Insomnia

[skorpionuk]

L'amour n'est pas consolation, il est lumière.
Love is not consolation, it is light.
Simone Weil, Cahier VI (K6), as quoted in House of Leaves, p.655.I've had insomnia for a long time; people first commented on it when I was 16, at which point I tended to have one night a month of simply staying awake. Since then, the bouts have become more

Comments

[strangelover]

I've been dealing with insomnia for years, usually when I'm most stressed (and therefore actually needing the sleep more) my sleep deprivation is at its worst. The worst has been five days straight with no sleep, usually after two or three nights without sleep I get to the point of serious hallucination. My mind goes off in another realm, though I continue acting awake - I'll continue writing, for example, an email and it'll turn into a dreamlike state and make no sense. My imagination feels real, I'll think I have seen or done things that didn't actually happen. Not good when you write contracts for a living and attention to detail is essential

[skorpionuk]

I understand there can be a negative feedback mechanism between stress and sleep, as you describe; the more you need sleep, the more you stress about not getting it. It's not something I get too much of, fortunately; in another sense, though, the idea of "you just need to relax enough to sleep" also doesn't really apply. I'm aware that my mood will descend if I'm too tired, but it's not quite like a depressive mood - I thought it was yesterday, but the longer I poked at it, the more I realised it's different. Rather than everything being terrible, and me worst of all, I just couldn't seem to care about anything.

I did manage some sleep last night, thank you. And the icon is good :-)

[chained_girl]

I know before I even write this you're going to take this as an insult, but please don't. I think, in this, we might be a bit similar. I can recognise so much of what you write here. It explains it way more than I ever could, and I've attempted it. Without sleep (my own particular amount of it being needed being different to yours) I am just 1 dimensional.

[skorpionuk]

That's not an insult at all, why would it be? If the things I write are useful to you (and they have been before), then that's a good thing, surely?

[chained_girl]

Phew. No, it's identified something really fundamental which has been niggling niggling niggling in the back of my mind since December. My sleep | happiness ratio seems to be directly linked. I actually didn't realise how fundamentally connected they were, until I read about the passion thing. Passion and enthusiasm require oomph, of course they do, it's just when you're inside something, right next to it, godamn but it's easy to miss.

[vardebedian]

I can't quite decide if I have insomnia or just don't need much sleep. Today I woke up at 04:30, so I just got up. Happens a couple of times a week, near enough. No idea really if it's insomnia or just my head intermittently deciding that five hours is plenty and it's time to wake up. Either way it's kind of handy, since I get to watch a lot of films or get to work at 6am, depending on mood.

[skorpionuk]

5 hours IS plenty! ;-)

I think the idea of "8 hours per night" is rot. Nobody I know lives like that. I was looking into sleep recently, and as it turns out, our cycles are 90 minutes long, so you need multiples of that, which 8 hours is not.

As I tried to say, for the most part my insomnia doesn't bother me even slightly - I get more time to do stuff, it's great! It just seems to be sometimes when it goes a bit far and knackers me out a little too much. I don't like not being functional.

[shermarama]

Some people really do need that much. My flatmate down in Brighton needs a good 7 or 8 hours and can get in quite a state if he's had less. Once when he was working for an events company, he'd had a couple of long days in a row setting up something big and one night, he got home from one evening's work at about 2am. He was expected to be back there the next morning for 8, just because of the event circumstances. I heard him get up at a bit after 7, and then there was this odd noise, so I got up, and found him sprawled halfway down the stairs, on his back and staring up with open eyes but snoring. He was in a total zombie-like state, we just about managed to get him upright and sat on the sofa with a cup of tea, and he kept mumbling about how he needed to go to work but he plainly wasn't in a fit state to be leaving the front door. I called work for him (happily it was a friend's company, he was understanding about it) and sent him back to bed. It was quite a spooky experience

[skorpionuk]

Oh, I wasn't suggesting that everybody should get by on little sleep at all, I'm well aware that lots of people need more than me. Most of the people I've ever lived with have fallen into that category.

I was just saying that if the 90-minute cycle is true, then exactly 8 hours doesn't work. 6, 7.5 or 9 do, however.

[denari]

Have I talked to you about Binaural beats before? Whenever I really can't sleep, I use my brainwave machine to put me into delta sleep. Sleep 4 hours, feels like 9.

http://uazu.net/sbagen/

Download tool and use some of the samples. Must be used with headphones

[shermarama]

Cor. What do these sound like, as in are they low or high-pitched sine waves? I strongly suspect that hearing beat frequencies would just make me go 'all right, who's out of tune?' as it usually does in band situations...

[denari]

doesn't actually matter what frequency they are at as long as they are a certain frequency different to each other. You hear one note in one ear, on in the other and a third appears in your brain.

[shermarama]

Yes, I'm familiar with beat frequencies but I was wondering about the practical side - for example what sort of frequencies do you use yourself?