This might end up being a series down the road, so might as well get a dumb name attached to it. Obviously I’m not actually getting old, just older. I’m making my way through my 30s and noticing with each year how I can’t do the same things I was able to in my teens and 20s. Then I will inevitably go through the same process in my 40s, 50s, etc. But one area of getting older definitely came up during my trip to Ireland this past week, and that is that I don’t handle sleep deprivation nearly as well as I used to. So this short post will be about that.
The impetus for this thought came from the fact that my wife and I took a red-eye flight to Dublin from NYC, landing around 8:00am on Saturday. With the time difference and not being able to sleep on the plane, that put me at 20 hours of being awake, and the idea was to push through until the end of the day in order to minimize jet lag, which would’ve made it at least 32 hours total. Back in my teens and early-20s, that would’ve been easy as I have done it multiple times. But this time it was really tough and we ended up crashing for a nap at the 28 hour mark after nearly passing out during lunch.
I wouldn’t necessarily say that this means 28 hours is my limit for how long I can stay up now, as traveling does a lot to fatigue you outside of just being awake, but I don’t have any other data points to refute it and I don’t intend to try to get more. It seems to fall in line with how I feel on days when my body wants to just keep going all night, when it’s easy to go for a whole 24 hours before I force myself to sleep. But it is quite a bit less than my early days when I would go a whole two days, around 36-40 hours, without much trouble. Back then I would definitely hit a wall around the 24 hour mark, but if I could get past it then I would feel fine until the next natural time to go to sleep. These days the wall comes sooner and eventually I just can’t go any further.
Which is all for the better I suppose. I’m at an age where I don’t feel any real need to push myself like that anymore. In high school and college, I would use this ability to get a lot more done. Not necessarily for doing actual work, but for playing games and watching TV/movies it was really nice. And though I think differently about it now, I was convinced at the time that depriving myself of sleep wasn’t having that much of an impact. Especially during college, I would regularly go days or weeks on 3 hours of sleep a night, and I would eventually crash and reset with a night where I would sleep for 12-16 hours. I thought this was perfectly fine and a great advantage to me, though I know many of my teachers thought otherwise as I struggled to stay awake at times. I know I could never get away with that now, when even just 6 hours a night for a week leaves me struggling.
I guess one of the reasons why I think on this topic pretty often is that I still wish I could get away with it. I know that I can get away with sleeping 6 hours a night for a little while, but I can’t keep it up, as much as I want to make it work. Two extra hours a day to do stuff is nothing to scoff at, and it seems like it should be doable since I naturally wake up after 6 hours of sleep every day anyway. Over the years I’ve learned that my sleep cycles tend to finish at 3 and 6 hours, and then again at each hour after that (7, 8, 9, etc.). This is why the 3 hours a night thing worked at all. So most nights when I sleep, I will wake up after 6 hours anyway, and then I will fall back asleep and wake up at 7 hours, then again at 8 hours. Usually at 8 hours, sometimes 9 hours, I will be done sleeping and not be able to get more even if I want to. I just wish that I could always feel great and rested after that first 6. Sometimes I do (like today when I’m writing this), but after a few days I really need to get that full 8 to avoid fatigue headaches.
On the plus side, I rarely suffer from sleep deprivation unintentionally these days. I used to think that I was a partial insomniac because I would struggle to sleep all the time, which partly led me to intentionally depriving myself since I wasn’t going to sleep anyway. But now it happens rarely, and even when it does I can usually use one of the tricks I’ve learned along the way to force my mind to calm down enough to let sleep take hold.
In the end, I continue to wish that days were just a little bit longer so that I could take advantage of my body’s natural inclination to stay up longer than 16 hours and still get in the full 8 when I need to. I just have to make due with what I’ve got.