Apparently there’s basically no downside to waking up “naturally” to pee in the middle of the night as long as you get back to sleep right after. You naturally wake up in the parts of sleep where you’re almost awake anyway.
It's not a problem if you also remain awake for another hour or so, our ancestors did that every night but then stopped because of capitalism requiring to get awake early and have a stable routine to follow the company opening hours
So, if you frequently wake at at that hour and can't go to sleep for a while, don'5 worry, it's natural, you should go to sleep an hour early though so you still sleep 8 hours
Getting rid of visible clocks fixed this for me, and all the way to the bathroom and back so I can't get the time when I go pee. I just assume it's 12:30 and go back to bed no matter what. Unless the fucking sun is coming up around the edges, then it's just "your bones are going to hurt today."
You go to bed pretty early, like within a couple hours of sunset early, let yourself wake up naturally around midnight, stay awake doing low-key activities (sex, have a snack, read a book by candle light, talk to your bedmate if they are up, etc. basically candle-light-or-darker activities, a low-wattage warm white bulb on a dimmer does nicely, as do flickering candelabra bulbs) then around like 2-3, fall back asleep until a bit after dawn.
Thats the sleep pattern humans had, as far as we can tell, for all of history before the invention of artificial lighting (its mentioned so casually, with zero explanation, in historical documents as to just be the de facto experience), and its a pattern a lot of people naturally fall back to, but with improper timing so they don’t make it to the second sleep phase, and just end up with a dysfunctional rhythm that has them waking at 4. Or they fully fall into the pattern and feel great, like my retired aunt, but are worried because it’s “not normal”.
In my experience, "sleep experiments" are practically impossible if you live with any other humans. Your schedule kind of has to follow everyone else's, otherwise you end up lying awake in bed for hours with a eye mask and earmuffs while everyone else is stomping around lol
Humans slept twice in history because it made sense at that time. During winter, it was dark for 14 hours, which is way more sleep than what most people need. It also made sense to wake up and tend to the fire etc.
Humans in other situations, even modern hunter gatherer tribes, are very flexible with sleep. Some sleep through the night in one block, staying up later. Some wake up very early. Some take shifts or wake up multiple times during the night. It's a relatively modern concept that every person must sleep exactly 8 hours in one block; the reality is everyone's circadian rhythm is different. This was a beneficial trait for most of our history; it helped survival if a few people were awake during different times of the night.
The problem is, that we now all have clocks in our pocket, and time-based obligations. You can't go to bed at sundown, because you're probably still at work at that time, and haven't even eaten yet. You can't sleep in, because you have to get ready at 5am. If you wake up during the night, it's just a loss of sleep hours, there's no fire to tend anymore. As a society, we've also decided that sleep is a waste of time, and tried to replace it with caffeine.
I dunno what the solution is, but it's definitely a problem.
The highest functioning time of my life i did something similar to this. I was getting my MBA while finishing my senior engineering project. My engineering team wanted to meet before they went to their internships, so we were getting together at 630 am. I also had night classes that started at 6pm.
Id meet with the engineers in the morning, then crank out all my engineering work, then go to sleep around 1-2 pm and sleep til 5pm, then head to classes, and do my MBA work until about 2am then sleep til 6am.
I wasnt working constantly, i had free time and play time, but sleeping 2x a day for ~4 hours at a time was AMAZING for me. I wish I could find a way to do that again
If I wake up at that time it’s because I have to pee. Then it takes me 3 hours to get to sleep again because I start thinking of all the dumb shit I’ve done in my life and how I’ll probably never accomplish all my goals.
The trick is to achieve the perfect balance of drunk and high where you are exhausted for exactly 7 hours, but then feel ok the next morning after a few cups of coffee.
I solved this problem by simply refusing to look at the clock when I get up in the middle of the night.
Even if it means every in once in a while the alarm goes off the second I lay back down, it's still a worthwhile tradeoff to remove the anxiety of calculating in my head how much sleep I still have left to do.
I used to absolutely love this feeling until I had kids. Now if I'm waking up in the middle of the night it's mostly because one of my kids is yelling for something. So when I wake up now during the night I pray it's as late as possible, so I got more uninterrupted sleep. If I get woken up now and it's only 1am, I think this could be a long night of several interruptions
Worst feeling: its 5:30 and you have 30 minutes left which leaves you wondering for 15 minutes if you should try to get back to sleep or already get up, and when you finally give in and try to sleep again, the alarm rings
Does anyone else love when the numbers line up? If it's 12:34 and i notice it, i stare at my watch until it's 4 seconds to 12:35. In my head or sometimes outloud i say one, two, three, four, five ,six. It makes me smile everytime i catch it.
I have the same problem, and often wake up unexpectedly in the middle of the night. Sometimes I can fall back asleep quickly, sometimes I am up for a couple hours, occasionally I won't get back to sleep at all. Whenever it happens it ruins my energy and mood the following day. It started to impact my energy level to where I couldn't exercise the way I used to. I'd become fatigued so easily that I could barely make it through my routine. Sometimes I wake up with my joints and muscles feeling so sore that I could swear I was beaten with a stick while sleeping. I started gaining a lot of weight despite no changes to my diet. My mood and brain fog were the worse they've ever been. I had maybe one "good" day every month or so.
A coworker and I were sharing our gripes about getting older, and I mentioned my sleep problems and the impact to my quality of life. They had gone through the same thing years ago, and ended up being diagnosed with severe sleep apnea; they recommended I get tested for sleep apnea, too. I talked to my doctor and scheduled a sleep study; turns out I also have severe sleep apnea.
If you have any of the sleep problems like me, then I recommend you talk to your doctor about it. Here's a few things to keep in mind:
Insist on an in-lab study. Your sleep specialist may try to have you do an at-home test, but those are inaccurate and unreliable. An in-lab study will provide better data.
When you receive your results, make sure they're evaluated using the American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM) guidelines, not the insurance industry guidelines. My first sleep specialist diagnosed me with mild sleep apnea and said I didn't qualify for treatment. Poor sleep was affecting every aspect of my health and daily life, so I sought a second opinion from an independent sleep specialist who reviewed the same test results and concluded that I had severe sleep apnea; they said insurance industry guidelines underestimate the severity of most apnea patients. Getting that second opinion made a significant difference in receiving the treatment I needed.
If you do end up needing a CPAP, research which masks work best for the position and how often you turn over in your sleep.
62 Comments
Jackusflackus@lemmy.world · 124 pts · 1d
Not waking up at 234 in the morning and getting a good nights rest uninterrupted?
Rhaedas@fedia.io · 25 pts · 1d
If I wake at 2:34am, I'm late for work.
But I get OP's point, as I've woken before thinking it's almost time to get up, and see 11:00pm. Yay, back to sleep.
SorryQuick@lemmy.ca · 10 pts · 22h
Apparently there’s basically no downside to waking up “naturally” to pee in the middle of the night as long as you get back to sleep right after. You naturally wake up in the parts of sleep where you’re almost awake anyway.
Axolotl_cpp@feddit.it · 1 pts · 15h
It's not a problem if you also remain awake for another hour or so, our ancestors did that every night but then stopped because of capitalism requiring to get awake early and have a stable routine to follow the company opening hours
So, if you frequently wake at at that hour and can't go to sleep for a while, don'5 worry, it's natural, you should go to sleep an hour early though so you still sleep 8 hours
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 20h
Staying up till 234, then going to sleep never because you miss having eight sides
ExtraMedicated@lemmy.world · 79 pts · 1d
Yeah except I can't get back to sleep until like 5:30.
Lommy@lemmy.world · 30 pts · 1d
And then the alarm goes at 6...
turtlesareneat@piefed.ca · 3 pts · 19h
Getting rid of visible clocks fixed this for me, and all the way to the bathroom and back so I can't get the time when I go pee. I just assume it's 12:30 and go back to bed no matter what. Unless the fucking sun is coming up around the edges, then it's just "your bones are going to hurt today."
VonReposti@feddit.dk · 2 pts · 15h
The sun at 4am in a Danish summer be like: Surprise motherfucker.
Passerby6497@lemmy.world · 44 pts · 1d
I know a better one, easy: Not waking up at all and sleeping thru the night.
Trex202@lemmy.world · 14 pts · 23h
Or just not waking up at all
Passerby6497@lemmy.world · 6 pts · 23h
You'll still sleep thru the night in that case
grte@lemmy.ca · 31 pts · 1d
When I was younger this was true for me, but these days once I wake up I tend to stay awake, so this is the worst outcome in my case.
Sibshops@lemmy.myserv.one · 11 pts · 1d
Came here to say this. It's not so fun two hours later, laying in bed unable to fall back asleep.
ApathyTree@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 5 pts · 1d
I wonder if second-sleeping would help you.
You go to bed pretty early, like within a couple hours of sunset early, let yourself wake up naturally around midnight, stay awake doing low-key activities (sex, have a snack, read a book by candle light, talk to your bedmate if they are up, etc. basically candle-light-or-darker activities, a low-wattage warm white bulb on a dimmer does nicely, as do flickering candelabra bulbs) then around like 2-3, fall back asleep until a bit after dawn.
Thats the sleep pattern humans had, as far as we can tell, for all of history before the invention of artificial lighting (its mentioned so casually, with zero explanation, in historical documents as to just be the de facto experience), and its a pattern a lot of people naturally fall back to, but with improper timing so they don’t make it to the second sleep phase, and just end up with a dysfunctional rhythm that has them waking at 4. Or they fully fall into the pattern and feel great, like my retired aunt, but are worried because it’s “not normal”.
Zarobi@aussie.zone · 5 pts · 23h
In my experience, "sleep experiments" are practically impossible if you live with any other humans. Your schedule kind of has to follow everyone else's, otherwise you end up lying awake in bed for hours with a eye mask and earmuffs while everyone else is stomping around lol
Humans slept twice in history because it made sense at that time. During winter, it was dark for 14 hours, which is way more sleep than what most people need. It also made sense to wake up and tend to the fire etc.
Humans in other situations, even modern hunter gatherer tribes, are very flexible with sleep. Some sleep through the night in one block, staying up later. Some wake up very early. Some take shifts or wake up multiple times during the night. It's a relatively modern concept that every person must sleep exactly 8 hours in one block; the reality is everyone's circadian rhythm is different. This was a beneficial trait for most of our history; it helped survival if a few people were awake during different times of the night.
The problem is, that we now all have clocks in our pocket, and time-based obligations. You can't go to bed at sundown, because you're probably still at work at that time, and haven't even eaten yet. You can't sleep in, because you have to get ready at 5am. If you wake up during the night, it's just a loss of sleep hours, there's no fire to tend anymore. As a society, we've also decided that sleep is a waste of time, and tried to replace it with caffeine.
I dunno what the solution is, but it's definitely a problem.
https://www.sleepjunkie.com/history-of-sleep/
Sc00ter@lemmy.zip · 3 pts · 21h
The highest functioning time of my life i did something similar to this. I was getting my MBA while finishing my senior engineering project. My engineering team wanted to meet before they went to their internships, so we were getting together at 630 am. I also had night classes that started at 6pm.
Id meet with the engineers in the morning, then crank out all my engineering work, then go to sleep around 1-2 pm and sleep til 5pm, then head to classes, and do my MBA work until about 2am then sleep til 6am.
I wasnt working constantly, i had free time and play time, but sleeping 2x a day for ~4 hours at a time was AMAZING for me. I wish I could find a way to do that again
uberfreeza@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 1d
In middle school, I set an alarm for 1-2 in the morning just to wake up and go back to sleep.
baggachipz@sh.itjust.works · 23 pts · 1d
If I wake up at that time it’s because I have to pee. Then it takes me 3 hours to get to sleep again because I start thinking of all the dumb shit I’ve done in my life and how I’ll probably never accomplish all my goals.
AFKBRBChocolate@lemmy.ca · 10 pts · 1d
I solved part of that by not having any goals.
socsa@piefed.social · 2 pts · 1d
The trick is to achieve the perfect balance of drunk and high where you are exhausted for exactly 7 hours, but then feel ok the next morning after a few cups of coffee.
baggachipz@sh.itjust.works · 3 pts · 23h
Drinking close to bed wrecks my sleep in my old age. Doesn’t mean I don’t do it, but when I wake up I’m exhausted.
Psythik@lemmy.world · 17 pts · 20h
I solved this problem by simply refusing to look at the clock when I get up in the middle of the night.
Even if it means every in once in a while the alarm goes off the second I lay back down, it's still a worthwhile tradeoff to remove the anxiety of calculating in my head how much sleep I still have left to do.
devfuuu@lemmy.world · 17 pts · 1d
Going to sleep, sleeping so good and never waking up.
Nowadays I get more pissed when the cat starts destroying the house 1h before the first alarm screams.
mastertigurius@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 1d
Uuuuh, you might want to wake up at some point.
Apocalypteroid@lemmy.world · 8 pts · 1d
No
lichtmetzger@discuss.tchncs.de · 7 pts · 20h
In this economy?
huquad@lemmy.ml · 15 pts · 1d
Yeah except if I'm waking up at 234, it's cause my kids are up and about to ruin my morning lol
Tylerdurdon@lemmy.world · 13 pts · 10h
Waking up at 7am having slept through the entire night.
LadyButterfly@reddthat.com · 3 pts · 7h
That's just fantasy talk
Agent641@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 10h
Shift started at 6am
kingofthezyx@lemmy.zip · 12 pts · 22h
When you think you're on your last nugget/taco/whatever but you reach in the bag and actually have two more.
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 13h
i want to eat wherever it is you eat that you can discover not just one but two bonus tacos.
kingofthezyx@lemmy.zip · 2 pts · 10h
I used to smoke a lot of weed.
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 10h
you still do, you just used to, too
Leviathan@fedinsfw.app · 12 pts · 13h
The same feeling, but then realizing you don't have to get up for work at all.
Briguy@lemmy.world · 11 pts · 15h
I used to absolutely love this feeling until I had kids. Now if I'm waking up in the middle of the night it's mostly because one of my kids is yelling for something. So when I wake up now during the night I pray it's as late as possible, so I got more uninterrupted sleep. If I get woken up now and it's only 1am, I think this could be a long night of several interruptions
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 13h
we used to have a train go by at 1AM where i grew up. i miss the 1 train. the whistle would wake me, then i'd fall back asleep.
it's funny what makes you wake up. when i first moved out of town, it was silence at 1AM.
maybe i'll go camp out by the tamale factory one night. it's right by the tracks. i might sleep better.
phoenixz@lemmy.ca · 11 pts · 20h
Worst feeling: its 5:30 and you have 30 minutes left which leaves you wondering for 15 minutes if you should try to get back to sleep or already get up, and when you finally give in and try to sleep again, the alarm rings
LifeInMultipleChoice@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 20h
That's the lucky result, I would wake up 15 minutes after the alarm went off running like a maniac
melsaskca@lemmy.ca · 11 pts · 11h
I'm the opposite because I know if I wake up at 2:30am then I won't get back to sleep, and I have to work the next day.
subverted_per@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 9 pts · 1d
Literally anything not involving chronic pain or mind numbing boredom?
theuniqueone@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 9 pts · 1d
And then you got so stressed about the worry of it being 6 you cant manage to calm down enough to go back to sleep.
X@piefed.world · 2 pts · 1d
This.
bloogoose@lemmy.zip · 4 pts · 1d
Cracking my eyes open to see my wife still alive sleeping peacefully next to me.
ivanafterall@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 1d
Same. Few things better than cracking my eyes open to see bloogoose's wife still alive sleeping peacefully next to me.
bloogoose@lemmy.zip · 1 pts · 1d
My wife died in a house fire 2 years ago...
Viking_Hippie@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 4 pts · 1d
Bonus fact: there are several ways to pronounce "Maghan" and all of them are wrong.
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 13h
Kolanaki@pawb.social · 3 pts · 1d
Having a dream that you woke up and are getting ready for work, then waking up at 2:34am and seeing you can get more sleep.
Proprietary_Blend@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 1d
Not being a wage slave in a shithole, dumpster fire of a country.
I'm in the US btw.
dontbelievethis@sh.itjust.works · 3 pts · 3h
Waking up rested with all the time in the world to do whatever you want.
Entertainmeonly@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 3 pts · 1d
Does anyone else love when the numbers line up? If it's 12:34 and i notice it, i stare at my watch until it's 4 seconds to 12:35. In my head or sometimes outloud i say one, two, three, four, five ,six. It makes me smile everytime i catch it.
moncharleskey@lemmy.zip · 1 pts · 21h
Never done that one per se, but I like seeing 8:08 and 9:09 cuz drum machines.
GreenKnight23@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 15h
waking up in the middle of the night to a blowjob feels pretty fucking good. but yeah.... sleep is nice too.
peaceful_world_view@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 12h
unless you're in prison
GreenKnight23@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 8h
I'd assume that too would feel pretty good.
PattyMcB@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 47m
I guess it would depend on which of you is on the receiving end
updn@lemmy.ca · 2 pts · 1d
I keep Melatonin beside my bed so that when this glorious feeling happens, I’ll actually fall asleep
raspberry_confetti@lemmy.ml · 1 pts · 21h
Literally the best feeling in the world
ContriteErudite@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 7h
I have the same problem, and often wake up unexpectedly in the middle of the night. Sometimes I can fall back asleep quickly, sometimes I am up for a couple hours, occasionally I won't get back to sleep at all. Whenever it happens it ruins my energy and mood the following day. It started to impact my energy level to where I couldn't exercise the way I used to. I'd become fatigued so easily that I could barely make it through my routine. Sometimes I wake up with my joints and muscles feeling so sore that I could swear I was beaten with a stick while sleeping. I started gaining a lot of weight despite no changes to my diet. My mood and brain fog were the worse they've ever been. I had maybe one "good" day every month or so.
A coworker and I were sharing our gripes about getting older, and I mentioned my sleep problems and the impact to my quality of life. They had gone through the same thing years ago, and ended up being diagnosed with severe sleep apnea; they recommended I get tested for sleep apnea, too. I talked to my doctor and scheduled a sleep study; turns out I also have severe sleep apnea.
If you have any of the sleep problems like me, then I recommend you talk to your doctor about it. Here's a few things to keep in mind:
PattyMcB@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 49m
Knowing how math actually works