What's Your Relationship with Sleep?
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So I would love to know how it is so...
I have defied doctors for decades on the whole "you need 7-9 hours of sleep per night" thing. Ever since I can remember, I can get 3-5 hours of sleep and function perfectly fine. Now many have argued in the past that it was my age, whether that meant pre-teen, or teenager, or now early 20s. I know this isn't the case though...
I know people in all those age ranges, and sure, they can pull that trick for one or two nights, but afterwards they crash and go right back to the 7-9 hours a night. They may be able to do it, but they can't really function on it. The difference is that I have been pulling that trick as a general pattern for years. Yes, years. However, the picture gets stranger...
Many people can function on a certain level of sleep, maybe 6-7 hours, but don't really function well unless they get a higher level of sleep, usually 8+. However, I have a target range to hit, which usually is around 5 on the low end and an absolute max of 7 on the high end. If I get more than 7 hours sleep, it's as if my body goes into hibernation mode and when I do get up, I tend to have much less energy all day. So yes, more sleep = less energy.
I've had days I had nothing going on and so I just stayed in bed for 12+ hours. Yes, I was lazy. The problem was that I was not able to be awake much more than 8-10 hours before I crashed from exhaustion. However, I get 4-6 hours of sleep, and I almost can't sleep before I've been awake at least 20 hours. This has been a legitimate problem in the past when there are not enough hours in the day for me to be awake long enough for my body to unwind and have me get even 4 hours of sleep before I have to get up for work...
Another interesting thing about my sleep, which is a more recent development, is I no longer wake up gradually. You know that feeling that most people get when they first wake up where they are really out of it? Also, you know how that feeling isn't really gone until most people have been awake at least 60-90 minutes and have had at least 1-2 cups of coffee? Well, I used to but starting last summer sometime, I started having it where the moment I opened my eyes I was wide awake like you often feel right before lunch each day (you've woken up but aren't sleepy from eating lunch yet).
Now I'd had this happen sporadically in the past before last summer, but now it's every day with no exceptions. Sometimes it isn't until I actually sit up or stand up, but if I actually get out of bed with the intent to get up, within 60 seconds tops I'm wide awake.
Now, for those wondering, I no longer take any supplements for energy, like B-vitamin supplements. I used to take this but stopped so that I could actually sleep and wind down after a somewhat workable length of time...
http://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B005D0DTZK/
I am also prescribed Adderall for my ADHD, which is a stimulant. However, the reason I know this isn't a factor to it is because, even though it's the extended release, it's out of my system after 9 hours tops, and I've also gone weeks between times I took it and this hasn't stopped.I do drink caffeine throughout the day, usually via soda, but I can go days without drinking any sometimes. Every external factor you can imagine that could be causing this I've ruled out by doing extended trials without one or more of these things. What I've found is that I have two gears on my body...full-speed-ahead and shut-down. From the moment I start my day til the moment my body says "you can sleep now", I run at max performance. I don't experience the ups and downs, spikes and valleys in my energy levels that most people do. It's weird... When my body does say I can sleep, I crash and I'm out, a lot like flipping a switch.
Now why am I bringing this up? Well, I've talked to @scottalanmiller at great length about his and my sleep patterns, as I've found Scott to be the only other person I know who sleeps like I do, to a degree. My question to my fellow Fruit Tarts is...
- What's your sleep patterns like in comparison and/or do you know anyone who this sounds like?
- How long does it generally take you to wake up in the morning and be up to working levels (from the moment you get out of bed, on average)?
- Does anyone have any scientific reason for why this might be the case? Just curious if anyone has any thoughts.
Anyways, look forward to reading the comments! Thanks for reading!
A.J.
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@thanksaj said:
So I would love to know how it is so...
I have defied doctors for decades on the whole "you need 7-9 hours of sleep per night" thing. Ever since I can remember, I can get 3-5 hours of sleep and function perfectly fine. Now many have argued in the past that it was my age, whether that meant pre-teen, or teenager, or now early 20s. I know this isn't the case though...
The way it really works is: the older you get, the less you sleep, so this fits the typical know-it-all adults in the world who will defy logic to tell you that you're wrong. Consider how much babies sleep and how much people sleep until they get older, especially if you don't include the stereotypical teenager who sleeps all day (most parents who judge this tend to also not realise that s/he has been awake all night and didn't sleep 16 hours; also depression can make you sleep way more). A baby can sleep 16 hours but the elderly tend to sleep 4 - 5, my grandfather prior to his death tended to only sleep about 3 hours each night; now I guess he sleeps 24/7.
Me personally, when I was a child I always woke about 6am, 7 days a week, no matter what, and I never slept-in until I was about 15 and I had stayed up all night until 7am, so I went to bed and woke up at 11am. Despite this, I was never a morning person though, I always was a night person, and I had more energy at night, got more work done, but then I still had to wake up for whatever reason.
Today, I am the boss and I can do whatever I want, unless there's a reason to get up a certain time, I just stay awake as long as I want and sleep as long as I want, and I've fallen into a thing where I am awake for 18 - 20 hours and I sleep for about 5 hours. I do most of my work at night, and I get vastly much more done than when I try to do it in the day. For comparison, most people are awake 16 - 17 hours, I wanted to point this out because after years of conversations with people, most know the "ideal" 8 hours, but don't seem to ever do the math to realise they're only awake 16 hours, if you ask them, they'll tend to say it's much longer... at least in my experience.
There's a sort of stigma that exists as well against people who would rather work at night, since farming once could only be done in the light of day, we've inherited a cultural idea that if you are asleep during the day, no matter how much you worked the night before, it's because you're lazy. Anyone who isn't a complete idiot, knows this is not how reality works.
I'm sort of sensitive to light as well, so I really hate being out in the sun, I can barely see, even with sunglasses. So it was a major encouragement for starting my own company, being financially independent, mostly so I can tell people to FOAD that want me to be up in the day time. I really hate it. It's harder to live that way since I don't live in NYC anymore, but not impossible, just a lot less to do/eat at night.
I also suffer from AD(H)D, definitely no hyperactivity at all, but I've always had focusing problems (I sort of just drift off into day dreaming or thinking about nothing), I did notice years ago, as a teenager, when I drank a lot of tea, I got more programming done and could focus better. Years later I found out that while caffeine makes regular people jumpy and keeps them awake, with AD(H)D it actually doesn't work that way, it helps with focus, and rarely affects sleep directly, though too much can still be bad for your cardiovascular system.
I started taking Modafinil years ago, primarily because of focusing problems and caffeine wasn't enough. Modafinil, combined with caffeine, I crank out about 1,200 lines of code per day (compared to the 100 average they say people do, maybe if you're playing tetris at your desk all day) and some days I go beyond that. I've never been able to get my hands on Adderall, even though I've asked tons of teenagers and drug users where to get some illegally, apparently nobody knows anything, of course they don't. I have taking Ritalin, but since it was for school, and I hated school and had no interest in doing anything there, even if I was on something, it didn't seem to work... I bet today it would.
I just buy Modafinil from Sun Pharmaceuticals in India with bitcoin, not only because it's about 40 cents per pill, but because in the US it's about $45 per pill, a month of Modafinil from a pharmacy, with insurance, tends it run about $1,800.
How I got on Modafinil in the first place was: I was working at a national ISP which will remain nameless and my boss would give it to anyone who wanted it. He never forced anyone to take it, but when people fell behind, the option was there. What I like about it compared to actual AD(H)D medication is, you tend to not know you're on anything until it's gone. You feel just normal and can finally focus, but when you stop taking it, you realise how terrible at focusing you were all along. At least that's how it was with me.
And that's me and sleep and AD(H)D, I brought up AD(H)D because AJ did so if this was tl;dr, blame him.
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@tonyshowoff, yeah, ADHD have the exact opposite reaction to most things that are stimulants that non-ADHD people do. To most people, meth makes them get an energy high, act sporadic/erratic, and then crash. For us, we get a natural-like energy high but no buzz, we are super-focused and efficient, and we don't crash.
Ritalin is similar to Adderall except that Ritalin helps with concentration but isn't a stimulant like Adderall, which is why, having taken both, I find Adderall preferable and also more effective. Caffeine is also important for ADHD people to consume, as it compliments something like Adderall.
Also, in terms of the math, I remember thinking about that once. 16 hours isn't that long. If you consider that with travel, lunch, and the actual work day, most people lose at least 10 hours/day for at least 5 days/week to work. That means they only have 6 hours to themselves on the backend, when most people are winding down and at an energy low-point.
My issue is that I can work at about 70% of peak all day, but that's all I will ever hit as a rule. I don't ever hit my peak efficiency/production until it's at least 8 or 9PM. So my Adderall gets me through the day, but I don't really come alive until the sun goes down...oh, and sunshine makes me sleepy. Literally. If I sit in the sun, while to most people they feel good and happy and energetic from it, I am depressed, drained of energy and just want to sleep. Driving home after long days from work in Texas when the sun was beating down on me was rough some days...almost fell asleep behind the wheel a couple of times...
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I can get by on five to six hours of sleep indefinitely, as long as the sleep is good. Because of my history of extreme sleep apnea my condition might be training and not genetic, but as my mother seemed to have similar sleep patterns an did not have apnea, genetic would likely be the cause.
When I wake up in the morning I sometimes like to just stay in bed, but that is only because I am comfy, not because I need sleep. I go from sleeping to wide awake essentially instantly.
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@scottalanmiller said:
I can get by on five to six hours of sleep indefinitely, as long as the sleep is good. Because of my history of extreme sleep apnea my condition might be training and not genetic, but as my mother seemed to have similar sleep patterns an did not have apnea, genetic would likely be the cause.
When I wake up in the morning I sometimes like to just stay in bed, but that is only because I am comfy, not because I need sleep. I go from sleeping to wide awake essentially instantly.
Yup, I think mine might be due to years of training as well. When I don't get out of bed, it's usually because I hate getting up, not because I'm still tired.
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I also spent several years working swing shift jobs like fast food, twenty four hour grocery stores and doing the evening and overnight shifts at hotels. So more than half a decade of jobs that required me to handle extreme sleep situations.
