20th
So tired
What is my deal? I can barely keep my eyes open today? I don’t get it. I got 7 hours of sleep last night, but I feel like I got one. My 16 oz black coffee is not helping, and needless to say, neither is looking at my computer screen. Wake up, Erin!!! Jeez.A health guru once described sleep to me this way:
For every hour we are awake, we collect a brick in the metaphorical backpack that we carry around in life.
For every hour that we sleep, we lighten our load by 2 bricks.
So in order to maintain well-rested equilibrium, we must sleep half the time we are awake (i.e., 8 hours a night). One or a few nights of less sleep do not immediately effect most of us, but if that balance is out of whack for too long, we end up with 20 bricks in our backpack. Even getting 7 or 8 hours of sleep doesn’t help much, and we drag ourselves around all day, as Erin is.
Every 2 or 3 weeks or so, I try to sleep 12 hours straight (if I can do so without feeling monumentally guilty). Then I’m back to some semblence of normal, for a few days.
Oh, New York….
The brick story. Awesome.
Only last year did I begin to notice the effects of several days without sufficient sleep. I can still go three or four days on basically no sleep, but the effects of a good night’s sleep are not as immediate as they used to be. Here’s a common scenario for me now:
1. I sleep 3-4 hours for about four days.
2. I sleep in on the fifth day, but don’t feel rested til the 6th, when I’ve already gone back to 4 hours or so for a few more days.
3. So on day 10 or so I start to get tired again, and I say, “Well I did it yesterday, what’s going on?”
This whole sleep debt thing is really new to me. I’m glad someone else is experiencing it. I am more aware of the zombie people I see on the trains in the mornings. I used to think they were robots. “There’s a lot of robots in the world,” I’d say. Now I know that “sleep-deprivation haze” is a weather condition for some, a permanent climate for others.
This week, my first slow week of the year, I promised I would do nothing. Nothing. “I won’t do anything!” And the second I heard this glorious news, I got sick.
What’s that all about, Guru?