Roy Tang

I love sleeping. And taking naps. But I’m not very good at doing it at night. Insomnia is a common problem for me. I often find it difficult to go to sleep at night, taking upwards of 1-2 hours in bed before I can manage to fall asleep. Of course all that time lying there feels unproductive, so I’ll often be tempted to to grab a nearby screen and read something online or such, which makes it even harder to get to sleep.

I don’t blame the electronics devices completely, though. I remember even when I was a kid I would sometimes have trouble sleeping at night due to a hyperactive brain having too many trains of thoughts to resolve. Something I still carry to this day, though I like to imagine my ability to compartmentalize thoughts has improved since then.

I remember when Warcraft III came out, one of the hero characters had an ability to send other units to sleep and I always chose that ability because I wanted to have it IRL. Not to use on other people, but on myself so I could sleep on demand.

Getting a continuous block of eight hours of sleep (or even six or seven hours) is pretty rare for me as well. Usually I’ll wake up after 1-2 hours, then if I’m lucky I manage to go to sleep again. If not, sometimes I’ll give up and work on stuff until it’s breakfast time.

Sometimes I try to force-reset my sleep cycle by going like 36 hours without sleep so I can’t help but be real tired and sleep continuously for a while. But it usually doesn’t last. And I’m at that age where going 36 hours without sleep isn’t really that easy.

It doesn’t help that since I quit working full-time I usually have a highly irregular daily schedule. Combined with a tendency to take naps during the day, it leads to the irregular sleep cycle. I also like having breakfast early so I often wake up at like 5 to 6 in the AM, no matter how late I went to sleep, then just recover sleep with naps during the day, making it harder to go to sleep early in the night, and so on. A bit of a vicious cycle. Also, it makes me a weird kind of cross between a morning person and a night owl.

One of the problems with sleep is that even though it feels great, when you sleep so much it feels unproductive, like you could’ve put that time to better use. I remember maybe a decade or so ago, I was reading about the idea of polyphasic sleep. I liked the idea because it meant fewer sleep hours overall during the day, which meant more time for doing stuff. Sadly, I never got it to work. It’s a bit challenging to do it with a nine-to-five job, but even without that, I don’t really have the discipline to keep it up. And also, I like sleeping a lot sometimes.

I’ll end this post with this tweet:

GOD: You have probably 70-80 years at most before you die, ideally.
MAN: oh. well, i'll make the most of-
GOD: You'll be unconscious for 1/3 of the time.
MAN: ..uh
GOD: *leans in* That'll be your favorite part.

— Ray 🦔 (@SirEviscerate) December 19, 2017

…then I’ll go take a nap.