Insomnia: Death to Sanity
My body has decided as of late that 7:15 am is wake-up time. Seeing as how that's earlier than I had been waking up, that's good, right? Except that my body has also decided that 3:00 am is sleepy time, as opposed to my previous sleep time of 1:00 am. So instead of getting between six and seven hours of sleep, I've gotten four or five hours of sleep. Even with the weekend freedom to go back to sleep until 9 or 10, that's not nearly enough sleep. You would think that I would be able to fall asleep when I am too exhausted to even form a coherent sentence, as I was both Saturday and Sunday night. No. That would be logical. And healthy.
As a result of the sleep deprivation, I was not in a good mood today and as such should probably not have interacted with other humans. Someone parked right in front of my grocery cart at the parcel pick-up (why does Shoppers not have cart returns in their lot?). Mine was the only cart with anything in it, he could have parked anywhere in front of the building, and he parked in front of my cart so I had to walk one and a half car lengths to get to my goceries, which, if I could have gotten them all in one trip, I wouldn't have bothered doing parcel pickup. I was tempted to take the bags containing my cartons of orange juice and slam them against his door. Or window. And then I decided that I really needed to go home and sleep because grocery rage is not a good sign. And now I'm home. And - surprise, suprise! - not sleeping. Gah!
As a result of the sleep deprivation, I was not in a good mood today and as such should probably not have interacted with other humans. Someone parked right in front of my grocery cart at the parcel pick-up (why does Shoppers not have cart returns in their lot?). Mine was the only cart with anything in it, he could have parked anywhere in front of the building, and he parked in front of my cart so I had to walk one and a half car lengths to get to my goceries, which, if I could have gotten them all in one trip, I wouldn't have bothered doing parcel pickup. I was tempted to take the bags containing my cartons of orange juice and slam them against his door. Or window. And then I decided that I really needed to go home and sleep because grocery rage is not a good sign. And now I'm home. And - surprise, suprise! - not sleeping. Gah!
posted by SpakKadi at 6:24 PM
4 Comments:
Try meditation - will reduce your angst, and kick boxing after - to work off whatever is left behind :P
Ever see the Machinist?
Actaully, I started a weight-lifting regimen yesterday and I was ready to sleep afterward. 'Course, it could have been the lack of sleep, too.
Jody, I've heard of the Machinist because some people who know I like the new Batman movie (ie, a subset of the entire world) have mentioned it. Christian Bale (the new Batman) is in it. It's absolutely unnatural how he went from this to this in under a year. *shiver* I love the plot outline. "An industrial worker who hasn't slept in a year begins to doubt his own sanity." Begins? Dear goodness, I go two days and start to doubt my sanity. Wait, I can get a full night's sleep and still doubt my sanity. Never mind.
When I go days without sleeping (only once due to insomnia - lots of times due to work/procrastination), I experience the following effects:
Day 1: tired most of the day, listless without caffeine.
Day 2: very tired, attention span greatly reduces and my motor skills for speaking become difficult. This has the effect of making me mostly incoherent to speak too. This also occasionally happens to me without a loss of sleep
Day 3: I still feel tired but I no longer feel sleepy (this normally scares the sh*t out of me so I'll almost always force myself to sleep at this point). Attention is still bad, but I am able to speak coherently again - I figure my conscious mind has slowed down to match the sleep-reduced performance of the vocal
Day 4-5 (only done this twice):
At this point my focus narrows to only being able to pay attention to one thing at a time. This may sound like a good thing, but you'll be surprised how often you're subconsciously paying attention to 3 or more things simultaneously and how important this is. I'll also get caught in loops. This means that I'll randomly say the same thing aloud repeatedly (not exactly like in the Aviator, but similar), and sounds I've heard earlier in the day will echo in my head (particularly the sound of a phone ringing which was quite annoying).
I've never gone beyond that so I've never experienced sleep loss induced hallucinations (unless you count the looped sounds - but maybe that's what hallucinations are), but I did once stay up all night playing tetris and chess. The next day I was mentally classifying buildings into tetris patterns and visualizing the effect of matching certain blocks into the buildings' gaps. That same day I found myself in room with about a 50-50 mix of whites and blacks and twice I uncontrollably assigned everyone piece designations (mostly by their relative height) and began to analyze the "board". Not quite a hallucination, but I could see how that would lead to it.
I also figure that if I stayed up for 6 or more days, I would develop an overwhelming urge to operate a lathe...
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