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.

For some reason, I’ve been thinking a lot today about the difference between going to school for the sole purpose of getting good grades versus actually gaining a wealth of knowledge. There’s no doubt that throughout my time at Neumont, I’ve learned more than I ever could have managed to do on my own, and I’m sure that this is true for anyone else that has gone through the school’s curriculum. However, I’ve noticed that there are some people that seem to care more about the grade they are awarded at the end of the quarter than actually having applicable real-world knowledge in our field.

Now, I have to admit that I was like this in high school. Anyone that knew me then knows that I thought it was a huge waste of time. I wasn’t gaining any useful knowledge in anything that I was interested in. There were very few times I was genuinely interested in my classes, but I still felt like all I was doing was serving my time just like everyone else. At the same time, though, I still felt a strong need to get good grades. I was number 1 in my class and I had to keep it that way. I can’t really explain it. Once I had my 4.0 I couldn’t let it go.

Maybe it was after I accomplished my goal of a 4.0 high school transcript that I realized how pointless it was. Did it necessarily mean I was smarter? Not really. I guess it meant that I put in more work than other people, but other than that I didn’t really feel like I had gained anything by putting in that extra effort. There were plenty of smarter people than me in my class, and there are tons upon tons of more talented high school graduates out there with less than a 4.0 on their transcript.

I guess my point is that now, I know better. Now, when it really counts, I’m not entirely concerned with my GPA. I mean, I don’t want to fail, and it still hurts a bit when I see B’s on my college transcript, but I know that what I’ve learned in this past year and a half is much more valuable to me than any letter grade.

The reason I bring this up is because I was asked an interesting question tonight by one of my roommates. I was mentioning how pointless this one homework assignment was, and he asked “Wouldn’t you rather have a bunch of easy pointless questions than a bunch of hard ones?” Actually, no. I really would rather spend my time figuring out 10 interesting hard problems than sit here doing 10 boring pointless ones, especially if I’m not learning anything from the easy ones.

Either way, even if I had interesting homework to do right now, I guess I would still be procrastinating.

-Ryan.

edit; I like the way my roommate Scott put it just now: “I’m not here to get good grades, necessarily. I’m here to learn!” I completely agree.

I haven’t been writing as much as I’d like to lately, so I created this blog to serve as sort of a starting point for me to jump back into my writing habits. I’ve been writing in blogs since my sophomore year in high school, and they were always a little on the naive side. Actually, they were very much naive because I was very much naive. Now, I’ve grown a lot, I’ve changed a lot, and I’m looking to explore myself through the words that come out of my fingertips within the lifespan of this blog.

I am hoping to tap into several creative and technical aspects of my life in these entries, but I’m hoping to stay more on the personal side of things. This will not be a technical blog in any way, but don’t be surprised if a bit of school talk slips in here every once in a while.

Also, I want to start chronicling my search for good beer. Maybe a beer-ranking widget would be cool for this blog… hmm…

-Ryan.