Tuesday, August 2, 2011

I need more sleep

After rereading yesterdays post I almost removed it.  It was written pretty poorly.  My thoughts were there but scattered.  I'm not sure if any real point came across.  After thinking about it I decided to keep the post up.  It's a good reminder of what happens to a normally logical, sensible person who doesn't get much sleep.  I normally sleep for nine hours per night during the winter and eight or nine hours per night during the summer.  There may be exceptions where I stay up late.  But on normal days I go to bed sometime around nine or ten and get up sometime between five and six.  That may seem like a lot of sleep for most adults but I have always needed around 9 hours of sleep.  I refuse to use an alarm clock because in my mind if I need an alarm to wake me then I am not getting the proper amount of rest.  I need to readjust what time I go to bed in order to get up earlier.  My aversion to alarm clocks doesn't mean I don't use one.  On days that I must be out the door by a certain time I will set the alarm.  I do have a good internal clock so if I tell myself to get up at 4:00 I usually wake up around 3:45. 
 
This past Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights were out of the ordinary.  On Friday night the grandkids and I were out until almost ten at night.  By the time I got them to bed and then checked my email to make sure no crisis needed to be solved before midnight it was almost midnight.  Not a problem, I figured I'd sleep in on Saturday.  Sleeping in means 7:30 since I usually get up by 6:00.  Unfortunately for me I forgot to close my bedroom door when I went to bed.  The rule around here is if my door is open the kids can come in.  If the door is closed do not disturb me unless it's an emergency.  This meant I had a grandson on my bed at six wanting me to get up to make breakfast.  He's starving!  Once awake, I stay away.
 
Not a problem.  I'll go to bed early Saturday night.  Except Saturday night came and as I went outside to turn the water off sometime after 9:00 at night I noticed a light on in the garage.  It seems Army daughter didn't get the freezer door closed when she was in the garage before dinner.  The freezer was running for over five hours with the door wide open.  Everything was well defrosted and the freezer motor was at full roar.  So was my temper.  I ended up cleaning up the melted ice cream and other stuff that made a mess on top of other things in the freezer and all over the garage floor.  It's a good thing that I had recently taken the 100 pounds of rice out of the freezer and put it into buckets.  Some of the flour didn't fare well but most of the stuff wasn't totally ruined.  Anyway, Saturday night was a late night - or perhaps it went into Sunday morning. 
 
Sunday morning I slept in until 7:00.  I woke up a bit tired but had lots of stuff to do.  I was on the go all the way until I got called in to work.  I got four hours of sleep on Sunday night.  Monday I started really early and was able to finish up work and come home not too long after it got dark.  I'm not sure what time it was when I wrote what I posted but it was late and I was sleep deprived. 
 
In three nights I slept midnight to six, midnight to six, midnight to four and I was extremely physically active.  And nothing out of the ordinary caused this lack of sleep, just pretty much everyday life.  What if TSHTF?  This was a three day stretch with lots of physical activity and little sleep.  What if I had to start doing this much physical activity every day on 4-6 hours of sleep?  Would I just get used to less sleep or would I end up making stupid decisions because I was tired? 

3 comments:

  1. With my Fibro I need even more sleep than that I think because my sleep is rarely deep enough. I to have wondered what I would do if I had to go on less sleep for a while. How do you really solve that though?

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  2. I would so love to get 8-9 hours of sleep per night. Most weekdays I'm lucky to get 6. I thought the older you got the less you slept?

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  3. I've heard you need less sleep when you get older. It's been over 50 years now, I'm still waiting!

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