Tired

I have been tired quite a lot recently.  This seems ridiculous because I have such a large amount of time to sleep.  I don't have the minimum of 45 hours of work a week for a full-time job.  45 hours?*  I have fewer and more flexible hours. 

Most of this post is redundant, written in a post on this blog before, but more than four years ago, so you probably don't remember it.  It is interesting to see that not much has changed in those four years.

Anyway, I should have enough time to get more than my fair share of sleep.  However, The Face of Evil and my wife agree that 6:30am is the correct time to get up.  Before the Face of Evil and my wife this seemed to me to be a crazy idea.  Getting up at or before dawn is simply unnatural.  While The Face of Evil and I are agreed that one should go to sleep early enough for a long nights sleep, my wife disagrees to some extent.  My wife has always needed less sleep than I do.  She goes for seven hours, I for more like nine.  The nights that I get the most sleep are when my wife is very tired and needs to go to bed early (also known as "giving up")

I am a bad sleeper.  Or at least I am bad at falling asleep.  Generally throughout my life I have done well at sleeping once asleep, I am dead to the world.  This has been changing recently.  The upshot of my love's sleeping habits and my difficulty in getting to sleep is that my basic length of sleep is confined to the hours that my wife sleeps.  So, after an uninterrupted nights sleep I start the day down two hours, and then walk the dog and eat breakfast for two hours or so.  At this point I have a choice to make, have a cup of coffee and stay awake throughout the day, or take a nap.

The cup of coffee is quite pleasant.  It is enervating and lifts my mood, particularly now with the magic blue pills.  I quite happily get through the day.  Naps are awesome.  Wonderful.  Fantastic.  Lying in a comfortable place with the dappled light of day, slipping in and out of dreams is one of my favorite things to do.  However, naps are not a good way to get the sleep you need.  They aren't a full, regular, repeating cycle that makes up a great night of sleep.  You probably know that foggy, bleary feeling upon waking.

Staying awake with coffee is fine that day, but this deprivation builds up over the days so that the next day I am more tired than I would have been.  Taking a nap generally provides the right amount of sleep, but in a divided less effective manner.  However, the rhythms of the household don't change very much except later nights on the weekend and I have one morning off a week from walking the dog, but because of my bad sleeping skills, once woken for five or ten minutes I find it hard to get back to sleep.  So, I don't get that rejuvenating long sleep many get on a weekend morning. My darling wife manages to catch up with ten hours on Sunday.

I, like many, if not most people in our society, operate on less sleep than I want or need.  A lot of the time I feel tired.  Why does this matter?  It matters because the quality of life goes down when you are tired.  We all know that when we are tired we find it harder to focus, we are less motivated to do things, we are more irritable, our ability to think and reason is reduced.  Being tired even feels unpleasant, itchy eyes, a feeling of extra weight, a greater tendency towards sadness and depression.

So what is natural sleep?  How much should I (we) be getting and how would it be different?  The answer is two sets of four hours over a continual period of ten hours, with a meditative period of two hours awake in the dark around midnight.  One of the good effects of just knowing this is that when you wake up in the middle of the night and don't go right back to sleep, that's normal, natural, and healthy.  This consistent amount is based on our having evolved around the equator where the hours of day and night don't vary.  Go to bed in the dark, give yourself ten hours of darkness, stay in bed when you wake up in the middle of the night, and wake up in the dark.  Those from the world of the electric light bulb who try this report that they realize that they have never before been truly awake.  Some day I really hope to try this for a month or so.

Natural sleep.

One of the symptoms of my bipolar disorder was that about once a month for about four consecutive days I would feel absolutely exhausted.  Lying down to sleep at any opportunity.  Stairs were hard work.  As a result, whenever I feel very tired I wonder if my illness is coming back (it isn't.)  I just assumed that I caught influenza viruses all the time without realizing what was actually going on.  Magic blue pills have removed this source of exhaustion, but they have also increased my brain's activity during the night.  I have the most amazing, long vivid dreams now.  I toss and turn more than I used to, wake up in the night more than I used to, and my mind wanders at high speed when I turn out the light.  One of the side-effects for the medication is drowsiness.

Today I realize I have a cold, a little cold, no big deal.  It just adds on a little bit to what makes me tired.  When I am tired I don't want to do the things I should and things are less fun.  I am tired.  Whoop-de-doo.  try working all day in construction.

*  One of the problems people have in calculating their work time is in including the things you must do in order to work for which you aren't paid.  I am including a half hour commute, which you have to do to work and you wouldn't do if you didn't work.  Commuting is consistently rated the most disliked regular activity, worse than chores or work.  You are not directly paid for your least liked portion of work.  This is one of the calculations we make for deciding if Christina wants a new job, an extra hour a day of commuting is more than a 10% pay cut and a substantial decrease in the quality of working conditions.