late, though those hours combined with the walking nature of the job did basically destroy me for doing anything other than the job, meals and an hour or so of email and webchecking in the evening.
So, yeah. I think what my body has become used to, over the years, is three to five hours of actual sleep, but also several hours of lying around, of half asleepness, and it makes to with that. I tend to sleep in quite heavily at the weekends (noon is usually my getup point then), so I probably pay it back then.
But I think the two types is also partly where my ability to do without sleep when I need to comes from; as long as I get one of the two types; either a few hours of actual sleep, or an hour or two of lying down, not doing very much, thinking some, then that keeps me going, and I just store it up and sleep longer later.
