On Sun, 28 Sep 2003 18:08:33 GMT, Starstuffed wrote:

I get perhaps 5 hours of sleep a day. It seems to be enough. Long ago,
when I was young, that never would have been sufficient.

I go to bed around 10:00 a.m. on an average morning and it generally will
take me an hour to fall asleep. 3:30 p.m. will find me up and roaming the
house.

6:30 p.m. reveals me turning in for a two hour nap. Really though, I
probably am only asleep for an hour during this period.

Then it's time to go to work if I must or to stay home, if I can, and get
out the telescope. When 2:30 a.m. rolls along, I could have slept more but
the established routine seems to be wired into my system.

Age, work, and amateur astronomy have all led me to functioning on less
sleep than I would really "like" to have.

Does any of this sound familiar?

Not to me. I don't have any regular sleep hours. I'll frequently be
awake from 24 to 48 hours, then sleep 8-16 hours.

There's no regular time of day I can expect to be waking up. Quite often
I'll roll over and not know whether it's 6 am or 6 pm, until I lean closer
to read the label next to the red dot on the alarm clock (myopia).

Since I'm only 28, I can't draw conclusions about increasing age
decreasing the need for sleep, but that seems to be the conclusion of all
the sleep studies I've read about. Another factor is the nature of one's
waking activities. Mental exertion causes a person to require more sleep
than physical exertion. So, someone who is more or less a physical
laborer doesn't need as much sleep as an engineer.

I'm a computer programmer (work at home, which is how I can keep my own
hours), and I definitely notice the additional sleep required after
wrestling with the implementation of new functionality for 8 to 16 hours.

Only on those occasions where I need to be somewhere at a certain time do
I find myself griping about not enough sleep. More often than not, I'll
just stay up longer rather than get only a couple hours of sleep.


--
- Mike

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