How much sleep do you get?

[Paladin - York]

Roll on the late evening tv news - zzzzzzzzzzzzzz - it works everytime.

 

[endoman]

never really able to lie in, can manage on 6 hours but prefer 7 -8, up most days at 6.30, maybe 7.30 at a weekend.

 

[Nearly there]

Working nights I get home by 8am and usually in bed by 9am usually sleep until 15:30 when the kids get home from school noisy lot,If im going into a day off I set my alarm for 2pm as I dont want to waste the day in bed but my body clocks all over the place on my days off i yawn all day but by evening i come alive and usually find myself wide awake at 3am and force myself to go to bed then ill probably only sleep to 7 or 8 depending how noisy the kids are when my shifts start again i try go for a couple hours kip but find i just lye there listening to my family trying to keep the noise down(doesnt work)

 

[Night Train]

Night Train, I dont know how you survive on so little sleepIf that were me I would be up on a murder charge by now, coming anywhere near to a sleep-deprived Lisa is like poking a hornets nest with a stick. I NEED sleep. Lots of it. My ideal would be at least 10 hours a daybut i tend to usually get about 7.

I have managed on little sleep for so much of my life that I am coping, just.

I can't work like this and until I can get it all sorted out I guess I will have to remain 'off sick' and doing the best I can. I can just about do 3-4 hours of work about 2-3 times in a week, the rest of the time I am pretty much useless. I just loose touch with the world and can't do day to day stuff with much competancy. I am sure it is partly a reason for my short term memory loss and general confusion.
It has meant I have cut all my activities, professional, social and personal, to a minimum and only do what I have to to get by.

 

[brokenflipflop]

I thought I'd read somewhere that you need less sleep the older you get. Lady Thatcher apparently had only 4 hours sleep a night when she was Prime Minister and she was brilliant at her job (INCOMING !!). Imagine how brilliant she would have been if she'd had 8 hours sleep (again...INCOMING !!)

 

[Lisa21]

I have managed on little sleep for so much of my life that I am coping, just.

I can't work like this and until I can get it all sorted out I guess I will have to remain 'off sick' and doing the best I can. I can just about do 3-4 hours of work about 2-3 times in a week, the rest of the time I am pretty much useless. I just loose touch with the world and can't do day to day stuff with much competancy. I am sure it is partly a reason for my short term memory loss and general confusion.
It has meant I have cut all my activities, professional, social and personal, to a minimum and only do what I have to to get by.

Crikey I bet you cant. Isnt it suposed to be proven that prolonged sleep deprovation can lead to madness?? (I must have been kept awake a lot as a child)
Hopefully your reasons/cause for this will be unearthed soon and you can get a little more sleep in your life.

 

[subaqua]

Okay then, now what is the longest and shortest you have ever slept for?

My longest= From 1.30am to 4.30pm (15 hours)
My shortest= From 4.00am to 5.30am (1.5 hours)

after working from 6pm on thursday before good friday to 6am tuesday after easter monday on a HV changeover shutdown I slept for 36 hours from noon on the tuesday. felt terrible and vowed never to do it again

 

[Night Train]

Crikey I bet you cant. Isnt it suposed to be proven that prolonged sleep deprovation can lead to madness?? (I must have been kept awake a lot as a child)
Hopefully your reasons/cause for this will be unearthed soon and you can get a little more sleep in your life.

I only had momentary snatches of sleep on Saturday night and next to none last night (Sunday). I do suppose the ability to to just lie with my eyes closed and rest is saving me from madness, no one is forcing me to stay away against my will.

It does mean that I am very slow in starting off a day. Today I was 'woken' at about 8am but couldn't rouse out of tiredness until after 10am and then I was very uncommunicative and sluggish until lunch time.

 

[Shaun]

NT - do you feel more tired after exercise, or does it make little difference?

 

[Nigel-YZ1]

I'm managing about 7 hours at the moment when I'm alone.
I did about 4 years at 5 hours a night which caused me serious problems.

<Rant
Didn't sleep much in a hotel on saturday due to some pair of scumbags screaming abuse at each other for over an hour. When will some idiots realise that they're not the only people in a 120 room building and shut the hell up or go outside a long way in the dark and sort it out. Bloody selfish!
/Rant >

I feel much better now :-)

 

[Night Train]

NT - do you feel more tired after exercise, or does it make little difference?

Even with heavy work and/or excercise that leaves me feeling tired it doesn't bring on sleep.

I do go to bed tired out, I am especially tired first thing in the morning, but that doesn't equate to actual sleep I can lie for hours with my eyes closed in a half dream/haluconogenic state but still aware of external stuff going on so I know I haven't slept.

I am more likely, though not always, to sleep if I lay on the sofa after lunch with a film on. I will then miss maybe an hour or so of a film so I know I have slept then.

 

[marinyork]

For anyone suffering from sleep problems I sympathise, but like dellzeqq said elsewhere in an excellent post, I simply also decided a long time go that I was 'someone who doesn't sleep' (awaits smileys from people who have met me only just a little bit and ironically seen me asleep). That doesn't stop anyone else seeking treatment (which is sadly very much harder to come by than people imagine) that works and I wish them well.

People don't tend to talk about sleep, so there is this idea that everyone literally needs 8hrs per night at all stages of their life. This isn't the case at all, you will have met people people (hypothesised to be a sizeable minority of the population) who can get by on 2-4hrs a night, a lot of people approximating your 8hrs per night and a few that need a bit more. Then as you get older your sleep may change. On top of that there are people which mysteriously have sleeping problems that come and go . The only thing about these categories is that most of the people on less than 8hrs a night probably haven't told you and you are unaware of how large a group it is.

 

[ianrauk]

I simply also decided a long time go that I was 'someone who doesn't sleep' (awaits smileys from people who have met me only just a little bit and ironically seen me asleep).

I was just going to say....

 

[ttcycle]

NT - I hope you get sorted - have you looked into any sleep clinics or alternative medicines?

I used to be a 7-8 hour person but it fluctuates a lot. I can have periods where I have strangely florid/lucid dreams and sleep well but at other times those dreams give me really troubled sleep, at the worst, I can have patches of sleepless insomnia that lasts until it decides to go.

Currently, sleeping for 9 hours without waking is great, I tend to wake a lot in the night and find it hard to sleep again or because of the night wakings I feel tired in the morning. Due to this on some days I'll sleep for 10 hours if I can sleep through. I try very hard to sleep and wake at the same times as that helps me feel better in the day- lying in when I'm awake IS bad news for me- makes it very hard to get going for the rest of the day.

I tend to look at it like MY- sleeping is a very individual thing, it sometimes goes without problem but if it doesn't there's no point stressing about it - it's just as it is for me and will fluctuate over the years.

 

[Night Train]

NT - I hope you get sorted - have you looked into any sleep clinics or alternative medicines?

Sleeping tablets didn't make me sleep, just made me incapable of work in the mornings so I stopped those.
Herbal Nytol initially calmed me down enough to try for regular bed times but also didn't lead to sleep after the first few nights. I have used them when my bed times creep into the early hours. It helps bring it back but but that is about all.

I've not got anywhere with my GP about this as he is more concerned about all my other health sysmptoms and suggests that sleep will return to normal when I am well. I like to think that if my sleep was more normalised I would get better quicker.