My relationship with sleep

I've struggled with insomnia my whole life, you would think that means that I have likely slept a lot less than the average person has in the same amount of time that I have been alive, but that's not the case.  Sleep for me is best described as a bank account.  You start with a zero balance, and the more active you are, the more energy you expend, the further into the red your balance goes.  For most people, each night they go to sleep, and they repay part of that debt they accrued and then they wake up the next day and repeat the process.  That's how sleep is supposed to work.

For me and many people like me who suffer from insomnia, when each day comes to an end, sleep eludes us.  Instead of repaying that balance each night, we stay awake not by choice, when we eventually sleep usually out of exhaustion, we repay part of the balance but not it all, as a result we stay in the red.  With each passing day because you expend more than you repay the deficit grows until you have a debt of sleep which starts to impact your life.  Like any overdraft on a bank account there is a charge for using it and staying overdrawn.  That charge in regard to sleep is an impairment of cognitive function which strains your brain.  The result is that your debt of sleep becomes persistent, never able to repay more to bring it back up, your mental functions begin to break down.

Like an overdraft with a bank account, there is a spending limit which you eventually reach, and once you hit it, you can't borrow any further.  This is also true of sleep.  The break down of mental capacity accumulates over time and when you eventually hit that limit to your sleep debt, a physiological shift occurs, one that causes a neurological shift in tandem.  Depression sets in, at which point the brain elects to shut down all non-essential processing and enters a state of shallow processing.  When depression takes full control the result is that insomnia is reversed to the opposite extreme.  You sleep, in excess.  You go from having nights where you could only sleep for 2 to 3 hours if you were lucky, to days and nights where you can sleep well over 12 hours at a time.  For me personally the height of my insomnia results in 1 hour sleep duration, and the height of my depression results in me sleeping up to 17 hours, not surprisingly that leaves you with very little to do when awake other than what is necessary to stay alive.

During that period, the debt of sleep is repaid with instalments much higher than the minimum.  If you attempt to disrupt this depressive state, which you can indeed be successful in doing, your insomnia eventually brings you back to your limit quite quickly because you didn't clear enough of the balance to be able to spend.  If you let this depressive state run its course however you can end up in credit, you can sleep so much that you reach a point where you can actually function quite well on 2 hours sleep a night without much impact to you, of course that blissful period doesn't last long.

This is basically how my relationship with insomnia has progressed over the years.  There is a physiological concept known as a circadian rhythm, this is the sleep-wake cycle that you live through.  For most people they try to maintain a 16:8 ratio of hours awake to hours asleep.  Interestingly, there have been sleep studies performed on humans that have shown evidence that the human body when allowed to adapt to its natural rhythm actually conforms to a circadian rhythm that amounts to longer than a 24 hour cycle, by intervals ranging from a few minutes to an extra hour.  Since you can't make the day any longer there is a natural debt that will accrue when you try to conform to a 24 hour cycle.  For the average person that amounts to around 10 minutes per day, so per week you need an extra 1 hour and 10 minutes sleep to compensate for the offset imposed by the fact there aren't enough hours in the day.

Over the years I've tried to figure out if my circadian rhythm was different and if I conformed to a shorter or longer day length would it make a difference.  The surprising thing was the most effective solution for me personally was to use a 36 hour day, although that proves hard to maintain over the long term as everyday life gets in the way, things like work etc make it impractical.  With a 36 hour day however I was able to live quite productively on an 18:18 ratio of being awake for 18 hours and sleeping for 18 hours at a time and this broke my cycle of insomnia and depression for a time.  As I said, this wasn't practical to maintain in the long term.  The only time I was ever able to do this was during the 3 months holiday I had each year for Summer break from school and college and University.  Beyond those times the only other instances where this behaviour would emerge would be periods of unemployment or periods of freelance work where I could set my own time table and go with my own routine as opposed to conforming to someone else's.

The only real advice I can give when it comes to sleep for anyone who struggles with it is something I have said many times before - listen to your body.  Sleep when you are tired, and if you can't sleep, then don't.  Don't impose a routine on your body that it isn't willing to conform to.  I've spoken to doctors over the years about my insomnia and the one piece of advice that comes up again and again is to ignore the duration and focus on the quality.  8 hours means nothing if it's poor quality, likewise you can survive on a lot less if you can make the most of what you get.