Sleeeeeeep

[lillibet]

[Poll #1620826]

Comments

[dpolicar]

Oops... I submitted prematurely.

I have a regular sleep schedule most of the time, though it's a constant struggle to actually end my day early enough to stick to it. I find it's necessary... I no longer have the ability to mess around with my sleep schedule with relative impunity.

(In retrospect I'm not sure how much I ever did, but the failure mode is more profound now.)

Sometimes it takes me fifteen minutes or more to fall asleep, sometimes I'm asleep as soon as my head hits the pillow. It depends on how much sleep I've been getting.

I had some pretty epic insomnia while in Brussels, but I blame a combination of jetlag and unfamiliar surroundings. Every once in a while I'll experience a bout of it when I'm processing something hard, or when I've fallen off the caffeine wagon. But it's not part of my ordinary experience.

[desireearmfeldt]

Yes, but I will sometimes choose to stay up uncharacteristically late (almost always on a weekend, only very unusually on a week night). I wouldn't call this "my schedule getting out of whack," though, as it doesn't have effects that persist beyond the following day. I sleep in a little on weekends, but am almost entirely incapable of sleeping in more than a couple of hours past my usual get-up time.

[coraline]

i would say it's fairly regular on weeknights, and wildly variable on weekends. but staying up late on a weekend doesn't seem to make it worse the next week, so i wouldn't say "out of whack."

i don't know how long it takes me to fall asleep -- not long, i'd guess under 10 minutes most nights, but that also requires defining "fall asleep" (as opposed to "doze") and being awake enough to watch a clock, since i don't think i can actually notice the passage of time very accurately at such times.
(why 7 minutes?)

thus far, i've never really experienced insomnia, thank god.

[lillibet.livejournal.com]

Seven minutes is the average time it takes people to fall asleep, or so I've read.

[joyeous.livejournal.com]

I answered "never" for the insomnia instead of "once in a great while" because the only times it's ever happened was because I had coffee too close to bedtime and was only up because I was having caffeine jitters. I guess I don't really consider that insomnia. And that still only happens like once a year or something.

[muffyjo]

Lately I've tried to stick to a regular schedule. My body is mostly responsive. I do experience insomnia fairly regularly although less so of late. Avoiding caffeine helps tremendously. Exercise seems to be the key to it all for me. Like a small child, the more wiggling I do during the day, the better I sleep when I go down. It's amazing what I've learned from a 3 year old. :)

[minkrose]

I've been an insomniac as far back as I have memories. Some of my earliest memories are of being a toddler and being unable to sleep and pestering my parents about it. Poor parents. Anyway, it's never been particularly better or worse no matter what I did. I do take medication to help me fall asleep (usually I don't wake up once I'm asleep but that's changed since wedding planning began), and have for the past decade. I don't take the same quantity and sometimes I skip it, but usually that means it takes about 2 to 3 hours for me to sleep.

Generally, I can get up at a specific time and once I'm up, I'm Awake. I can't fall back asleep, unless I'm unusually exhausted. Coffee is nice, but not required. But it never gets EASY. Andy's actually switched over to a normal morning schedule and now can't sleep in on the weekend. But my brain never tells me "hey, it's time to go to sleep/wake up!" I get exhausted but not sleepy. My brain also doesn't like waking up until I'm actually walking around and out of bed. Andy says that I have trouble with "state changes." I say I don't have the files in my computer-brain to moderate sleep controls.

Falling asleep is always hard, even with the meds. The idea of falling asleep within 7 minutes is ... laughable. Inconceivable to me. I thought it was more like 20 minutes for normal people. It's usually 30 to 45 at least for me (I know this because I sometimes listen to audiobooks or podcasts until I fall asleep and I can find where I stop "remembering" what I heard). It's sad to realise that I am so completely far away from normal.

Even if I get up on time and go to bed on time for the entire week, I will still sleep a good 12 hours without even trying on the weekend. If I don't catch up and get extra sleep on the weekend, I feel like crap the next week.

[ayelle.livejournal.com]

I try hard to get enough sleep. But since I am in school and don't work an office-type job, the timing of my commitments during the day (and the morning -- and the evening) vary so greatly, as well as the amount of work I have to do each day, and at any given time -- and the amount of time I have to do it in -- and the urgency of that work -- all of it varies so much no matter how hard I try to plan, that what time I go to bed varies wildly. I'll create a regular schedule around a semester's schedule, but the next semester will have a different schedule. Also, I'll take the time to catch up on lost sleep when I get the opportunity to do so, such as on weekends or mornings when I don't have an urgent commitment. It's not a guaranteed migraine trigger, at least not as much as remaining short on sleep is.

[bookly.livejournal.com]

Watched this recently; it seems apropos. http://www.ted.com/talks/jessa_gamble_how_to_sleep.html

I also read somewhere (maybe on the RealAge test I just took again?) that if you fall asleep in fewer than seven minutes, you're not getting enough sleep.

The only things that seem particularly interesting about my sleep stuff are that if I don't get at least 9 hours, I feel sleep-deprived; and if I'm getting 9 hours regularly, I wean myself off caffeine without noticing. (Oh, and apparently I hold my breath when I'm sleeping, but not if medical staff are watching.)

[clarity-dog.livejournal.com]

I finally, after literally a decade of not having anything *like* a regular sleep schedule, have a regular sleep schedule. It's weird. It's not just "I have a Real Job(tm)" now, although that's part of it. My sleep schedule used to be incredibly flexible - if I had to stay up till 4am, I could do it - and then I'd sleep until noon. Now, though, on the rare occasions where I have to stay up till 4am, I still wake up at 7am. I'm a moody bitch all day, but I can't fall asleep.