"Full" night's sleep

Posted in: Sleep

Continuing my reduced sleep experiment, yesterday (15th) I had a complete day (day 6) of no oversleeps and mostly well scheduled naps. Apart from some dragging around dawn it was all fine. So I wondered what would happen if I slept the night. Would I feel like crap or bouncy in the morning? What time would I wake up? Would I want to get out of bed?

First off, my newly acquired skill of falling asleep within minutes still applied. I can barely remember getting into bed. If I get nothing else out of this experiment having developed the ability to fall asleep right away is an enormous win.

I also woke up before dawn (7:30am ish) and felt rested and ready to get up. It was comfy and I didn't have anything to do so I dozed and enjoyed the warmth.

And the feet...

At work now and feeling fine. There's one difference that's significant though. My feet are not hurting as much as yesterday. For anyone who's joined recently, I smashed my heels in May, underwent surgery and am in a year-long recovery phase. I can walk, but there's a background level of pain I have to manage. The last few days I've found it increasingly hard to walk comfortably. There's no doubt I've been in various stages of mild sleep deprivation; this is expected during an adjustment phase. And I know from experience that lack of sleep affects my capacity to absorb the background pain from my feet.

Now there are many factors that could influence here - what's the medium term effect of polysleeping? Once I've stabilized will I still get that (admittedly small) extra pain? Will it materially impact the healing process in any way? Was the night's 6hr sleep contributory or coincident to how I'm feeling today?

So, that in mind, and that this is a single datapoint I wouldn't read too much into it. But, datapoint it is nonetheless.

Posted by Paul Makepeace at December 15, 2005 12:29 | TrackBack