The side effects of not sleeping

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Or one could work third shift and just suffer in general.

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That makes babies sound positively evil.

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I never understood why people use the term “I slept like a baby” to describe having a good night’s sleep, especially since becoming a parent of twins.

“Oh, you slept like a baby last night? You mean you repeatedly woke up screaming in terror to find that you’d just pissed and/or shat yourself?”

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When my daughter was about 7 or 8, I read a book about sleeping by one of the leading sleep researchers, the man who discovered REM sleep. He said that as for as they knew, there wasn’t a set amount of time when you recovered back to normal levels of restedness unless you actually take the time to sleep all the hours you lost. For example, you might suppose that if you get a good night’s sleep for two weeks you would reset back to where you were pre-baby, but, no, if you have lost 3 hours each night for a year, you need to make up all of those hours.

That summer, I slept as much as possible to try to restore my sleep bank. I still think I’m down a few hundred nights.

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Just listen to the Blues or Elvis… (Just listen to them)
Baby always be leavin; cheatin; etc; they sent Elvis to heartbreak hotel – that does not sound pleasant.

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The worst of all possible worlds? Living with a teenager who routinely doesn’t get enough sleep 6 nights a week. It results in a truly delightful temperament, I assure you.

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Sing it sister! I feel that pain. Yes.

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It’s not just yours, Maggie. All babies cause alcoholism.

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Sleep is one of our most important vital functions, and yet we value it so very little. We all hear the “eight hours a day” standard, but how many of us actually get that many? Worse still, once we’re in a hole, how many of us are able to sleep even more than eight hours a day to start making up lost hours?

One of my good friends, a unfortunate wageslave, complains about her frustrating work scheduling. They’ll have her work late one day, then work early the next morning, despite her repeated requests for stable hours. Apparantly they can schedule their employees whenever they want so long as there are eight hours between shifts.

Presumably they believe that people can somehow magically use all eight of those hours for sleep, and not need to spend some of them commuting to and from work, feeding themselves, and taking care of other basic needs. When she tries to explain her situation to her fellow wageslave manager, she gets told off for being “lazy”, with the manager claiming to work two jobs and to only get four hours of sleep each night, and that if they can manage it, she should be able to, especially since she’s younger than them.

We treat our health as a disposable commodity in this country. This is why we can’t figure out a proper healthcare system. We’re culturally trained to believe only the wealthy deserve to be healthy.

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Not only that; we hold out our suffering as a badge of pride, and scorn those who are less oppressed than ourselves. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve endured a slow day at work, only to hear, “Workin hard there buddy? Wish I had a job like yours, haw-haw.”

It’s reminiscent of the “critique” of the ACA that it will allow some full-timers to cut back to part-time or even start their own businesses… as if those were bad things, and 80-hour wage slavery is real work.

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Being that teenager isn’t particularly fun either, I can say from experience.

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Homer: “I told you, I can’t come into work cause my baby beat me up.”
Pause, listens too phone.
Home: “Oh, it is not the worst excuse I ever used!”

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Take heart, the manager is probably a adepressed alcoholic and/or speed addict who will die of a heart attack.

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Cool! More things for me to stay up worrying about!

Sleep deprivation sucks. When our baby turned out to be an olympic-grade insomniac from day 1, we took measures: For nearly 6 months, I would stay up with the baby until 4am. Then my husband would take over until 9am. The arrangement ensured that we could count on at least 5 hours of uninterrupted rest no matter what. We could both grab a few cat naps on the couch (as to not disturb/wake the other) during our ‘shifts’, if our little owl allowed it, so some nights we could both manage a good 6-7 hours of sleep.

Even though we missed not getting to sleep in the same bed at the same time for a while, I think it ended up being better for our togetherness since our waking hours together were not spent as desperately sleepy, bleary-eyed zombies. We were both thankful for the little oasis of rest we each created for the other nightly (seeing my partner taking over and the prospect of 5 hours of complete rest was like winning a luxury cruise every single night). Needless to say it also helped manage an extremely active, alert child throughout the day.

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I’m not much for Schadenfreude, sadly.

Why in the world was that embedded into flash? It’s a simple jpg. …so confused…

As an evolutionary strategy it’s a good one: your offspring wants to make sure you don’t burn up his/her inheritance by living 'til you’re ninety.

As many here have acknowledge, often by citing their own experiences, the necessity of sleep cannot be overstated. And it’s not just sleep, it’s quality sleep during which one’s brain can run through the REM cycle one or more times a night. As with others, I too can speak from experience - decidedly horrifying experience - of the sinister effects of extended sleeplessness and dreamlessness. Quantifying, rather than qualifying, the extent of my own journey through sleeplessness is easier (and affords me certain privacy). By the numbers, I endured a 4 month period during which I got a mere 18% of the sleep I required - averaging less than 1 hour/day. The 4-month period was but a window within a much longer period of sleep/dream irregularity.

All I can say is one should not take problems with sleeping or dreaming lying down.