Monstergirl Cafe

During times of extraordinary sleep schedules as well as not being able to sleep even whenever exceptionally tired (due to stiff muscles or other related things), I've come to find some interesting things about how tiredness works for me. They're mostly made up to be able to vividly articulate them a little better, but I do wanna share them since I've had these thoughts and theories circulating in my head for a while. Plus, I'm curious to see if others' sleepiness could also relate to these things and if so perhaps find it insightful.

These thoughts have been an exercise in being able to quantify these things and strategizing on studying the eep, theorizing the eep, and how to best eep. Some research that I've done is on stuff like circadian rhythms and polyphasic sleep schedules. Those are where sleep is broken up into different times of the day with varying lengths. I've experimented with a handful of those, even sticking with biphasic siesta today on some days, so ye this is also sort of like a personal experience to that too.

So here's my take on all of this eep business

I always get a feeling of 2 kinds of eep... entirely made up by me but this is just to make it easier to track: Shallow eep and D e e p eep.

How one restores the eeps:
I get good Shallow eep by laying down n just resting (either half-asleep or just closing the eyes), while D e e p eep is when I do drift off to sleep. With how this works, it is assumed that restoring D e e p eep is coincidentally also restoring Shallow eep, but the opposite is not true. Both means laying down and trying to sleep after all (I mention a weird inadvertent loophole to this towards the bottom).

Assuming one eep is good, this is how it feels to crash when the other is bad (with a starting example):
Bad Shallow eep: Falling asleep for 6-8 hehe hours every day without naps. Some days aren't the full 8. Regardless of that, you're awake, you have energy, but doing things feels stressful. This is under the assumption that with those lesser hour sleep days, there's an accumulating sleep dept that's catching up to you. You have less patience, don't want to laugh at things, and things probably piss u off more than usual. Resting doesn't immediately feel like it's helping. The spirit feels ugly, bruised, and you feel irritated. Even after the crash, things feel kind of pessimistic, probably because of some meandering negative thoughts that had been felt during the crash. This sucks because if it happens for long enough, It feels like the new normal and I never note how irritated I truly am until I sleep good enough. As negative as it is, it's still more serviceable imo because you can fully focus if you really need to, to the reluctance of your body.

Bad D e e p eep: Sleeping for like 6 hours, but you have the chance to rest in bed for like 3-4 hours (From trying to get the body to fall asleep again or from short naps). Eventually, the effects of bad Shallow eep will creep in if this sleep schedule continues or if the short naps stop (specially nearing night). The reason is of course being that 6 hours (for this example) isn't enough for most people. But anyways... Like, 80% conscious. Things are still kinda funny (even more so if recently gotten up from resting which could make one feel a little dopey...) You can probably still hold good conversation, but you're constantly yawning with half-lidded eyes, or even just fully closed for a good few seconds. Sleep feels like it could come swiftly if closed for long enough. A comfortable surface or blanket gets a greater and greater allure to the mind. Doing things feels like you're on autopilot. You feel like a low-energy gremlin that says 'mmmyes myes' with a dopey expression while your eyes are closed. Doing things only feels half as fulfilling as fully rested would be though. After the crash, it doesn't feel that bad.

Extra observations:

• The effects of sleep quality now is felt 2-4 days later

This is purely on the idea that sleeping very low hours one night doesn't feel like anything is wrong until like 2 days later, when you had good sleep last night but u still feel like dirt. Getting good sleep for a good few days to clear out any other bad sleep is what really helps with getting in a flow state creating things if it had been put off for a while.

• Body sometimes likes to crash after 2 hours regardless of how sleep went

It's weird when it happens after getting 8+ hours of good sleep because you're wondering what the heck is up with that? This is something I can somewhat correlate with the polyphasic sleep schedule thing, particularly in the biphasic sleep. Two 3-hour sleep periods are broken up by a 2-hour period of wakefulness. It's claimed to be a more 'natural' way for humans to sleep, but take that with a grain of salt. If that's the case though, then it's interesting to see it in effect even after an 8+ hour sleep. Maybe it's the body trying to compensate for sleep deprivation days prior.

• Crashes usually last like :30 minutes to 1:30 hours

I imagine it's the body trying to compensate from bad sleep before. Something interesting to note is that after the crash, regardless of how much sleep deprivation is currently being experienced, the body and brain can kind of operate like the most normal thing for some time, like maybe an hour or so, and have little to no signs of being low on either type of eep. It's like the burst of melatonin you get runs out... for now, until your circadian rhythm gives you another one or you've been inactive for a while. I've seen this occur whenever I had to travel out of state to help out in a day-long gig right after getting up early for work, that which I had failed to sleep for as well. I did however eat a lot of sugary things, so maybe that contributed to the strangely high energy moments.

• C a f f e i n e

Not sure about caffeine. Haven't taken enough consistently get a good read, but I think there's a difference in the different eeps when using it. From what I've seen, it's less egregious to use when Bad D e e p eep as opposed to Bad Shallow eep. The emotions of being irritated mutates into being boisterously irritated when using caffeine. Also, it's probably not a good idea to use when the last 1-3 days had been terrible with sleep. Though if you end up successful in getting good sleep to avoid that along with good eeps, caffeine feels entirely unnecessary, because it feels as if you're already on it.

• Sometimes there's times where one could get bad shallow eep without bad D e e p eep?

It feels like it whenever you manage to enter a dream weirdly fast or induce sleep paralysis, you succeed in getting some kind or REM sleep without having to have a whole core sleep surrounding it? It could mean that you'd theoretically get like... 6 hours of deep sleep, get some 20 minutes of extra REM, and thus never get the effects of Bad Shallow eep that would normally creep in after a while. This I am very much not sure about due to the rarity of quickly entering a dream.

• Circadian Rhythm

These observations could very much also be affected by the circadian rhythm. I want to say that perhaps they wouldn't to that much of an extent because of my wild schedules sometimes, but I think it might still have a notable effect anyways. Hmm.

• I wrote this with fair shallow eep but Bad D e e p eep

Half of me thinks I have done a big brain think, while the other thinks I'm talking nonsense. I feel like I'm on autopilot as I write this down though. Yerp =w=. Either way, I had fun jotting this down finally into something readable... hopefully. Idk, it's all a big wall of text still. I'm getting too tired to check for grammar errors now

tl;dr: I think tiredness is actually 2 types of tiredness... along with other things that I've seen in my sleeping career of sleeping.

I was doing a polyphasic sleep cycle for a while. It was pretty rough.

I was at Google and I'd get up super early to get to work, so I'd be there at like 5am. Then I'd leave work around 2pm, all to avoid traffic (45 minute commute vs 1.5 hour commute, depending on rush hour). But by the time I got home I'd need to crash immediately for about four hours. So it was four hours between midnight and 4am, and four hours between roughly 3pm and 7pm.

It only works if you live in an environment that'll actually let you sleep during those times. Any disruption would wreak havoc on my sleep, and the housemates I had at the time were very noisy. So I had to give that up eventually.

It was nice being able to have some time on the weekdays between work and sleep to do stuff like run errands and enjoy the sun, though.

Oheck. Yeah noisy people/things are super unaccommodating for daytime sleeping, specially for 4 hours in the middle of the day. I'm super fortunate to have the chance to do my own here at home most of the time, assuming I don't sleep the entire night away. It gets wild sometimes.

Snek does a good bask in the sun

i tried the "uberman" sleep schedule for a while, 30 minute nap every 4 hours, for a total of 3 hours of sleep a day. i don't think i ever made it past day 3.

nowadays i sleep like 6 hours and have a nap after work.

also! on multiple types of tired: you discover more types of tired as you get older! i've experienced 4 or 5 so far!

There's MORE???