I’ve seen studies that say that people who claim to have spent the entire night tossing and turning actually tend to have spent large portions of the night asleep. The problem isn’t the lack of sleep, it’s that for whatever reason, they get very little rest. Experience tends to confirm this: the alarm certainly woke me from something this morning. This knowledge does very little to help with the fact that I’ve been glaring at my bedroom clock in approximately 50-minute intervals since I first started trying to sleep last night.
I am not a fan of the morning shift.
“Rest” largely has to do with the amount of REM sleep you get. When that’s interrupted, you feel crappy. That’s why sometimes a person will feel worse on 2 hours of sleep than on no sleep at all.
Power napping is effective because when you sleep an hour or less you get a little REM sleep without going too deep that you would feel unrested after waking up.
Oh, poor Coriolinus. If it’s any consolation, last night I barely got any sleep either. Last night a very important fax (related to my community service project) was sent to our fax machine… at sometime around 11:50. From then until 12:22, we repeatedly received phone call after phone call–not meant for us, of course, but for the fax machine. And the person sending the fax had no way of knowing whether the fax was sent or not, and I didn’t know his phone number, so I had to email him and message him on Facebook, and hope he got the message in time. Luckily, he did, but after that I couldn’t get back to sleep for quite a while. Hope you got enough sleep after all!
–Rourke
I seriously empathize and I hope it’s not continued insomnia. Mine got so difficult I started taking myslee for a week just to get me back on schedule.