biorhythms

loosing sleep

Over the holidays, I reverted to my body's natural schedule of going to bed about an hour later each night. By the end, I was going to bed at 8am. When I started going to work again, I would sleep for a short bit, go to work, be very tired when I got home, take a nap for 3 hours, be unable to sleep until about 3 hours before work, sleep for 3 hours, repeat. I lost a lot of sleep this way.

I decided to correct the situation with melatonin. I would take 1.666mg at midnight, and with that I could fall asleep by 2am. I would then set an alarm for noon, and I would generally still hit the snooze a couple times before getting up, meaning I was getting 10+ hours of sleep per night. I naturally sleep a lot, over 9 hours, so this seemed fine for catching up on sleep.

Last night I had some trouble sleeping due to train noise in my apartment, so I slept until 2pm, and went to bed again soon after, sleeping until 6pm.

At this point, I had quite a bit of sleep, I think, but I still felt tired.

trying coffee

Now, I've drunken coffee in the past, and it has seemed to fail for me. However, my main previous datapoint was a time when I had not slept much, but needed to be awake. At that time, I drank a cup of coffee, and then proceeded to fall asleep.

But I thought, maybe that experiment was poor, since I was so tired that the coffee just couldn't compete. So I thought today might be a good second datapoint. Today I am well rested, but tired. This seemed like a more reasonable foe for coffee.

I went to a coffee place nearby, and had a coffee. As I drank, I think I started to feel a bit more alert — I'm not sure — and then my alertness went way down. I was even more tired than I was to begin with. In fact, I'm not even sure I would have been safe driving. When I went to order some food at Subway, for which I always order the same thing, it took me a while to form the words of what that was, and when the Subway person had toasted my bread and asked me about toppings, I reactively said "hi" to them again, as if my brain wasn't aware of our recent interaction.

having something to write about

Oddly enough, there was a sense in which the coffee worked, and that is that I'm motivated to write this blog post. And somehow, having something I'm motivated to do is generally very stimulating.

Maybe what I need rather than coffee for these situations is some interesting thing to do — an interesting side project with some low hanging fruit — to use as fuel to get me moving.