Insomnia

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It's 4.40am here and I still haven't got to sleep. I have to be up in 3 hours to get ready for work and I'm so pissed off :frowning: urghhhhhhhh just a random moan and pissed off-ish-ness >:(

It's not good to go on the computer when you're trying to get some sleep. Do you really have full blown insomnia?

awww sweety... you know I can relate and you know I have no solutions.If I had a cure for you, I'd also have a cure for me.hmmmmmmm, now that gets me to thinking

mmm I know, I don't normally come online when I can't sleep because it usually hypes me up even more. For some reason the random moan actually worked, and I got about 2hours 45mins sleep ahh. Normally I end up with about an hour tonight so that's pretty good going for me I get it every other day pretty much, I just get pissed off when I know I have to work... so on days like today I find it harder to sleep because I know I have to get up, I think... I worry about it!cuddles mr u you mad person. It's crap isn't it!

Ah I hate that.I find it increadbly frustrating when I can't sleep because I usually have no problems. It's boring to just lye in bed for hours...

I'm not really one for sleeping myself. I'm usually up until 5:30am, go to bed for a while and get up at 6:30am for some breakfast and I go out to college or somewhere. I see sleeping as a waste of time, if I go to bed early I will lie there for hours just thinking. Without visual distractions I come up with some of my best ideas and solve problems in a way that I never thought of before. I evaluate my personal life and I sort stuff out. In quite an insane fashion, I have hypothetical conversations with myself imagining that I'm talking to someone else, usually someone that I have a problem with in some way. I don't open myself up to others in reality so I do it in my head, I can throw everything out of me so I can go back to being the nice person that everybody knows me as.Nobody needs sleep, its all a conspiracy.

If you can survive (much less thrive) on an hour of sleep at night, then you are a freak of nature (I mean that in a good way, like Lance Armstrong), and it would serve humanity to study you and figure out how you do it. Most humans (in fact, most mammals) would literally not survive on an hour of sleep per day.

Well there are of course the odd occasions when I'll sleep until 11am, and on occasion I've even gone well into the afternoon, but I try not to waste the day. Even tho I do most of my work at night. Its a natural development for myself, I am far too easily distracted so the only chance that I get to really focus on anything is when everybody has gone to bed, the tv has absolutely nothing of interest and even looking out the window is boring.

Still, if you're able to get by on far less sleep than most people would be able to, it's interesting.

On the other hand, if you deprive yourself of sleep, and then make it up occasionally in large amounts, then you're probably doing something unhealthy.

that is very true and it's what will often hapen to me. I slept (admittedly fitfully) for about 15 hours on Friday.I do have apnea but it's been much improved with the shed of 60 unnescessary pounds

> I do have apnea but it's been much improved with the shed of 60 unnescessary pounds

My father did as well, for many years. Losing weight completely solved the problem, in his case.

I have a very mixed lifestyle. I can go without sleep for long periods of time as long as I don't do anything too physically demanding, and I eat lots and lots of junk food. But I'm not unfit, quite the opposite really. I don't drive, I haven't applied for a driver's license yet because the cost to insure me on my parents car is far too high. So I walk everywhere and take public transport. I run and am a very capable athlete, yet I'm also rediculously lazy and a strong believer in procastination.I'm quite a bipolar individual in most areas of my life.

keeping the weight off really helps. It hasn't actually cured the apnea because there is still the soft-pallet issue. Before fucktard left, she had complimented me on my lack of snoring though.I was dating a lady with apnea back in the spring. Lovely lass but I really had trouble sleeping beside her.

There are some people who do seem to thrive on much less sleep than most. Elizabeth I and Margaret Thatcher are two well-known English examples. It would indeed to be interesting to know what (presumably genetic effect) made them able to do it. We know so little about why sleep is needed.

Its kinda like a car, you have to keep the petrol tank filled or it'll stop running. Luckily, I'm a hybrid!

Thomas Edison supposedly got by on cat naps...but no one was actually observing him around the clock.

I can't believe some of you people! Sleeping is up there with eating and sex on my preferred things to do list. In fact if it were up to me my day would go something like this:Sleep, sex, eat, sleep, sex, eat, sleep, sex, eat, sleep, sex, eat, sleep, sex, sleep, sex, sleep, sex.But seriously: Lack of sleep seriously inhibits your potential, some more than others.I read somewhere that 2 nights of only 4 hours sleep is just as bad as missing a sleep all together. In other words lack of sleep compounds itself.As for not being able to sleep here are a few suggestions:1. Exhaust yourself. Go for a run, go to the gym, play sport, whatever2. Watch your diet. Moniter your sugar and caffeine intake and don't eat large meals before you intend to go to sleep.3. Have good mental health. Your problem could be caused by an anxiety disorder or just thinking too much about your problems. Go to the doctor/psychiatrist and get something to help.I was having serious troubles getting to sleep a few weeks ago (I was seriously stressed) and was displaying some symptoms of anxiety. What made it worse was that I was trying to get to sleep, then stressing more when I couldn't. I got some sleeping pills from the doctor and I use them occasionally now if I get too worked up about not sleeping.Hope that helped.

Hmm...I've gone 3 nights without sleep, then I had a 4 hour nap and I was back to my normal self. I have a good full meal once a day, maybe once every second day, I snack a lot. I saw my girlfriend for the first time yesterday in over a month.So as far as sleep, eating and sex goes, my life is pretty different from your wishful timetable.

Just a thought: maybe your 'normal self' is well below the potential of who you could be if you slept. In reply to: One process commonly believed to be highly dependent on sleep is memory. REM sleep appears to help with the consolidation of spatial and procedural memory, while slow-wave sleep helps with the consolidation of declarative memories. When experimental subjects are given academic material to learn, especially if it involves organized, systematic thought, their retention is markedly increased after a night's sleep. Mere rote memorization is retained similarly well with or without an intervening period of sleep. Some memory theorists argue that saving memory directly into long-term memory is a slow and error prone process, and propose that cerebral input is saved first in a temporary memory store, and then encoded and transferred into long-term memory during sleep. (Zhang, 2004). I've seen some documentaries on sleep on the TV, I think this article from Wiki comes to similar conclusion.While the reason we sleep is not completely explained, the fact is that we do do it. If we didn't need to I suspect people would have stopped doing it.You are probably 99.999% like me genetically, so I very much doubt that you don't have a similar need to sleep that I do. In fact if you were someone with only 10 posts to his/her name I suspect we would be hearing calls of "bullshit".

There are actual cases of people who function well on far less than normal amounts of sleep, but I think they are pretty rare. They're not well-understood. But for most people, if I remember correctly, getting six hours of sleep a night for a few nights impairs mental performance the way a few drinks of alcohol would. OK, those numbers were guesses from my fading memory, but it was something like that.