Sleep...A Love/Hate Relationship

One thing I notice about myself is my relationship to sleeping. I guess it’s kind of unusual. Every night, unless I am extremely sleepy, it will take a long time for me to go to sleep. How long? It takes at least a half-hour (more than an hour much of the time) for me to go to sleep. I have a few theories as to why it takes me so long.

For one thing, I am kind of fidgety. It takes me a while to actually get comfortable. I toss and turn to get the best position, only to get warm from all the moving and having to throw off my sheets. Then, I get cold and have to put them back on. The position of my foam mattress pad affects how comfortable I am as well. If it’s not in its right place, I can’t get to sleep right away.

Also, one thing that always happens is that my mind always drifts to various things as I attempt to go to sleep. I think a lot about what I want to do the next day, stuff I need to remember, and so on. I’ve gotten several very good ideas for writings while I am trying to go to sleep. The one that sucks the most, though, is that all my worries and fears come out as I try to go to sleep. When I was first on Academic Probation and my grades were about to come out, I was on edge when I tried to go to sleep. I’d start worrying about what would happen if my grades sucked and I got kicked out. I’d have to calm myself back down and be optimistic so I could get to sleep.

Another thing that sucks is that sometimes I am very affected by caffeine. I already have the ability to stay up late despite my body wanting me to sleep, but caffeine sometimes makes this worse. If I eat chocolate or drink something with caffeine in it (even something like regular cola), I’d have trouble getting to sleep. This is why I never frequented coffee shops at night during my entire college career.

However, just as it’s difficult to get to sleep for me, I need a good amount to really feel refreshed. I can operate on little or no sleep if I have to. But for me to really feel like I had a great sleep, I have to get nearly 10 hours of sleep. As my family can attest, if I go to sleep in the 4:00 am to 5:00 am range, I won’t be up until 2:00 pm at the earliest if I don’t set an alarm of some kind.

One thing I need to do is spend less time online at night. I know my family wonders what the heck I am doing staying up that late. There are several reasons for this. First, I download various things, from music to pictures and manga scanlations. I often use IRC to download some files. The problem with IRC is that I have to sort of “look out” for downloads. Since I am getting files directly from another person, if their connection screws up during a transfer, I have to find another person to get it from. I can’t just leave it running unattended like with files I download from websites.

Then there is the fact that I like going to a lot of sites in general. On a given night, I may check my e-mail accounts (three of them), check for new manga scanlation releases, check various news/entertainment sites, check my blog (and others), make a post to my blog (and potentially make some changes), go to anime sites, visit message boards, download images and so on. Once I figure that there’s nothing left for me to look at/read, I stop surfing and start downloading. If any manga releases are out, I’ll download those before I do any real surfing.

With a 56k connection, doing these things takes longer to do. Loading a single page of a site itself can take a minute or more. I do go to a much smaller amount of sites than I did while I had that fast connection at NU, but even then, it takes a little while to visit and read them all. This also means that next thing I know, it’s gotten pretty late and I still have stuff I want to see. I probably should limit my surfing even more, and I probably will once I have to get up every morning for a job. But I do stay up fairly unnecessarily in part because of surfing the net.

Even with all these problems I have with sleep, it’s a little bit better for me than it used to be. It used to be that no matter how sleepy I was, I could never take a nap. Now, I can take one when I am sleepy enough. In fact, I took one the night after my sister’s graduation after getting very little sleep. But I still have my weird qualities when it comes to sleep. Hell, I slept better at NU(with its cheap foam mattress and no boxspring) than I do at home. How bizarre is that?