I've learned that I can't do coffee or other caffeine, the jump gets shorter and shorter over a period of days while the jitters far outlast it, which then contributes to paranoia problems from the artificial mania. It also makes the insomnia a lot worse too.
Have you tried cutting back if not entirely eliminating coffee? I found it easier to sleep without it, even finding sleep to be funkier for the week over having had enough for one day from the half-life of it's less desirable symptoms.
During the pandemic after Alice came home from the hospital I had no school, no job, no responsibilities and my waking/sleep cycle was something like 20 hours awake, 10hours asleep. The period of time I would sleep was rotating to different points of the day.
I can remember sometimes falling asleep after breakfast and waking up after everyone else had dinner. Then at other times I would be waking up at 5 am while the rest of the house was asleep.
The rotating to different points of the day is ugh, it's where I start to see myself become misaligned with other people's schedules. 15+ hours of sleep though feels super good after being up for around 72+ hours, but that overtime's so taxing on the body and mind. Waking up feeling exhausted is pretty much the norm, and after a few hours it ramps into something more hyper.
In general once I'm awake it feels sort of like propping a window open with a stick, and then not being able to move the stick... I can be exhausted but once that stick is there there's no going back to sleep, I have to just deal with it.
Otherwise yeah I get that. I had some insomnia friends at random points too who would give room for it to get worse, or there was a point I tried having both daytime and nighttime friends. When I was younger I was the one who never slept at conventions or when visiting someone else's house, and the longer that goes on for the more the brain seems to speed up to exhaustion.
I would need a week or more with 0 responsibilities to try to quit coffee without ruining my life at this point. Caffeine is an addiction and I go into withdrawal without it.
Could be worth it, caffeine as an immune system booster ends up weakening your own overtime.
I knew someone with a deep addiction who, after quitting, was sick for a little under half a year.
How would you describe these specific states of "zoning out"
Basically motionless blacking out, with shaking my head later to check the time to gauge how much I lost if not someone or something getting my attention. Eyes are still open and there's minor blurry intake of perceptions in case anything warrants more focus.
In bad cases it's kind of like this, for the blurriness like 20ish seconds in rather than the cancer:
The body stops taking in stimulus quite as well and, while blurry, you have to somehow function through it. Strangely this also led to OCD things snapping me out of it, if not holding me out of the zone out state.
Similar to nodding out on opiates sorta?
I wouldn't know, but maybe?
Setting alarms across the room doesn't work for me. If they are too far away they won't wake me up.
Then you need an alarm that lets you do custom sounds, like my old CD Player alarm.
You can make it as loud, obnoxious, and specific to the things you hate as you want. If it doesn't wake you up, upgrade the noise to something harder.
OhGod, what an unpleasant way to start the day. I feel like an annoying alarm clock would put me in a bad mood every morning.
It wasn't about pleasant, it was about responsibilities.
Thankfully my cats make a better alarm clock lately.
How long do you generally go without sleep now? How long do you stay asleep?
I sleep daily as long as what I use to make myself sleepy is there. It otherwise gradually increases until three day stretches are the norm. Following that I sleep long and deep, a "Death Nap", and then I wake up very recharged if nothing interrupts it, ready for another three days with room to increase into more if I have an active stress to worry over, like work, school, or travel. I can also just forget to sleep, like if I have a new game or a particularly long research tunnel, which then speeds up the severity of the problem.
My second wind feels more hyper than normal energy, when I feel tired it kicks on to keep moving.
What a chaotic way to live, that is a vibe. I haven't gone to work on no sleep since leaving the wearhouse. After having to do it for a year I would rather sedate myself than try to go to a job/ school after staying up all night. I do low-key miss the overall chaos vibe of it all tho
It doesn't seem chaotic to be when it's all I've really known so much as inconveniently inconsistent. If I lived somewhere that had longer day and night cycles however it'd probably start to feel more normal from removing the sun and moon from the equation.
It also has often meant me losing out on sleep-benefits socially, like not usually being a nightly snuggler from staying up as my partner'd go to sleep, which has worked against me multiple times when they needed that closeness but I was too amped to be there for them. One of the few things to grant relief, weirdly, is pain over how it can spike and depletes those reserves, but it's usually not enough to fix everything on it's own.
For road trips and travel it's sucked too, I end up sleepwalking through airports while twitching in place as a natural way to stay awake, and half-asleep often enough when somewhere that should be fun. The more sleep that's lacked, the less I can milk the fun chems from the brain to perceive things brighter and more engaging, lending to a dryer, blurry, empty experience when compared to having a semi-normalized sleep cycle. The ability to encode it into memories also ends up a bit messy when compared to a corrected sleep cycle.
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