Sleep's always been a bit weird to me, not the activity itself, I mean if you think about it it is quite a weird activity in general; you need a place where you can lay half-dead for 1/3rd of your day, but my sleep has always differed from what I believe to be normal sleeping routines of the majority.
When I was young I used to love being able to stay awake longer, not sure if it's cause my parents were always strict about my sleeping hours that drove me to enjoy staying up longer or if it's a mix with the enthusiasm for the internet that I got around the same age when I received my first computer. I felt like I was cheating others in a way that I could retain more waking hours to intake more information and do other kind of entertaining fun stuff while most kids used to go to sleep at around 10-ish to wake up at 6 to start their day and get ready for school. There was a period in my life there where I'd go to sleep at around 2, wake up at 6, go on about my day normally, then take a nap once I got home from school and wake up in the evening to do it all over again.
I retained that activity for many, then there was also the period where I got into lucid dreaming. Not sure how I stumbled upon it, but with a few easy tricks like putting on an alarm half an hour into my sleep, stay up for a few minutes and go back I'd manage to become lucid quite often. Research at the time would tell you that lucid dreaming wouldn't affect your REM sleep so in a way you could spend "waking hours" lucid dreaming while still sleeping. In and of itself this activity was quite weird I admit, especially for a teenager and it didn't take me long of discussions about it to realize that my peers also found it quite weird so I mostly kept it to myself and enjoyed my new free time in waking sleep. In a way I think I got a lot of good out of it, it often indeed felt like time was moving differently for me, not just cause of the countless hours I'd spend imagining and outplaying different scenario's in my lucid dreaming but also how it affected my experience with things. I remember how it changed the way I'd socialize with people, from having been the shy observer most of the time to slowly but surely getting into the "main character" kind of role where things would revolve around me in my friendships and I'd often find myself leading certain conversations. I'm not saying this to brag or to encourage people to get into lucid dreaming, the part I've yet to talk about this might be some negative long term side-effects that may have come from it, but for the time it did indeed feel like I was growing "faster" than others mentally. I also somehow became funnier over time, not sure if this was cause of my wild imagination, both being awake and asleep, or that certain things like experiences and memories in both worlds had lead me to be aware/prepared of certain scenarios to play out and getting to re-live them I'd often look for something to say or think that'd be a bit outside the box in the funny area. Maybe it was also due to the hype of Family Guy and American Dad at the time that my humor would be a bit more excessive or "shocking" sort of like "what's something you'd least expect someone to say right now" that'd make people laugh about certain situations and social interactions. Either way, I don't have many regrets there, this newfound confidence and humor lead to some great years in my late teens and early twenties.
In the early twenties is when my sleep started to change again, I wasn't even trying to control it much by then or forcing it to change. From sleeping a few hours every night and taking a nap during the day it changed to more of a "let's try sleep at least 6 hours every night and no beauty nap" (come to think of it, maybe this is why people always thought I was younger than I really was, jk they were probably just forced to ask for ID of anyone looking under 30). It was difficult early on but with daily activities I found myself getting quite sleepy in good time and usually get at least 6h sleep every night but I would often find myself doing things on the computer later than my sleep would've wanted me to. It slowly over time progressed into this rhythm where I couldn't be able to fall asleep unless I was really, really sleepy.
It could be a mix of my later twenties not needing me to wake up early anymore for university or a job, some would think I was doing it on purpose to "save waking hours" again, but that wasn't the case. Even after having researched what some people with odd sleeping patterns would attempt to do, like this one case where a person would sleep 5-7x per day for about 15minutes and force themselves to wake up and more impressively stay up until their next nap. Apparently once you got used to it for a few weeks it got easier and it also resulted in close to no REM loss as they'd fall into it instantly and if you've calculated on your fingers this meant that they'd only sleep about a couple hours per day. That never seemed enticing to me to even try, I was a deep sleeper, if I fell asleep there was not much that could successfully wake me up. Maybe me having fallen asleep first when I was really sleepy and usually having a hard time falling asleep if I wasn't was part of the cause to that deep sleep, though I often wondered if that caused any side effects then and later on in life, and kind of still do.
So this lead to my sleep being what it is now, and something I've posted about on Hive in the past. Basically I let my sleepiness dictate when I go to sleep. If it's the hour of when I went to sleep yesterday it doesn't mean that's when I automatically try and go to sleep, even if I try it doesn't mean that I will get sleep until maybe a couple to a few hours later. I'm not really sure what is that has resulted in this being the way I sleep now, it could be the lucid dreaming wasn't as well researched as I thought it was when I was sporting it back in my younger days. Could be the napping in the middle of a day for a couple hours and having to wake up only after 4-5h sleep every night had long term effects on my sleep. Or it could of course also be the lifelong overusage of computers and neglecting physical activity (especially now in my thirties). Most likely a combination of them all and add a little crypto market anxiety and stress on top of it all for the perfect mix of me not being able to fall asleep when I should and try to. Although lately I think I've gotten jaded battle-hardened to at least intentionally not worry too much about the markets, but the fact remains that my sleep remains the way it is.
These days my sleeping clock shifts forward a couple to a few hours every night almost depending on what I did that day. I could for instance start a Monday night going to sleep at 12 am and waking up at 7-8 am, by the time next Monday arrives my sleep is set to going to sleep 12 hours later at 12 pm in the day and waking up in the evening. In a way I guess every couple weeks I get one day where I haven't slept at all this way, but can't say much about how healthy that is, probably not.
With that said, I think I'm going to try to tend to my new years resolutions that miserably failed quite hard except for the one about posting every day. Guess I'm a decent enough Hiver to keep that one going at least, but I'm going to try work on the other things a bit more now. Physical activity, even though my location and climate makes it a bit difficult right now, some added time off-screen (both pc and phone) and see if that improves my sleep at the same time by trying to be physically tired enough to fall asleep at the same hour every night rather than it moving forward. I think that with age, it also has resulted in this thing where if I do eventually get sleepy enough, I can't really stay awake. Or like, it makes it really hard to stay awake if I "have to", something I had no issues when I was younger. I remember at lanparties I used to be able to stay awake for 72h before the party was over and I got to go home to sleep in my own bed. Nowadays if I get past hour 14 or so some times when I'm trying to correct what hour I go to sleep to start a week in proper sleeping hours, it gets really difficult to stay awake. I'm in this weird zombie state where I can't really do much, especially not physical except for trying to stay awake and do minimal activity. Oh well, maybe that's just age and you guys can let me know how that affects you.
I'll let you know how my renewed new years resolution plans go. :p
Images from Pixabay, keywords: sleep
