Sleep

I spent part of my day looking at studies on sleep deprivation. I've been wondering, lately, why I haven't been feeling better even though I've been getting more sleep over the past few months. I have to confess, though, that better sleep actually isn't that much better -- three nights of seven I'm still woken in the night, and the other four I'm getting a absolute maximum of ten hours a night. Most nights, just eight. Which yes, I admit, is great sleep (at least, compared to what I've been getting the last few years) but it's not like I'm making up for sleep at all. One study I saw said that in order to make up a sleep debt, you have to sleep half the time that you missed -- as in, if you missed six hours of sleep, you need an extra three hours to make up for it. And given that I'm missing approximately eighteen trillion hours of sleep -- give or take -- over the last two and a half years, and not making any of that up, it makes sense that I'm still feeling less than well rested. I don't want to fall asleep while driving anymore, but I'm sure not feeling like running a marathon is a good idea. 

However, another study notes that it's actually impossible to make up sleep, and that with chronic sleep deprivation your body in fact forgets how to make up for lost sleep. As in, you'll start sleeping only eight or ten interrupted hours instead of sleeping for 12 or 14 like you might have otherwise with acute short term sleep deprivation, to make up for the loss. Uh, yeah. That's SO true. I haven't slept for more than 10 hours in a row in getting on for three years, even when I've had the time to do so. But then I feel kind of helpless and hopeless about it -- well, if I can't make up for lost sleep, will I ever feel well rested again? Am I just doomed to be like this forever, or will it eventually -- and very slowly -- get better over the next year?

Other interesting ideas of note -- sleep deprivation makes your immune system half as effective (hello all the colds I had last year!), makes you less able to cope with stress (hello feeling the effects of no personal time / alone time!), irritability, decreased mental function, decreased ability to concentrate ... pretty much everything I've been having lately, much of which I've been attributing to stress and boredom at work. And maybe I am stressed or bored at work, but maybe I'm just so chronically overtired that my ability to function is really impeded.

So what do I do? Get more sleep, I suppose. Easier said than done. I do sleep as much as I can, but fitting everything into the day that needs to get done sometimes means that I get to bed only at 9 or 10 -- early, but not early enough to make up for lost sleep. I guess that there's nothing else to be done but wait and hope that things continue to slowly improve. Unless someone can spare me a week wherein I get to do nothing but sleep -- no work, no house work, no child care, nothing. I think that I could probably sleep for the entire 168 hours.