After reading Uberman's Sleep Schedule, I for some reason found myself compelled with the idea of sleep deprivation. Admittedly, I'd never even considered or even looked at the facts around the idea, but instead of thinking I put my crazy-ass fate into the hands of E2 noders whom I most certainly trust whole-heartedly. *tongue-in-cheek*
"
Great!" I told myself - something to fill the hours during the
Easter holidays, while I'm not at college. Things I forgot to consider though include:
- Because I'm not at college, that means that work want me to be at work for basically every waking hour of the day, therefore I had no genuine free time. Also I would need as much sleep as I could get - and I was about to try the opposite.
- It takes me a good 25 minutes to hear my alarm clock after a nice 14 hour sleep (lie-in inclusive) on a weekend, so waking up (and also staying awake) at the clap of a hand isn't what I'm good at).
- I had 3 days off work in a row when I first attempted sleep deprivation - therefore not nearly enough time to totally change my sleep pattern - and therefore meant I nearly died on the following 8-hour shift on my first day back at work.
Needless to say, it was a
dumb idea. I knew straight away that I would not be able to keep up the whole 20 minutes per 4 hours, so I had a brand new idea - get as little sleep as possible by staying awake as long as possible and make sure I woke up as soon as I could. Unfortunately my '
naps' varied from about 3 hours to about 9 hours,
ranging from times starting as early as
midnight up until around 5am, and ending somewhere between 7am and
midday. The jokable
inconsistence of these so-called naps and the fact that I had mere days and only 3 full days in those to totally change my
entire sleep routine whilst still trying to take caution as to not miss out on so much sleep that I'd be too tired to go to work. This failed due to
indecisiveness - I didn't know whether to go
gung-ho on my routine or scrap it completely, so I sorta did both at once.
I definately noticed changes however... things I noticed changing about myself were:
- I was shaking all the time, in the same way in which I would shake if I was nervous (No joke, one morning I sat down with a bowl of cereal and spilled the contents of the bowl everywhere - I cleaned it up, sat down again and whoops, cereal went everywhere. Annoyed at myself for letting it happen twice, I cleaned it up, and sat down again. And spilled cereal everywhere, again. If I remember I was distracted by the TV remote control, but still that really ought not have happened. I ate the cereal standing up.)
- I found a strange sense of comfort in lying down on the sofa watching TV.
- Daytime TV sucks, therefore I was bored out of my head for a large portion of the days I had off. Mainly because I couldn't be bothered to do anything else, as I was so darn tired.
- Films aren't good after you watch them on repeat about 4 times in 1 day.
- There are only so many times I can watch the first hour of Apocalypse Now on DVD before deciding I need to sleep too much to stay awake.
- I found no joy in anything. Anything. Literally, everything sucked bad for days.
And in all those hours I have had extra awake, I still didn't find the time to do an
essay for
English, which has to be in tomorrow. A long, long, fairly important essay. I don't even know what the essay title is, although I am sure it's around here somewhere.
(I just looked because I became curious as to where I had left the sheet with the essay title on - and it turns out that it isn't here...)
Shit.