Night time is quiet, no loud talking downstairs, no annoying kids yelling outside, mostly no sirens, less cars = less noise, good time to calm down and think about stuff… stuff like weird philosophical questions and questioning if reality is real, also browsing the web in silence, looking for my next [youtube video / film / tv / anime] to watch.
It’s like 6:30 AM here lolz.
I just lie there and wait until I eventually do fall asleep … (or until I have to get up again).
How do you deal with the boredom? Usually if I can’t sleep, I have the urge to do something, which usually means internet time. (Sorry I’m an internet addict lol)
Basically just “daydreaming” or watching mental cinema.
The goal is to fall asleep, so doing anything would be counter productive.
I’m a night owl; I’m wide awake and super productive all night. During the day, I’m kind of sluggish and unproductive.
It’s apparently a genetic trait. I took a DNA test about a decade ago and paid to have my genetic data matched up with current research into specific genes. Turns out I have a gene associated with people who stay up most of the night. My mother and grandmother are the same; they usually don’t go to bed until after 3 AM most nights. So it’s definitely a genetic quirk and not necessarily a choice.
I spent 20 years in the US military, which required me to get up at ungodly early hours of the morning every work day. I was miserable for those 2 decades. Every day off, I slept in until close to noon just to feel rested again. Every work night, it was a struggle to go to bed at a reasonable time and shut my brain down so I could wake up ready for another day at work.
I have ADHD, so getting my brain to be quiet so I could sleep has always been a challenge. When I retired from the military, I fully retired. No more work for me; my pension and benefits cover my basic needs and that’s good enough for me. Now I sleep when I’m tired and get up when I’m awake, no matter what time of the day it is.
I think, because of my ADHD, I prefer the nighttime because it’s dark and quiet. No distractions, no noises, no people. I can just focus on what I need to get done. During the day, the world is filled with distractions and I can’t focus on anything.
It’s currently 6 AM here. I’ve been up all night long and I’m actually going to stay up as late as I can today. Every once in a while, my sleep schedule gets flipped so drastically that I end up sleeping all day and being awake all night. Which is fine, except that since COVID, most places aren’t open all night anymore. Not even Walmart or McDonald’s. So I can’t be productive with anything outside of my house.
So I reset my sleep schedule by staying up as long as I can the next day. Eventually I’ll crash and sleep most of the night through. Then I’ll be awake the next day and have plenty of business hours in my day to get stuff done.
Honestly, I need days to be about 26-28 hours long. Every single day, I stay up just a little bit later because I’m not tired yet, and that’s how my schedule eventually flips completely. If I could just be tired at the same time every night, I could maintain a solid schedule. I’m married, so I have to consider my wife’s schedule too. She gets lonely if I’m sleeping all day.
I spent 20 years in the US military
Now I’m curious, how accurate are movie portrayals of the military? Do higher officers yell at you all the time? Do fellow soldiers harass you? (Personally, me as an Asian American, I’m terrified of the military, especially the discrimination aspects, it’s why I won’t voluntary go there for no reasons lol) Did you ever get PTSD from it? Ever actually been in combat, or was it just during peacetime?
They are not very accurate. You’re more likely to get yelled at by a NCO(non commissioned officer) than by an officer on a day to day basis. Most officers are like middle managers until you hit the O-5 to O-6 rank. Officers give out orders, NCOs carryout orders using junior enlisted personnel. Most harassment stops outside of basic/advanced training, unless someone in your unit gets in trouble and then they might do a mass punishment where everyone is cleaning the barracks on a Friday night or over the weekend. I’m white, so I can’t speak much to the discrimination part, other than it didn’t happen much in the jobs that I was in. I’m positive it happens, but it didn’t happen out in the open when I was in. Obviously the current administration for the US government is changing that a bit. I can’t speak for the person you asked the question to, but I had two combat deployments and two trips to South Korea, with a solid bit of PTSD from the deployments.
I was in the Navy and I can corroborate this. I’ll add to it that a lot of our teachers at A school were O-1 to O-3 (Ensign to Lieutenant) and they were pretty cool. We used to mess with them from time to time when they left the building by lining up and making them salute all the way to the parking lot. They were good sports.
What do I do during this time? I lie in bed with my eyes closed and try to fall asleep. I get up every half hour to hour and have a glass of water in the dark or something like that.
Do people mean ‘i don’t want to go to bed’ when they say they can’t sleep?
Anxiety. I can’t get out of my head. Thoughts spiral. And when I’m lying in bed with everything quiet it’s hard to shut it all up. Sometimes I can’t fall asleep. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night. I’ll try to thirty minutes to an hour before giving up. Then I’ll sit on my phone or go downstairs and watch tv. Eventually if I get tired enough I’ll go back to sleep. Otherwise I’ll wait until it’s time to get ready for the day.
