A sleepy insomniac

April 20th, 2008 by Mike | Posted in rant |

In the last few weeks… well, lets actually say the last few months… more like the last year, I have found myself being very untired. It’s not like I can’t go to sleep when needed, but I find myself constantly (like tonight for instance) staying up to unreasonable hours, given my next day’s events.

A perfect example would be the last school year’s worth of Sunday nights: I usually get done doing whatever I was doing for the day by 11pm-midnight, then I come back to my apartment and stay up until 3 or 4am not thinking given that I need to be up at 7am to work or be at class. For the most part, my body adjusts and wakes up at 7am with me exhauster but strangely refreshed within 10 minutes of walking/moving around.

Of course, the downside of this ends up being my sudden tiredness between 2 and 6 hours later, which, I have found, depends on my eating schedule during the day and my water intake–this all of course assuming I haven’t had any caffiene that day. It’s a strange thing, but I get through the day.

Now, I do know this isn’t your typical or even closly related to insomnia, but I view it as such because despite having your standard 7-8 hour sleep schedule I can function throughout the day minus the random and sudden attacks of extreme tiredness.

What it comes down to is this: The strange thing about all of this is that I know I can go to sleep when I finally go to actually lay down and sleep, but up until then, I’m (usually) not even tired at all. I would say it’s the damnedest thing.

And you could say to me: “Why don’t you just go to bed when you need to?” and in return, I would say “Well, would you go to bed if you weren’t tired?” My guess is that you’d say no. And that’s just it: my mind/body think ‘Yea! We aren’t tired despite having no sleep!’ and just keep on trucking despite the consion logic that 3 hours of sleep sure-as-shit is not enough sleep to run on through the day. Who’d have thought?

But really what I just wanted to say is that even though I can run on this minimal amount of sleep, I can feel it taking it’s toll: I feel myself being unable to retain information that is important (such as school work) while being able to remember every line of code I wrote the night before for my personal project, or that could just be my mind in general, I can’t tell, but when it comes down to it, I feel myself being unable to focus on one thing for too long. Strange and sad, but then again, it could be my mind just going about it’s own business.

And yea. So I call myself ‘A sleepy insomniac’ because I can stay up late, but eventually, I will get tired and even thought I can run completely fine on very little sleep, I still need that sleep in the end. So, not your typical insomniac, but definitely something strange if you ask me.