Robots Don't Sleep

I’ve been experimenting with my sleeping habits lately – trying out some new things.

I’m constantly trying to find new ways to get a healthy amount of sleep around my irregular sleeping patterns. As anyone that knows me is aware of, I’ve always had trouble sleeping, and even more trouble waking up in the morning. It’s a problem that I’ve been dealing with ever since I was young – I remember lying in bed for hours upon hours as a kid, not being able to sleep. It used to take me anywhere from an hour to three hours to fall asleep, and then anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour to actually wake up in the morning.

In high school, this became increasingly difficult to deal with as the amount of stress began to build. I was always tired in class, and when I started taking concurrent classes after school, the situation only got worse. I remember my parents constantly fighting with me to go to bed at 1am, 2am, 3am. I knew that I was just going to lie in bed, sleepless and restless, so I figured that I could just stay up late and get tired naturally by doing work or just writing. My sleeping habits just grew worse.

Of course, as I entered college, I didn’t have my parents around to beg me to go to bed anymore. I stayed up some nights until 4am, and I could walk around the New Mexico Tech campus and see lights on in students’ dorms everywhere. It was common occurrence to see kids asleep in class and often missing class because they overslept. I fit right in! I wasn’t too concerned about this until I missed half of my first Calculus exam because I didn’t wake up on time. It started worrying me even more when I started waking up late for work. I didn’t have an excuse, really. I just overslept. I overslept a lot. It started becoming a real problem.

Fast forward a few years to now, and I’m still fighting the same sleep issues. I’ve missed classes, quizzes, work, and presentations, all because I overslept. It still takes me hours to fall asleep sometimes, and waking up is still just as hard. I started taking sleeping pills for awhile, and they worked really well, but they left me really groggy and mindless for most of the next morning. I have four alarms that I have scheduled to go off – very loud alarms – and sometimes I sleep through all of them. I can’t explain it, but getting out of bed is constantly one of the biggest struggles I face every day.

However, this week I started an experiment. I couldn’t sleep on Sunday night, and I had a fairly large lab due Monday morning that I hadn’t worked on very much. So, I stayed up all night and worked on it until about 6am. I took a quick hour nap and went to school, feeling like absolute crap all day. The minute I got back home from school, I went straight to bed. Then, at around 3am, I woke up on my own, fully awake. I felt amazing! I took a walk around outside, took a nice long shower, and worked on homework until my roommates woke up. I went to school early, got breakfast, and felt great all day. It was pretty much an amazing experience.

So, I’ve tried to keep this up for the most part this week, and it worked out pretty well for a couple days. However, I stayed up a bit too late tonight, so I probably won’t try this experiment again until next week. Let’s see what happens… maybe it will become a regular thing for me and I won’t have to worry about missing class or constantly being tired anymore. I have to say, one of the most frustrating things about oversleeping is walking into class late or going to a class later in the day, and having people say things like “Glad to see you showed up,” or “Nice of you to join us.” I’ve been struggling with this for years – no need to make me feel worse about my sleeping disorder.

-Ryan.