Life is not Worth Living When You Suffer from Lack of Sleep

That’s how I feel.  The morning after a night of being woken multiple times by my crying child, noisy neighbors, or spouse returning from a late night drinking session, I have less desire to do any of the things I normally do.  Repeat this scenario for a few nights in a row and I start to not know who I am anymore.  Things that normally get me excited- surfing, writing, skating, playing with my kid- all have about the same the appeal as wading through a septic tank after such a night.  I just can’t muster up any energy to even begin to think about enjoying something when I’m so sleep-deprived.  Even if I do make it to the water to surf, for instance, I’ll find myself so tired and deeply weary that surfing becomes more torture than fun.  Instead of being stoked to be out in nature, on the beautiful ocean, I find myself feeling my tiredness and thinking how much extra it sucks to not be able to enjoy something that is one of the main reasons I love life.  Same goes for anything else- be it work or play.  For this reason, I absolutely HATE being woken up and robbed of sleep.  It destroys any joy I can experience and life becomes something full of bitterness.  All I want to do in such instances is remove myself from society, from any kind of man made noise and sleep for a hundred years.  I want to seal myself in a cave away from all light and noise until I can finally get that maddeningly elusive thing: a good night’s sleep.

Does anyone out there know the feeling?  I can’t believe it should be so hard.  Perhaps those of you with your own houses and/or neighbors that aren’t crazy or rude or both can avoid the plague of noise pollution.  Then there are other people who can fall asleep with the presence of seemingly any level of noise.  I seriously envy such people.  For those of you who are also light sleepers, however, don’t beat yourself up for it.  I’ve got something to share that will make see in a new light something that can often seem like a curse.   

First of all, if you’re still reading, you probably know that feeling you get when you find yourself suddenly awake, realizing that if it were not for the sound which just woke you up, you would have been still sleeping soundly.  Now that you’re up, you find yourself getting a bit upset.  Now you’ll have to calm down in order to fall back asleep, and what if the noise which woke you up happens again?  I’ve experienced the deep frustration of being woken up from a sound sleep.  What often makes it worse is that falling asleep itself can sometimes be difficult, and to have your achievement destroyed with one fell stroke, why, it’s an absolute outrage! 

This might sound crazy or ridiculous to those who have the good fortune of not having to deal with being a light sleeper in a noisy world. But to those who understand exactly what I’m talking about, I’m here to tell you that you’re not crazy. Others may have told you you’re crazy, but it’s a natural reaction to having your sleep interrupted (see my page on REM sleep). You are probably evolutionarily adapted to be a protector/watchdog/survivor type. Think about times in humanity’s past where we would have to be more on guard for nighttime attacks by wild animals, bandits, and whatever other serious issues our ancestors had to deal with. Why, we light sleeper might have been regarded as heroes in those bygone times as we woke to the slightest odd noise to warn our families of danger, thereby enabling survival (that’s right, you sound sleepers out there, you might not be here today if it weren’t for us light sleepers). We would have been the ones to jump up and immediately bash to death that sabre-tooth tiger threatening to eat our kids or the bandits trying to slaughter us all and make off with our food. Imagine the thanks we would have gotten “Hey there Alert Bob, thanks for saving our skins again! We only woke up after we heard the death cries of that tiger, that was a close one! How do you always manage to hear them and wake up so quickly? Why, if it weren’t for you-“ and so on and so forth, you get the idea of the gratitude that would have been heaped on Those who Wake Easily. Of course this is a theory I have formulated myself during all those perversely wakeful moments late in the night as I wondered why I was being punished by being such a light sleeper and why I feel like killing someone or something when I got woken up. It’s my Sleeping Caveman theory- sleeping caveman easily woken when he hears a strange sound, immediately proceed to bash the living daylights out of the source of the sound if it poses a danger. Great great survival mechanism.

That’s all well and good, but nowadays?  Nowadays your family gives you looks of deep concern as you express your serious discontent over the noise of footsteps or the TV as you’re trying to get some shut-eye.  They think you’re hearing things, or maybe you have some sort of psychological disturbance because you wake so easily.  People you live with would be grateful on the off chance you were able to wake up and stop a robber or something, but that’s about it.  Us light sleepers don’t get no respect these days.  Well, with peak oil and a possible collapse of society, humanity may find itself in the good ‘ol dark ages again.  People may be desperate to survive and willing to rob and kill to do so, moving in on innocents while they sleep.  In another more pessimistic doomsday scenario, our well-lit streets may well be claimed by feral or wild animals looking for easy sources of meat.  If you survive the (possible) end of the world as we know it and things end up looking like I just described, you’d better pray you’re sleeping close to a light sleeper.