I’ve haven’t updated my blog in nearly eleven days because I’ve been too tired to write. Until yesterday, that is, when I started writing a new short story that has been swimming around in my head for the past week and a half.
So, on the topic of being tired, I read a report in the NY Times that highly suggested a person should get about 7-8 hour of sleep a night to “feel” well. Getting that much sleep helps your body re-energized and helps a person maintain or lose weight and a bunch of other stuff that is supposed to be good for you. Kinda like LIFE cereal, I guess.
I don’t get 7-8 hours of sleep a night. At best, I might get 4, 4 ½ or even 5. And those aren’t continuous hours – but not for my lack of trying. I just don’t sleep well, ever. It’s nothing new. It’s been that way for years. It probably started way back in college when I worked full time – third shift and tried to keep up with my friends and classes all day long. When I was on the midnight to 8 am shift, I used to sleep from about 8:15 am to 11 am, then I’d get up, drive to class and stay around campus, hanging out with my friends or working out until about 5 or 6. Then I’d go home, eat, and go back to bed until 11 pm, when I would get up and go back to work.
For a short time, I was on a 4 am to noon shift. For all practical purposes, it seemed a normal enough shift, if you had a normal life. It’s definitely not the shift for the college student that wants to barhop with her friends. So I’d go to the bars until 2 am, go back to the dorm – or my apartment and sleep on the couch for like 90 minutes, then get up and go to work. I wouldn’t dare sleep on my bed for fear that I would oversleep. The couch was uncomfortable and gave me the illusion that I wouldn’t sleep soundly and would be able to wake up in time to go to work. When I got off work, I’d go to class, hang out with my friends and then about 6 pm, take a 3 or 4-hour nap – so I’d be ready to go out again at 10 pm. Hence, the vicious cycle began.
And now, 20 years later it continues. I usually shut the lights off somewhere between midnight and 12:30 am – about 30 minutes after my “don’t forget to go to sleep” alarm goes off. And yes, I set an alarm to remind myself to go to sleep because if I didn’t I’d be up all night writing stories or blog entries or playing some ridiculous video game or streaming reruns of my favorite TV shows on Netflix. Sounds weird, I know, but trust me – it works.
So, once I shut the lights off, I fall asleep quickly and sleep soundly for about 2-2 ½ hours and then I wake up and wonder … hmm, what time is it? How many hours of sleep do I have left? This is the start of what I like to call the “dozing” cycle.
I call it dozing because once I wake that first time, I never really get back into that deep – drool on the pillow sleep. I’ll doze from here on out and maybe even for an hour at a time, but I keep waking up to look at the clock, wondering what time it is and how much sleep time I have left. I don’t even know why I look – it’s not like I’m going to over sleep because I have the alarm set – two of them, in fact, and both are battery operated – so it’s not like I’ll oversleep due to a power failure or anything.
I do this any given day of the week. Weekdays, off days, work days, weekends, even when I’m on holiday – laid off for a month – break. It doesn’t matter if I have to get up to go to work or I’m sleeping in until noon. It’s like I’m obsessed with the time, but clearly only when I’m sleeping – because I could stay up all night doing not much of anything important and it wouldn’t even bother me. And then, because I sleep so crappy, I wake up exhausted – which works against me for most of the day.
My alarm goes off at 6:20 on the days I have to work. I’m usually brushing my teeth when it goes off because I’ve already been awake for at least 15 minutes and just got up out of frustration. I leave the house at 7:00, which gets me to work at about 7:30, including a stop at Casey’s to get my morning coffee and possibly a stop at the McDonald’s drive thru for some oatmeal.
When I get to work, I’m tired and need food right away otherwise I’m doomed for the morning and then I start wondering how much longer it will be until I can go back to sleep. Most days when I get off work, I drive straight home and take a nap. Sometimes this refreshes me, but sometimes not – it just depends.
People, mostly my mother, have commented that I should take vitamin B for energy, which allegedly would help me sleep. I bought some. I took them. They didn’t work. Then mother suggested I go to bed earlier or take a sleep aid. I tried both and neither had any positive effect on my unending cycle. When I go to bed earlier – I’m not sleepy, so I end up flopping around in bed trying to get comfortable until I fall asleep after midnight or in the rare event that I actually fall asleep before midnight, the dozing cycle just starts earlier leaving me more tired than normal. Taking a sleep aid may work for about 3 hours, until I wake up – in the middle of the night and in the morning, makes me feel like I have a hangover.
I talked to my doctor about it once and he suggested that maybe I had sleep apnea – which would account for the waking up for no good reason out of a perfectly good sleep. According to him, sleep apnea runs in families and my father has it, so I almost bought into this theory. I even went to have a “sleep study” done.
I showed up at the sleep lab at 10:30 at night. By the time the technician had me hooked up to the machine it was nearly midnight. I watched maybe 15 minutes of TV and then rolled over on my stomach and went to sleep. I slept for a couple of hours and then woke about to look at the time. Went back to sleep for another hour, woke up to look at the time and dozed until the technician came into the room at 5:30 to unhook me and send me home.
After the data was reviewed by an MD …. I was told I didn’t have sleep apnea. They acknowledged that I woke up several times, but there really wasn’t any medical reason for it. I wasn’t snoring, I didn’t stop breathing and I didn’t have restless leg syndrome. I chalked that up to another unnecessary medical test – that proved absolutely nothing.
I guess I’m just one of those people that doesn’t need a lot of real sleep. Maybe I can’t sleep because my mind is always on over-drive thinking about potential story lines or working out details to stories that are stuck on my hard-drive. Or maybe those two or three hours are all I need and it’s all that dozing that makes me feel so damn tired.
In a way, I finally understand that dunkin donuts commercial from the 70’s … when the donut guy’s sleep/wake cycle was messed up and he met himself at door as he was trying to come home or go to work. Guess it’s small comfort that there are others out there just like me. (even if they are only TV characters).
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