Re: Your Experience with Sleeping Patterns
I do agree with what Dark said about sleep and emotions. What I've noticed, though, is that my body seems to have a more or less uniform response to how it wants to sleep and stay awake. For example, if I fall asleep at 9 and wake up at 1 feeling fully rested, I'll only feel rested for a few hours. Then around 6 or 7 I'll go back to sleep and finish the last 4 or 5 hours of the sleep I started earlier. So it eventually makes itself up. The problem, though, which I completely forgot about until reading Dark's post, is that sometimes I'll wind up splitting my 24-hour cycle into two distinct ones. For example, sleep for 4 hours, wake for 6, sleep for 4, wake for 10. That's a 24-hour cycle but it's exhausting, and the best way I've found to break it is to simply avoid those 4-hour naps. Which of course knocks everything out of whack and who knows where I'll eventually end up? Speaking of that, there's a little story about an extreme ve rsion of that which I will tell a little later.
I'm also extremely sensitive to sunlight, especially in the summer. A few years ago I was helping a friend of mine with a presentation and we had lunch outside. The sun was shining on me and while I was only outside for 15 minutes, it was enough to tire me the rest of the day. When I got home at 4:30 I crashed. Hard. I woke up at 2:00 the next morning, and spent the next month fighting with that pattern. I'm not exactly sure why the sunlight hit me that hard, but I do have some medical problems (mainly crohn's disease) which I think creates some vitamin deficiencies which I have to be periodically tested for to ensure the supplements I take are adequately dosed. That all might play a factor in my sensitivity to sunlight. I don't like going outside much either for some reason, so that also probably plays a part in my sun intolerance. I've always had it, though, and I think it used to be worse before I star ted meds.
Here's a story of a somewhat personal nature, but which I think you will enjoy. My previously mentioned Crohn's disease went spiraling a couple years ago, and I went to see my specialist. He expressed concern that something was going on, so we did a whole workup and other procedures, and he indeed said things were progressing. Thankfully, the worst of it was the symptoms caused by the progressing disease, and not some devastating turn of events the disease had set in motion. So, he was able to alter my medications and also streamline them so that I was only taking the essential things I needed for treating the disease in its current state.
Unfortunately getting the new meds took time. The doctor told me that if I simply couldn't wait, if the pain was too much, I could let him know and he could prescribe Prednisone, a powerful anti-inflammatory, for symptomatic relief, but that the side effects may not be pleasant. At first I said I don't ne ed it, but soon I had lost much of my normally ravenous appetite. I felt lethargic and was not keen on getting up and doing anything. My mom, seeing this, encouraged me to get the Prednisone, and soon I was taking it. And boy did it change me!
The most dramatic change caused by the Prednisone was my emotional state. While most people become depressed, I actually became high. I became overly enthusiastic about everything. I finished some projects, or did significant work on them, that I wouldn't have thought to do otherwise. While I didn't do anything ground-breaking, I certainly did a lot compared to what I normally do. I was told that I also looked very unhealthy, and that is another side effect of Prednisone, it can change appearance by making you feel or look bloated or have breakouts on your skin. I had all of that too.
It also screwed up my sleeping patterns. My 24-hour schedule was dramatically reduced. I was lucky if I could stay awake for 8 hours. And t here was no such thing as even a 6-hour sleep. In fact after only 2 or 3 hours of rest, I was, almost, ready to tackle anything. Some days consisted of a very repetitive rectangular pattern. Sleep for 3, wake for 4 or 5. All day. It was exhausting, and often meant I couldn't pay attention in class. I would often doze off. Fortunately most of my professors didn't even mention it, probably because my life isn't theirs and they're leaving it up to me, but the few who did were understanding. I promised them that I would still get my work done, that they didn't have to worry about my well-being, and while they were worried, they believed me. And as it turns out, that's exactly how it happened.
Because Prednisone is slow to wear off and requires you to ween yourself off of it, and my new meds have a process of their own to be weened onto, there was a point when I was taking both at once. It was a bit scary, but nothing consequential happened, other than the fact that as I tapered off the Prednisone, my high wore off within a matter of days once I got below the critical point where side effects begin to diminish. I had never been oblivious to my altered mental/emotional state, but while I liked it, I was in no hurry to keep it. I wanted it to be gone. It was utterly exhausting. The sleep patterns and unhealthy appearance took longer to subside. I think they took a few months to resolve to something close to normalcy, but ever since then my sleep patterns seem to be oddly different. I can't put my finger on it. I like long sleeps, about 10 or 11 hours now, though I can survive on 7 for a few days and sometimes that actually makes me feel a little better. Who knows what caused that? It could be anything really. It's all getting too convoluted for me to make sense of it, and it becomes even more so when trying to write about it. Lol
_______________________________________________ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
