My sleep's been weird again lately.
I heard of another friend on Hive who's had sleeping problems and I guess it may affect quite a few of us even if we don't complain about it like I do.
I guess I've always had quite a bit of a weird sleep, I remember when I was younger I used to get excited at the idea of staying awake longer than I should and being able to "tolerate" it more than others would. For instance when I was around the age of 14 I'd go to this lan-party and stay awake the whole 72 hours without much issues while others would go and take naps in between.
I suppose when I first got a PC it affected my sleep quite a bit, the early days of internet were quite exciting for me. I remember excitedly looking at downloads, as in, the download of a movie itself being exciting early on. Downloading a 700mb cd rip of Lord of the Rings at 25 kb/sec, opening it up on VLC and watching it until it would shut down cause the download hadn't gotten further yet, then restarting the movie to watch 5-10 minutes further rather than waiting for the whole thing to be finished. It was hard to get sleep those early few days with a PC in the house.
I also remember the excitement of using it overwhelming anything else I should've done that day, my mom would tell my 10 year old self to move some CDs away from my brothers bed and I'd say "ye in a minute" while hours passed and it was time for bed again. Then in my sleep I'd remember my unfinished task, sleepwalk to my brothers bed and tell him to get up cause I gotta put the CDs away which most likely traumatized him.
While that excitement died down over time my "addiction" to the PC didn't, even if a lot of it had with gaming to do. The internet was pretty nice back then, MSN, IRC, access to anime, etc, a teenagers dream probably.
In high school my sleeping kinda took a turn for the weirder again, for some reason I started getting used to taking a nap after school which meant I'd sleep for way too long during the evening and wouldn't get sleepy again until 2-3 am but had to wake up at 7. I also got into the habit of lucid dreaming after reading up on it, while it helped me deal with some things back then (some random stutter I started getting), I can't say it helped my sleep pattern out much.
Fast forward to the steem/hive days and things got a lot worse. Most things and people were oversea's so the "happenings" would occur during my natural sleep time living in EU. This made communication, ideas and discussions hard to move forward when I was sleeping while people had their evening sessions and I'd do hive stuff while they were at work so it kind of forced me to change my pattern up to adapt to US timezones.
Now being in Asia that has an even bigger effect but these days I'd be happy to be able to go to sleep at the same hour rather than having the "healthy" rhythm of going to sleep before midnight.
I was talking to this friend recently about his sleep issues and he mentioned that taking pills made things worse for them and they got slightly hooked on it which made their sleep even harder to regulate. For the longest time now I've been in this phase where falling asleep is the hardest thing to do so going to sleep at the same hour every day is close to impossible as it always depends on how exhausted I am. If I'm not exhausted enough my mind keeps racing, trying to come up with solutions to current problems, trying to figure out what to do next and if that's better than the other options, etc. I don't even have a lot of things to worry about yet my brain won't shut down, maybe the past years of bull and bear cycles have put my brain on high alert constantly or maybe I have ADHD or something, dunno. It's hard to shut it off.
There's potentially a lot of solutions I could test such as meditation or physical exercise to help falling asleep but feels like I just can't get around to make time for it with all the things I got going on. I keep telling myself "okay just this one last week and then I'll go more passive and look for assistance to take over my part" or "okay just this one more project then I'm done and I'll focus on the big picture stuff" yet here I am daily doing stuff that's most likely affecting my health and sleep in bad ways for the future.
The thing about falling asleep first when you feel mentally exhausted is that you push your sleep forward by a few hours almost every day. As you can imagine this means that every week or two I have slept one night less than the normal person. Can't imagine what affect that'll have on my sleep's health down the line but I really wanna change that sooner rather than later. I'm hoping to get the energy and conviction to make time to fix it by alternative solutions such as physical activity and maybe post about how that's going. One thing about being anon is that you somehow have an easier time being true to yourself and others without the fear of them "judging you" based on your looks so I do feel some sense of comfort being able to post about these things more openly here, even if there's some people on here I know irl hopefully they won't get to read these posts as I'm posting more actively these days. Hidden in the spam I suppose.
I've been to doctors and they've of course recommended all kinds of medication but it's hard to feel like they're doing it for my health rather than for their own pockets. Maybe I'm becoming a bit of a conspiracy nut in that case. I definitely wanna be careful with such things though and at least try some more natural supplements before going down that route. I know melatonin doesn't do anything for me and coffee barely affects my sleep neither but I'll be trying to look for the healthier options before last resorting it to medication. I'm not too old or fat yet to try getting back into exercise so maybe that should be my next attempt at fixing my sleep. I know I've posted about this before but there's a lot of things losing a few kgs would fix at this point in time than sleep alone I feel like so I really need to step it up and just start doing it. Maybe posting about it might give me the motivation I need to keep it up too.
Anyway, enough rambling for one night.
How is your sleep?
