Too much sleep?

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Enjay
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Post by Enjay »

My problem is my biological clock wants me to sleep at a time that means coordinating with the rest of humanity is quite difficult. For me, the ideal time to go to bed would be 3-4 a.m. I don't fee especially tired before then. However, I also need to sleep through until about mid day. So, I am faced with the choice of going to be too early, then spending hours staring at the ceiling until I finally drop off - at least getting some rest, if not sleep, or going to be at a time that suits me, but waking up absolutely knackered when the world dictates that I need to so that I can do my job. :? It's bizarre. Most of the morning I'll feel quite tired. About mid day, I'll start feeling human. By the end of the working day, I'll come home and feel pretty tired but as the evening wears on, I become more and more awake until I'm fully functional at about 9-10 p.m. I don't even mean it's the typical student/ teenage thing of going to be late and lying in in the morning but getting over that when you finally get a job. I stopped being a student over 20 years ago, have been working regularly since then and still have the problem.

It's always been this way. Even before I was aware of it, my mother tells me that, as a baby, I used to yell whenever she tried to put me to bed, until the early hours of the morning when I would finally sleep - and then do so right through to the middle of the following day. My first memories of the problem must have been when I was about 5 years old, just lying in bed - not sleeping and bored stiff. School trips etc were another time when it became obvious. Whenever we had a school trip somewhere where people were in dormitories or something, obviously there would be the usual nocturnal hi-jinx but one by one, the voices contributing to our conversations, or whatever, would disappear until I was the only one awake - and wide awake at that.

I've tried everything, and so has my doctor. I've done all the alternative therapies and old wife's tales. Nothing worked. It's not that I'm an insomniac. I'm great at sleeping. Once I get off to sleep a nuclear device is required to wake me. The problem is with me getting to sleep at a suitable time. Frankly, it sucks.
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Paul
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Post by Paul »

Enjay-You said that when you return home you feel really tired. I think I've experienced this to some degree. It's my belief that the human organism has several moments during the day when the ammount of produced sleep hormone increases (melatonine?) and that would be a good moment to sleep, otherwise, the awakeness tells the organism it's not the time yet. In other words-I get sleepy at 10 pm, then awake, then at 12 pm, then awake again, then again at 2 am. I think the moments you feel tired is the moment to go to sleep, or at least attempt, otherwise it's a signal for the body to stay awake. When I feel tired I can either go to sleep, and there's rarely a chance I'll keep counting the lambs, or stay awake. When I don't feel asleep, it's a struggle in the bed for me, unless that magical moments comes. I hope this helps in some way..
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Lutrov71
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Post by Lutrov71 »

I usually get about 8-9 hours sleep a day. Go to bed at around 10:30-11:00pm and then get up at around 7-8am. I never feel tired anyway.
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Enjay
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Post by Enjay »

Paul wrote:Enjay-You said that when you return home you feel really tired...
I do sometimes come home from work (about 5.30 p.m.) and hit the sack. I can usually fall asleep within about 20 minutes (good by my standards). However, even if I am left undisturbed, I will tend to wake again around 9 p.m. - and it's a real wide awake. Then I can't get to sleep until about 4-5 a.m. Which of course leaves me only a couple of hours to sleep before I have to get up and go to work. So despite a good couple of hours in the evening, I've still not had the sleep I need and I go to work tired. :sleep:
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Post by Shinjanji »

Paul wrote:It's my belief that the human organism has several moments during the day when the ammount of produced sleep hormone increases

I learned about this when I took a psychology class once. The brain operates on a semi-predictable pattern of "sleepiness." If one wakes up in the morning, they will usually get a feeling of tiredness in the afternoon. This schedule is not absolute; it will shift with your usual sleeping time, so if you felt tired again, say, 8 hours after waking up in the morning, then suddenly started waking up in the afternoon on a regular basis, eventually your sleeping pattern would adjust, and you'd start to feel tired 8 hours after waking up again. I tried Googling for a chart or page explaining this, but all I got were pages on the sleep cycle (a chart of WHEN you're asleep) rather than your sleep/wake cycle. The sleep-wake cycle is called the Circadian Rhythm.
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Post by The HavoX »

I usually get to bed around 12:00 AM (St. Louis time) and I'm always tired in the morning Image

Perhaps I should buy one of these things and install it in the garage...

[CLICK TO VIEW IMAGE]
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ellmo
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Post by ellmo »

I have the same problem as NJ.
I'm not tired when I'm supposed to go to sleep, and if I'm to be full of energy through the next day on the university - I'm supposed to go to sleep around 23:00 (Why the hell can't you guys use 24h time? I hate those british AMs and PMs) to wake up at 7:30.

But in my case it means laying in the bed for two hours untill I'm so goddamn bored that I automatically fall asleep.

On weekends I go to sleep (read as: leave the computer room or finish watching NBA game) at 3:00-4:00 o' clock, and get up next day around noon. I'm really gonna have to find a job which gives me a good flexibility in working time... or I'm gonna shoot myself.

As for the topic itself: I'm not sure if you can get too much sleep, but I suppose it is possible. It will then take you a few good hours to fully wake yourself up.
But it crtailny is possible to be so drastically tired, that you can't even sleep. It seems like the organism has to settle it's primary functions while you are still awake (and almost dying on your feet) to let you sleep a good whiles later. My dad had a hard period during which he was working his hands to the bone... and with all respect for my father - he sometimes looked like shit in the morning.

But remeber one thing: your organism is always right. Listen to it.
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Post by BioHazard »

I'm usually up late because that's when the people I talk to - which are on the other side of the world - are up. Quite annoying...
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Paul
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Post by Paul »

Wise man once said wrote:The best cure for insomnia is the need to get up
;)
Jake wrote:But in my case it means laying in the bed for two hours untill I'm so goddamn bored that I automatically fall asleep.
This reminds me of myself, actually. Sometimes when attempting to fall asleep I usually twitch in the bed, exploring vast worlds in my imagination (which are usually influenced by what I had experienced during the day). I found that ceasing imagination and attempting to "think about nothing" (except the tought of thinking about nothing that is..) quickly immobilises my body until I accept the fact it's bed time. Maybe that would be an advice.
On a curious note, some eastern religions (I think it was Taoism) claim that turning the mind off helps unifying oneself. Interesting and odd at the same time..
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Enjay
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Post by Enjay »

I just read an interesting article in "New Scientist". It was actually dealing with smokers - more on that later - but it was saying that people do have an internal clock and a sleep time period that suits them. For most people this is, apparently, 12.30 to 8.30 a.m. So I guess that means most people are up slightly before they would like to be. However it did say that daylight and other factors also influence it and that minor readjustment is not a big problem. More importantly for this discussion, it also said that there is a wide range of sleep times in the human population and that it is genetically determined (it seems my kids have inherited my sleep period as they already display the problems I have).

None of this was presented as new information, but rather as fact on which the research that was actually the subject of the article was based on. The article itself was related to smoking and people who necesarily work outside their natural sleep times. It has been found that 70% of the people tested who regularly have to operate outside their natural sleep time by more than an hour smoke. Interestingly, the further away from your prefered sleep period you are seems not to influence how heavily you smoke, but the fact you are outside it influences whether you will smoke or not.

I, however, clearly operate outside my prefered period all the time but I'm in the 30% of people in that situation who are non-smokers.
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ellmo
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Post by ellmo »

Enjay wrote:It has been found that 70% of the people tested who regularly have to operate outside their natural sleep time by more than an hour smoke.
Well, usually I don't give a broken penny for these bollocks... but I do operate outisde my natural sleep time (at least that's how I feel)... and I do smoke from time to time.
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