Comments on: Sleep

By: Elvo

Elvo — Fri, 07 Apr 2006 19:34:07 +0000

~2.30am to ~10am ==> Coincidentally also my natural sleep cycle!

Few facts:

* Actually, the most natural thing to do is to stretch the days. Put any group of people in a cave for 14 days and they’ll have slept only 10 or 11 times.

* The more crap you take in (alcohol, Australian beer, drugs,…), the more sleep you’ll need. The more stuff you do(work out, party, run around,…), the more sleep you need. Basically: the more fun you have, the more sleep you need.

* Digital pictures can be compressed ;-)

* I was only _pretending_ to be picking my nose :-)

By: tiff

tiff — Fri, 24 Mar 2006 19:31:08 +0000

May I offer my heartfelt agreement. Sleep sucks, and I don’t understand people who like their sleep. Some people lose half their lives to sleep!

I remember reading somewhere that they invited a drug of some sort that would allow people to sleep less, for military use or something… sounds like a bad idea though. The truth is that you can’t get away from it. So why not learn to love it? (Good luck with that.)

By: jon

jon — Thu, 23 Mar 2006 12:23:40 +0000

I think a fundamental problem is that my natural sleep cycle is from ~2.30am to ~10am!

It also seems that the later I go to bed, the less sleep I need before waking up refreshed. When I was at university I used to have no trouble going to bed at 3am-6am every day, still waking up when I needed to.

An additional factor I think is how awake you need to feel in order to undertake certain activities – for example it requires no real mental effort to slouch around on the weekend, or even go play sports, whereas at work I have to concentrate pretty much solidly on what I’m doing, so I notice when I’m feeling tired a lot more. So call that perceived awakeness required. If you know you’re going to have to be awake to do something, perhaps this adds stress/anxiety and hence you wake up prematurely/take a long time to drift off.

Funnily enough though, I never seemed to have a problem waking up in Canada, and don’t remember ever feeling particularly tired (unless I’d had 2 hours sleep and was hungover), even though to live there I had to shift my body clock back by 8 hours.

Must be that either I’m destined to live on a different continent, or the fact that the weather is so damn depressing in England that it makes everyone more tired/miserable (i.e. effects characterised by Seasonal Affective Disorder, or SAD), so that they can only live normally in the summer months. Don’t you find that you’re always more tired in winter, when the daylight hours are reduced?

By: Omar

Omar — Wed, 22 Mar 2006 23:45:15 +0000

Hmmmm, it’s an interesting point. It must be psychological, i find it so much easier to get up at the weekend. I’ve never given my sleep pattern much thought, though i can’t lie in really, if i’ve got work at 2pm i still get up at relatively early, even if i was in bed at 2, even if i could sleep some more. I’m rambling, i think it’s about getting some sort of regularity maybe??

Loads of sleep questions here that will have awesome amounts of info.