(no subject)

[prog]

Favor to ask: the next time you happen to hear me make noises about pulling an all-nighter just so I can make an early-morning appointment, please suggest that I go to bed as usual anyway, even if it would result in my getting only 3 or 4 hours of sleep. Reminding me of this post will be sufficient.

I am now maybe fifty dollars richer from this morning's freelance camera gig, but an entire day poorer. My whole Friday afternoon sunk into a bleary fog that finally overcame me when I slept straight through a social engagement that I was looking forward to (dozing deeply enough that my cell didn't wake me, twice). And now it's after midnight and I am rested and refreshed and guaranteed not to see another person I know for another 12 hours or so, and when I do it will mean that it's time to go back to work. I'm not so much lonely as teeth-grindingly angry at myself. What the hell am I supposed to do now? I guess I can find some work to do, but I really don't want to, since I haven't had a chance to play first. Oh so bitter.

Every damn day it seems I manage to lie to myself about sleep. I set my alarm for 10am, knowing it won't work and that I'll sleep until 1pm or whenever eight hours after bedtime is (unless something non-routine is happening in the morning, as novelty is very effective at getting me out of bed early). But I set it anyway, thinking "Ah, it's five hours, that'll be enough." Maybe if I was someone else, for whom alarm clocks consistently worked, that thinking would apply, but after so many years you'd think I'd be able to face the truth.

Another lie I tell myself is that staying up all night will give me a chance to reset my sleep cycle. No, you fool, it doesn't work like that. It just fucks up the entire next day, and then I'll be back where I was, or worse. Hate hate hate.

Comments

[aspartaimee.livejournal.com]

it is sad but true, and i learned this the hard way, that tricks such as you describe above worked in our youth but at a certain point, they just make things worse.

[jtroutman.livejournal.com]

I share your episodes of self loathing.

This happens to me too sometimes, even after I developed the magic ability to actually get by on 2 to 5 hours sleep with the introduction of the off-spring units. But there are many times in which I sleep through an alarm(s).. or worse, I wake up, but somehow manage to talk myself into rational reasons (in my semi-awake state) as to why I should be sleeping more or skipping whatever event it was that I set the alarm for originally. This is because one cannot operate on 3 hours of sleep each night for days on end.

You might seriously want to invest in a OTC sleep aid, to force yourself to sleep when you should. And then there is that whole avoiding caffeine thing for hours before you want to sleep.

[radiotelescope.livejournal.com]

I was lucky, in some sense, that "clever sleep tricks" *never* worked for me. I think I pulled one all-nighter in college, and I fell asleep at 10:00 AM and was wiped out all day anyway.

So I never got into the habit of doing that dumb stuff.

I can crank my sleep schedule back by maybe half an hour a day if I am careful about going to bed early and setting the alarm. Or I can crank it *forward* by an hour or so per day. But if I fall asleep at 5 AM, really, the consequences are inevitable.