Fell asleep while it was still light out, woke up while it was still light out: You are an effortlessly perfect person. You do things like read in magazines that it’s optimally healthy to drink a small cup of coffee right before taking a fifteen-minute nap, decide to start doing this, and then actually start doing this. There is nothing more comforting than falling asleep while the world hums busily around you and waking up to find things in the same state. You haven’t missed anything. Life is ready to embrace you back into itself. Between the application of your will and reality there is no barrier. What you want to do, you do. No despair.
Fell asleep while it was still light out, woke up after dark: Your body is mocking the natural order of things. The world turned itself off while you were sleeping, and you missed it. Everyone has forgotten you. You missed your last stab at seeing daylight, and every day is finite, and your life is never going to get any longer than it is right now. Enormous despair.
Fell asleep while it was dark out, woke up when it was still dark out: Something is very wrong. You are almost certainly hungover or ill. The sun has hidden her face from you. Time is no longer particularly meaningful, or never was, although there is still a chance you can cobble together a solid night’s sleep out of this. Moderate despair.
Fell asleep while it was dark out, woke up when it was light out: This sounds like a regular night’s sleep, but isn’t. This is the kind of nap that happens after you spend all night jolting awake with a heart that moves too quickly for its body. It’s an obscene parody of the order of true sleep. You wake up dizzy and ashen-brained, and you know there’s no way you’re going to make it through the entire day without another nap, which means that come the night, you’re not going to get a regular eight hours’ sleep, which means you’ll be passing in and out of consciousness in fits and starts for the foreseeable future, clutching at a circadian rhythm that constantly escapes your grasp. Maximimum despair.
I feel like having a newborn child at home is just being constantly between one of these states. Though unfortunately, usually the last two. My kids are bigger now, but I still occasionally wake up in the night and basically experience sleep-related PTSD.
That first two weeks was the WORST. I never knew what day it was, what time it was, and sometimes didn’t even know if it was day or night. Feedings every two hours was hell on earth. Like, why did we do this to our lives? We have made a huge mistake and they won’t take her back hell on earth. She is starting to sleep longer now, but I swear the best night of sleep I ever had in my life was a 4 hour nap from 8 p.m. to midnight, the first time she let me sleep longer than 1-2 hours at a time.
And despite all the jokes about newborns and sleep, no one really prepares you for this! “Put the baby down on her back on a separate sleeping surface” sound so reasonable until you have a 2-day-old (or a 2-week-old or even a 2-month-old…) and then you just read the recommendations and laugh-cry.
I mean, it gets better, but man is sleep deprivation brutal.
And then falling asleep with the baby in your arms because you haven’t slept for over 20 hours, and waking up in a panic convinced you’ve smothered or dropped her.
This is so true that reading it triggered my sleep-related PTSD.
I don’t have a child but I still have some kind of sleep-related PTSD. I stayed up for three days straight once, during a huge anxiety meltdown, and only fell asleep after I called 911 and the paramedics assured me that I was not, in fact, dying. Now if I’m up too late past my bedtime the normal tired feelings can send me straight into “this is how it starts, this is HOW I DIE” territory. I don’t even like hearing about other people’s sleeplessness, it makes me nervous.
Oh man I am glad this thread is here. My partner would be happy to be nocturnal. I tried to explain to him how I don’t like to stay up too late, or go outside after it’s dark, because it makes me feel really dysphoric. He did not at all understand what I meant.
I realise now that it’s because some of the worst, most anxious and depressed times of my life involved sleeplessness and that sense of dislocation it brings when the rest of the world has abandoned you into sleep, and you want desperately to join them but it seems impossible, and even a whiff of it now kind of freaks me out.
This is exactly it. I went through a major depressive episode one winter a few years back and I felt like I didn’t see the sun for 6 months and was completely unmoored from all human schedules. When my schedule gets off now I feel like I’m looking back into that abyss.
We sleep-trained at 14 months and it was great! Until 2.5 years. Then the sleep training just vanished with the time change (and didn’t come back with the recent time change) and the now-3 year old terrorizes us nightly. Why do people have children?
The time change is evil and should be destroyed with fire.
At our house, we’re experiencing the 20-month sleep regression, which I believe comes between the 19-month sleep-tastrophe and the 21-month wakey-wakies.
As I understand it, it’s 0 to 12 year old FOMO and then they sleep until noon (but apparently you’re responsible for getting them to school still?)
YES you spend half their childhood wishing they’d go to sleep and the other half wishing they’d wake up!
I don’t want to hear this. My youngest is nearly two and I REALLY want to believe that she will soon morph into the 12 hours a night angel that only exists in sleep training books.
It can happen! My child was a terrible sleeper – awake crying three times a night, only soothed by nursing, you know the drill – until she was nearly two and then INSTANTLY, like unto a miracle, transformed into a child who you just had to put into bed and leave until the next morning. She genuinely went from terrible on a Wednesday night to a great sleeper on the Thursday night. I wish this for you also.
The worst part for me was the constant anxiety of night approaching and not knowing if/when I’d be sleeping at all.
Yes this! With my first, I dreaded going to bed, because it felt like a mockery of everything that night stood for (ie sleep).
Thankfully my second is a much more sensible sleeper. But man, those are hours (and hours and hours) of my life that I’ll never get back.
YES!
I still dread this when I’m sick, and I’ve slept all day and then I either can’t sleep or have faded, restless sleep. It feels so grim, as soon as the sun sets i start fretting about it.
I was very sleep deprived with my son. Once I arranged for my mom to watch him so I could take a nap, and then I laid in bed with my eyes open, tears leaking out, thinking “They’re coming back in 3 hours. They’re coming back in 2 hours and 50 minutes. They’re coming back in 2.5 hours.” It was the worst feeling ever. I think I finally told them to come back home so I could try again later.
Trying to sleep when you desperately need to, but can’t, but have a time limit, is AWFUL.
According to this, I’m perfect.
Me too! Really i have just learned the hard way that long naps destroy me. I don’t do that coffee trick, though, I should try that coffee trick.
You monster.
I assume it’s the jealousy inside you that’s speaking.
Just my innate awareness of sleep witches.
Or jealousy. It’s one of those two things.
This used to be me. And now I basically can never nap anymore. It turns out it was a skill! I didn’t practice it enough! I’m sorry! Can I have a do over??
The last one resonates but I also have another napping style which can be described as “Lie down when it’s light out (because you did not get a full night’s sleep, because your child is possessed by demons when the moon is up) and phase between lucid dozing and focusing on your breathing to avoid your hampster wheel brain, getting up an hour later without having fully slept but at least calmer.”
OMG what is WITH all those demons possessing children at night when the sleeping and/or leaving me alone should occur? Not cool, guys. Not cool.
Also, yes. I don’t nap so much as lie quietly and count backwards from 10 over and over so I won’t spiral out of control thinking of the eight million things I should be doing but am too tired to deal with. Occasionally I lose consciousness briefly and it is so lovely.
This is why I just prefer to never actually wake up. Everything is just different shades of napping.
I would actually spend money on a book called 50 Shades of Napping, which would be comprised of different passages describing people falling asleep. Peacefully, of course–nobody gets knocked out or has narcolepsy or anything like that.
The dark dark thing is also applicable if you live somewhere northern enough that the sun sets at 4 pm and you desperately need a nap when you get home from work but get all messed up anyway.
*waves from above 50 degrees north latitude*
Yup, this.
the worst thing in the world is those couple months when any kind of 9-5 indoor job means the only way you’ll ever see the sun is if you cut out on your lunch break
“Fell asleep while it was dark out, woke up when it was still dark out”
The winter solstice is a myth. Spring is a myth. Summer is a myth. You will never see the sun again. The sun is a myth.
–every Canadian ever, after mid-December
Followed by: Hey, it’s April and the sun is finally coming out–wait, is that snow? Stupid clouds are blocking out the sun…
I went to college in Canada, and people wondered why I didn’t want to stay after graduation.
4 Canadian winters (as a person prone to depression) were sufficient, thank you.
Right now it’s light when I wake up, that helps with waking up! And it’s still somewhat light when I leave work! But it’s dark when I get home. I started deploying my SAD lamp this week. And I’m pretending that 2016 being a leap year means we’re going to leap right over February, that month won’t even exist.
Ugh, yes. 🙁
The hands down worst part about winter in Montreal is not the cold, but the unceasing greyness. Even when it’s those five minutes between sunrise and sunset, it’s cloudy, damp, and grey. Awful awful awful.
On the flip side, we in Saskatchewan actually might get sun for those five minutes, but it’s usually accompanied by temperatures that have to be reported in degrees Kelvin so.
Are you suuuuuure you’re in Montreal? Because I’m in Seattle and I’m preeeetty sure you just described my city.
When I started working at Starbucks, they had me on mostly opening shifts. This meant that I would get up at 4, work until 1, then go home and fall asleep, waking up at 5 or so when it was pitch dark. I spent a lot of time being very, very confused.
When I am president my first act will be to abolish daylight savings time. Then I’ll pass a stern resolution admonishing the earth to stop tilting in such a way that I have to experience winter.
I will vote for you if you abolish *regular* time and stay on daylight savings instead.
I am totally on board for not switching twice a year, but I like having more light in the evenings. I hate mornings no matter whether it’s light or dark, so that part doesn’t matter to me.
Same. I LOVE daylight savings because it gets things more in line with where the actual daylight hours are. The two weeks before each change I find myself increasingly disoriented and strange.
Holy shit, I’m 26 years old and only now do I learn that DST is the summer one, not the other way around?
My spouse doesn’t believe me, but unless I am hungover, napping invariably makes me feel 1000% worse than when I started out. He is capable of taking hour-long naps and truly feeling rested afterwards, whereas I simply feel like hot garbage. I’m not sure if I’m envious of him, or if I am simply okay with my state of non-napping. Both, probably.
Exactly! I’d rather just either go to bed early or sleep in a little later, and get that full, delicious, continuous sleep, than that disjointed NAP HANGOVER.
I wish I could get myself to sleep earlier, but it never works out that way.
If I’m really sleepy after work, and I just power through it, I don’t end up getting tired earlier. I end up going to sleep at the same time as always (or possibly later), because in the the process of keeping myself from falling asleep at 6, I’ve done too good a job of waking myself up so I have to stay up watching Youtube videos until my brain is ready to slow down.
So for me, taking a nap if I’m tired is better, even if I get a slight nap headache, because I at least catch up on some of the sleep. Although this does lead to moderate-to-enormous despair on occasion. *le sigh*
This. This is my whole life. If I go to bed before I”m tired enough to sleep, I can’t sleep for hours. So I force myself to stay awake, and then I get stuck in that mode. And my getting up time is pretty set in stone, because of logistics.
My boyfriend just passes out whenever he decides it’s time to sleep and it’s RUDE is what it is.
same
also, I have a hard enough time sleeping at night without wasting precious sleep-minutes in the mid-afternoon
I am only OK with napping when I have been on a transatlantic flight, because sometimes I just really *need* to. Also on trains to or from work, because I’m only human damn it.
This was me until I had a baby last month. Turns out, naps only work for me if I am deeply, pathologically sleep deprived. Then they’re great! Or at least better than no naps.
I was amazed to discover that other people had no idea what a Nap Headache was, and, in fact, didn’t get them at all.
I have to be in really dire straits before a Nap Headache is the better alternative…
Augh! Nap Headaches are truly the worst. What I would have given to have an alternate, Nap Headache-free body.
What is it like to just fall asleep and wake up feeling refreshed, with no pounding headache preventing you from working the rest of the night? Tell me, O my Napping Sistren! (and occasional brethren, I suppose. really any -en!)
See, I can do this – it’s great! It’s a miracle! It makes you feel blessed and chosen!
But increasingly I wake up from real-sleep in the morning with the Nap Headache. It is a cruel curse and I want to speak to a manager about it.
Try the uber-short, like 10 minute nap. DO NOT take an hour-long nap because that will totally mess you up metabolically and indeed you will question the very reason for your existence. It’s like a refreshing sip of water versus chugging a full two liters.
man it’s one thing to arrange to go to sleep sooner or later, you can do that when you’re awake, but when I fall asleep ain’t nothing short of gunfire gonna wake me up before I’m good and ready to wake up. even then probably just roll over and stuff a pillow over my ears if I already know it’s coming and isn’t gonna hit me.
Last January 9 police cars raced past my house on their way to intercept a guy who had led another group of police on a high-speed chase across town. The entire thing ended two blocks away when they dropped those tire-puncturing strips on the road and the guy tried (and failed) to get away on foot, and somehow I slept through the entire damn thing.
Whereas I wake up if the guy across the road pulls out of his driveway.
There should be a way to average this out.
Anyone who can fall asleep within 10 minutes of lying down, much less do it so quickly that they efficiently plan a 10-minute nap is practicing outright witchcraft and I wish to become their apprentice.
I am very good at deciding it is now time to sleep and then falling asleep within five minutes (now using the term “sleep witch”, thank you) and my husband is terrible (let’s call him a sleep muggle). He describes it as struggling to change states. He’s developed a lot of a “sleep hygiene” things that have helped him, notably never getting into bed other than for sleep or sex, blackout curtains, expensive pillows that he travels with, and always playing white noise right before he’s ready to sleep. Rituals and strict environment help a lot and mean he can nap without it causing more problems than it solves. If you have the resources to only use your bedroom for sleeping I highly recommend it, it’s been a huge help.
*sleep witch secret handshake*
May I send my husband to you for training? He eschews routines of any kind and thus believes (as near as I can tell) that sleep hygiene is something that I made up to explain my occult powers.
Haha, the breaking point for mine was that part of his job involves two full weeks of the year where his schedule starts way earlier than normal and the days are long. He went with my suggestion to start prepping himself with a really strict routine leading up to it so he wouldn’t be completely devastated at the end like he had been the previous year. While he’s not as strict the rest of the year it definitely got him to start investing in some long term habits.
In the spirit of Toastie misandry, I suggest finding something to annually break your husband’s body and mind, then emphasize sleep habits as the way to put him back together.
I am the muggle and my partner the witch in this situation. I have always been a poor sleeper – takes me ages to fall asleep and then if I’m woken up for any reason, I am awake and can’t go back to sleep for ages.
I actually don’t have trouble falling asleep at night – IF I can stick to all these sleep hygiene things. The most important ones are, having a routine (brushing teeth and changing is enough for me), no doing anything in the bed, not even sitting on it and reading, for at least three hours before bed (it uses the bed up. No I can’t explain this, it just feels used up, ok?) and not, under ANY circumstances, going to bed before I feel sleepy. If I do go to bed before I am sleepy enough to fall asleep in ten minutes, I will be up half the night. I foolishly did this last night and it was terrible. Much better to stay up another two hours and then sleep what’s left of the night through.
None of this works for napping, though. The only way I can nap these days is to bribe either my cat or my partner to come snuggle with me, and become trapped in such a way I will disturb them if I move, so that I am FORCED to relax enough. Then sometimes I can nap for a half hour or so, if i’m lucky.
SHORT NAPS ARE IMPOSSIBLE
Right???
I tend to doubt that short naps are actually sleeping, and I look side-eyed at my dad every time he claims to be doing it.
Once I’m asleep, I’m out for 3-4 hours, provided something doesn’t wake me up prematurely (and if you do, it is hell on earth for both of us). Unless it’s properly night time, in which case my brain doesn’t set the little alarm and I can sleep 8-12 hours.
My problem is that I will fall asleep within 10 minutes, and I will wake up for that 20 minute alarm I set, but I cannot get up because the mistress of sleep has thoroughly enchanted me and thus I turn off the alarm and go back to sleep.
The only nap I can do now is a ‘nap’, where I rest for a half an hour, fall asleep briefly for like one minute, startle myself awake and now we’re done.
At my work I get several 20-minute breaks a day. When desperate, I can use these to… lie down and close my eyes, entering a state in which I am awake and aware enough to keep track of the time, but nothing else. It is not sleep – it isn’t even really a nap – but it helps, somehow.
An actual nap is guaranteed to give me a headache.
I like to think of that as entering standby mode.
Ooh, I like that.
Ditto. Waking up is the worst thing ever. Why would I want to do that to myself more than once a day?
Waking up only to roll over and go back to sleep, however, is the most amazing feeling. Sometimes on my days off, I’ll set an alarm for 6:30 just to enjoy the feeling of relaxing back into my sheets after the momentary panic.
See, if I do that, I get a headache. You are a Sleep Witch.
If I do that for too long, I get a headache. If I do it well before I’d need to get up anyway, it’s heaven.
Somehow, on days I need to get up, I could EASILY go back to sleep (and sometimes do, by accident). On days I don’t need to get up, if the alarm goes off, I am now 200% awake.
If I manage to nap for 15-30 min I feel great, any longer and I feel terrible.
I was like this, but now my cat, who is a sleep witch, sometimes puts me to sleep in the middle of the day and I have a little nap and wake up feeling fine.
Other than that, there will be no napping. But it sure was a relief to find that the particular variety of sleep she induces is actually positive even in midafternoon, because she is a very sleep-inducing sort of cat. Much more so than other cats I’ve lived with, or especially than her sister.
Napping with a cat is one of life’s great joys.
What’s the category for “making yourself comfortable with tea / knitting / a book for JUST ten minutes, only to be ambushed by a warm, cuddly cat, and then waking up three hours later with no memory what happened, and also you missed your chance to go get groceries, and now you’ll go hungry the rest of the weekend”?
That’s my category. If I try to nap, it never happens. If I just want to read for a little bit on the couch with a blanket, I pass out for who knows how long.
Also whats the category for I really want to watch this movie / TV show, oops I just missed the whole middle of it.
This is why they invented grocery delivery. You never have to move the cat.
Hoo boy. I spent a semester in Jerusalem, where everything shuts down from Friday afternoon to Saturday night. Every Friday I would say “I’m going to go to the market before everything closes so I will have food for tomorrow.” And every Friday afternoon, I would take a “quick nap” and wake up at 8 pm hungry, in maximum despair, and with no way to get food.
Oh god. I would starve in this city, I abolutely have to rely on last-minute Saturday evening grocery trips.
Had to seriously cut down on my napping because of #2 — somehow, in college, it was fine, because I stayed up until 4 AM, I guess. But now, I very much feel the “You missed your last stab at seeing daylight, and every day is finite, and your life is never going to get any longer than it is right now. Enormous despair.”
Glad I’m not the only one with nap-related depression.
haha. For me, #2 was NOT fine in college because I would immediately think I had slept 24 hours and had therefore not handed in that assignment on time oh no my life is done that’s it.
Unless I’m super sick I cannot nap. It takes me upwards of an hour to even start to fall asleep. And unless it’s actually night time I just can’t lay still long enough. And even then it’s a struggle. I’m jealous of anyone who can fall asleep effortlessly.
I have friends who can fall asleep at pretty much any given moment. Even mid-conversation. I envy them.
I too have to be either very sick to be able to nap, or deeply sleep deprived. It takes me forever to fall asleep, even if I take a benadryl or something.
My sister is like that. She once fell asleep on the ferry to Staten Island and her friends almost left her behind because they didn’t notice and she didn’t wake up.
They didn’t notice? Where were they in relation to your sister? I’m presuming they were sitting next to each other. Is she normally really quiet?
Good friends and she’s pretty loud! No idea, really. It was several years ago and they all laugh about it now, mostly when she uses it as a bargaining chip to get her way. “You guys almost left me on the ferry, so…”
I can fall asleep pretty easily. My cousins make fun of me because I fell asleep sitting down while visiting a museum in Italy. But it’s not fair – time difference!
I will also admit to falling asleep in movies, on subways, on airplanes just as they are taking off…
I need a complex system of pillows, white noise, well-timed bathroom breaks, and so on to even think about falling asleep. I have a very long overnight flight coming up and I’m freaking out about it a little, because experience has proven that there is no way in hell that I will be sleeping at all.
Have you tried a book on tape? I never quit fall asleep on flights but books on tape tend to put me into a half asleep trance that is definitely better than full on awake.
That’s all I do on airplanes and it has never worked!
Oh man. The amount of time I spend thinking about whether I’ve timed it well enough so that I’m not too thirsty to sleep, but I’m also not going to wake up at 3am to pee and then not be able to sleep….
I find books on tape don’t work for me – the only thing that works is having classical music, etc, that is instrumental but also not too many peaks and troughs. Put that on, and I get the sleep trance thing. Sometimes.
When I had a lot of insomnia as a child, my parents tried story tapes and relaxation tapes, but they didn’t work for me at all – having something to focus on just kept my brain even more awake.
I can only fall asleep effortlessly at times when it’s completely inappropriate for me to be falling asleep. Early evening, 5 a.m after an all-nighter when I had class at 9, in a six-person class where we all sit around a table so it’s NOT LIKE THEY DON’T NOTICE YOU’RE SLEEPING, FEMAELSTROM, you name it.
Actual night time, time for sleep? It takes 30+ minutes. Is this brain under warranty? I really need a new one.
I have taken one, maybe two good naps in my life. The rest are horrible and I avoid them as much as possible.
The fourth one happened to me a few nights ago. I settled in for a normal sleep, then woke up at 3 or 4 and decided it was time for it to be light out and turned on the harsh fluorescent light on my nightstand. I lay like that, eyes burning, for maybe 5 minutes before I woke up, startled, and turned my light back off and tried to fall asleep for 2-3 more precious hours, during which I had murder nightmares. This was quite a week to swear off work coffee.
I like the new indicators for actual tags and joke tags!
(Until the Pip (age 4) learns to put himself back to sleep at night without calling for me, I really really really do not want to talk about sleep.)
I am disheartedn to hear you are still dealing with that at 4. I had hoped it would get better after 3. Though I suppose I enacted the same disheartening on the baby-havers.
Well, to be fair, we have just started making a concerted effort on improving his sleep habits, so it’s possible if we tried sooner then it would have improved sooner.
And that’s all I want to say about that.
what if you wake up when it’s a different dark out, you began intending to nap but now you’ve Rip Van Winkled through at least an entire day (Was it just one day? Can you ever really be sure? The linear sequence of one day following another no longer holds meaning; time has passed you by and you are forever lost in the past, looking in on the waking world but no part of it, like a ghost)
You look at the clock, and it says something unhelpful like “6:00”. Both of those are dark now. And what is the date? What was the date when you fell asleep? What is the year? Who can say.
This is my biggest fear, probably, except centipedes and responsibility.
One time I slept from “light” to “different light”! It was finals week, I barely slept for four days. Finished all my exams, showered, went to then-boyfriend’s house and said “let’s go out and celebrate after I take a quick nap,” made him give me a back rub, and then fell asleep from 5 pm (it was May) until 1 pm the next day. Bf told me I woke up to eat the food he brought me but I don’t remember that happening so I think I managed to eat in my sleep. It was horrible, but also kind of amazing.
I did the last one last night. On nights when I get even less sleep, or no sleep, I will usually nap the next day and it is the most amazing sleep I get, almost good enough to make the insomnia worth it. Not quite, but almost.
Oh lord. I used to be able to nap all the time. In college, I would nap during each class break. Sitting up in a chair, even. Just come back to my room, sit down, nap for 15-30 minutes, then wake up and run to class.
After graduation, once my anxiety got worse and after I started having panic attacks, I can still lay down to nap and fall asleep within minutes, but I jolt awake, often with a yell, and wake up feeling like I’ve never seen a wink of sleep in my life. Unless I am well and truly exhausted, such as after my half-marathon or running a charity event. In that case, I can nap, but really it’s just a daytime sleep because it will be no less than a couple of hours.
I miss my days of half-hour power naps.
Fell asleep while it was still light out, woke up while it was still light out: You are an effortlessly perfect person.
Daily napper, here. I keep a camp mat, blankets, and pillows in my office.
Same. Napping is my superpower.
I find that my mood upon waking up from a nap is less determined by whether it is light or dark out for the two stages, but whether I managed to turn my bedroom light off before drifting off to sleep (whether it was because I was drunk and passed out, or because I was tired and drifting off while reading). If I wake up with the light off, I’m at least somewhat at peace. If I wake up with the light on, not only does it hurt my eyes but I am forced to confront that I stupidly conked out without making some (or any) of the appropriate sleep preparations.
Oh, yes, those aggravating naps that occur between 1 and 3 am with my contacts in, all my clothes on, and the light on. A very grumpy wake-up experience.
I HATE it when I’m tired and comfortable enough to fall asleep, but I know I have to do something first (turn off light, take off bra, etc) or I’ll wake up weird. So then I finally do the thing, and then I’m not sleepy enough, but now the lights are off and so’s my bra and UGH.
I have created an account to leave my very first ever Toast comment to share my professional napping tips! It’s all about the pre- and post-nap. The ratio should be about 1:2:1 (is that how ratios work?? Can you have three things??).
Say you’ve got an hour to spend napping. Get into the exact position you’ll be napping in. Get everything arranged, put anything you might need within reach, etc. Set an alarm for 45 minutes in the future. Now spend 15 minutes reading, browsing your phone, watching one of those shows with half-length episodes, etc. Do not pressure yourself to fall asleep immediately. Let it creep in naturally. Sleep for 30 minutes until your alarm goes off. WHEN YOU AWAKEN STAY WHERE YOU ARE. Under no circumstances should you attempt to leap out of bed after a nap or expect to feel immediately refreshed. This step is called post-nap and it is the most important. Continue lying in nap position but don’t fall back asleep. Check your phone to see what you missed in the world of facebook in the past half an hour. Stretch languidly. Eat the snack that your pre-nap self left out for you, maybe. Allow 15 minutes for this slow reentry into life, then calmly arise and go back to your day.
Please attempt this method and let me know how it works out for you. Also, never nap after 7pm.
I would. But I have cats. They ruin _everything_, including naps.
That is sad. One of my dog’s best traits is that she loves naps, and when I curl up and pull a blanket over me, she gets very excited, snuggles in close, and then encourages me towards slumber by immediately falling asleep.
O, my cat is excited for naps, and likes to nap with me. She just also likes to knead in her sleep, and since she prefers to sleep in an armpit, her claws are generally kneading my eyes.
Small mercies: she is Gentleman X’s cat, and goes preferentially for his armpit when he is home.
See this would just fill me with anxiety at the imminent timer and I wouldn’t be able to fall asleep until like five minutes before it goes off. Sigh.
It’s true, the alarm aspect is a real hindrance, but it’s there to prevent accidental 6 hour naps (or as I call them, Sleeps).
“sleeps” yes, I’ve had naps that turn into sleeps so often… and then i end up with an Anti-Nap when I am awake for a nap-amount-of-time in wee hours and fall back asleep pretty quickly, just like they used to do in olden times before clock radios and light pollution that encouraged us to sleep through the night.
Often it goes like this:
6pm – I am a sleepy Keri and can’t even keep awake for dinner
6:30pm – nap starts!
11pm – nap has gradually ended and i am wide awake, and also hungry
Midnight – my hungries can’t be ignored, time for a peanut butter sandwich and maybe a cup of tea
1am – why aren’t my eyes staying open there is things to do because i slept through them
1:30am – anti-nap ends
7:45am – no fuck you it’s too early for the alarm to be waking me up
I try not to let my anti-nap extend beyond 3am, or else the sleep time before my alarm is too short for a proper REM cycle, which is I think why my usual naps run 3-4hours unless interrupted.
My ideal sleep cycle is:
– an hour after the sun goes down, sleep (unfortunately in winter this starts before I leave work, which is awkward)
– sleep for about four hours
– wake up. Do some stuff that requires no brain (dishes etc would be perfect except it would wake other people)
– two hours after that, go back to sleep. Sleep until just before dawn. Wake up.
When left to my own devices, I do this naturally. Unfortunately it does not really work for most fo the year, with 9-5 work, and also now I live with a Teen, who slams doors, which makes sleep before, say 10pm really difficult. The other good/bad is that in summer I need only the sleep I can get between dusk and dawn, so I get SO MUCH DONE but in winter I need that same amount, which is a much larger amount, and means I am like 4 hours a day behind on sleep, constantly. It’s terrible.
I downloaded that nap tracker thing that’s supposed to know when you fall asleep, by some magic, and start the timer now. But these days the only way I nap is by accinapping and ofc I forget to set the timer, or even that it exists, so I cannot report back.
This is very good.
“Continue lying in nap position but don’t fall back asleep.”
ahahahahahahhaha
It’s a very delicate balance
I completely agree with this. In fact, this is the only way for me to do ANYTHING, not just napping.
@rilo_cryley, this is close to my strategy except that cuddling up with my phone is likely to lead to spending the whole 45 minutes on the internet. So I have to very carefully limit my unwinding activity to five minutes and leave the rest of the pre-nap for getting comfortable. Luckily, I’m usually able to get to a restful state (if not exactly sleep) by closing my eyes and visualizing comforting things.
fell asleep in the light, woke up in the half-light, unable to determine if it is 5 a.m or 5 p.m.—paralyzing existential terror, you will never feel rest again, you will never feel love, you will never be more than a nauseated, quaking shell.
that’s me
how could you possibly know what my life was like during the months I was unemployed
In college my roommate woke from a nap at 7 p.m.
Roommate (groggily): “What time is it?”
Me: “Seven.”
Roommate: “…In the MORNING?!”
Me: “No, at night.”
Roommate: “Oh.” *pause* “I’m confused.”
Then she went back to sleep.
I cannot nap unless I am desperately ill, no matter how tired or bored I am. If I do nap, I inevitably feel like death for half an hour or more.
That being said, once I took a nap at 6pm and woke up at 10 the next morning, thanks to a combination of deep depression, undiagnosed diabetes, and entirely too many carbs. That’s probably the longest single stretch of sleep I’ve ever had in my life, and that includes the month I had mono when I was 26 (I KNOW), being an infant, and the night after the time I was awake for 48 hours straight.
My high school boyfriend once fell asleep in the early evening, woke up at 7:30 that night, got up, showered, dressed, and walked out the door because he thought it was 7:30am and he had to go to school.
I did that once! In my defense, I’d just gotten back from a week at camp, so I was all wore out.
I did this once in high school. Came downstairs to find my mom had saved my dinner for me, and thought it was very mean of her to make me eat leftovers for breakfast until I realized it was 7 at night, not 7 the next morning.
I used to set my alarm to music, which would get incorporated into my dream until I realized it was the alarm and woke myself up. Once, I dreamed music, got up, made a pot of coffee, took a shower, and realized it was 330 am.
Now my alarm is set to buzzer.
Tried to fall asleep while it was light out or dark out and failed. You just spent 45 minutes being acutely aware of both your bone-deep fatigue and of the irrepressible, shrill whirring of your mind. Perhaps there was a pillow over your head in a futile attempt to hide from the burning light of day, perhaps you were wreathed in perfect darkness, either way your exhaustion is an aching reminder of your physical weakness and the enervating effects of aging. You will never have as much energy as when you were 19, as time is steadily sapping it from your increasingly frail mortal form. Naps are merely an exercise in allowing your mind the focus it needs to wholly conceptualize each individual grain of sand in the hourglass of your life sliding by you with a gentle, nauseating hiss. Medium despair.
[quiet sobs]
There are only 2 kinds of naps worth having:
a) you are 19. You have chosen to complete your entire undergraduate degree in Spain. You live in a small southern town. Your best friend lives down the road. You eat spectacular 6 euro menú lunches, drinking tinto de verano (one part red wine, one part lemonade) at 2pm, then have a 3 hour siesta with no alarm on the sofá in the salón. That night you go out and party till the sun comes up. Rinse and repeat.
B) (infinitely less relaxing and dreamy context 7 years later, in your childhood bedroom in freezing, grey Scotland: you magically manage to have the only refreshing 20-minute nap of your life, waking up a full minute before your alarm, stunned and grateful. You are productive and relaxed for the rest of the day and go to bed happy at midnight.
All other naps are 45 minutes of staring into the abyss with your heart pounding SO FAST – why is it so fast? All you’re doing is lying down, too tired to sleep and too lazy to get up and Do Stuff.
Anyone else get Pounding Nap Heart for no reason?
No, but I get Nap Sleep Paralysis and what I think must be Nap Adrenaline Rushes. I spend what feels like a good fifteen minutes at the end of my nap thinking I’m awake but unable to move or open my eyes. I dream, over and over again, that I’m ever so slowly sitting up, getting out of bed, trying to cross my room, but with great difficulty and through a gray haze, and then I realize I’ve never left my bed and I’m trapped. And then a wave of paralyzing prickles like a head rush goes through my whole body, crushing my chest, stopping my breath and pinning me even more firmly to the bed. When it passes, I try as hard as I can to move before the next wave hits, because if I can move so much as one finger I can break the paralysis and be awake. Sometimes I can, sometimes I can’t. What seems to help is remembering exactly what position I was lying in when I fell asleep and visualizing myself in that position, so that I know exactly where all the limbs are that I’m trying to move.
Only happens when I nap. I don’t nap a whole lot these days.
That sounds terrifying! It’s funny to read over these comments and see the minefield napping becomes in adulthood. As a child and teen, it’s all warm and cosy and restorative. It must be all the Responsibility and Drudgery of the adult world that turns it into a tide of fear and anxiety. Thank you for sharing!
I think PNH for me is a symptom of the intense Nap Guilt I feel.
Yes. Nap Guilt is real. I COULD BE ACCOMPLISHING SO MUCH./sending 3 emails that can be sent in an hour. Sigh.
It’s been so nurturing for me to find community at The Toast, in terms of thinking and reflecting and expressing, but also experiencing fear and anxiety. It really makes my heart happy every day.
Some people apparently have trouble absorbing vitamin D from particular sources – some need animal products, some can’t absorb it as well from animal products. Also because of industrial agriculture (I know I know) a lot of animal products have less Vitamin D and Omega 3 in them than used to be the case.
It’s worth asking your dr if you can get a vitamin D blood test if you’re already there. I felt the same and also spend a reasonable amount of time in the Australian sun, and yet was also drastically low on the D (heheh)
YES! I get Pounding Nap Heart all the time and, like femaelstrom, I think it’s a symptom of Wrenching Nap Guilt. I just can’t win with naps.
Hmm…where do we feel like “fell asleep on BART, woke up guiltily wondering if I drooled or snored,” fit here?
EDIT: Maybe I’m perfect because I never missed my stop due to sleeping! I DID miss it once because I was reading a really good book, though.
I am an unapologetic bus sleeper, and have also never missed my stop due to sleeping. I AM fairly certain I snored at least once though, because I suddenly woke to see a couple of college kids looking at me giggling.
Well, how much despair do you feel upon waking?
One time I got drunk and went to Five Guys just before an overnight Greyhound ride (“one time” who am I kidding), and I like to think my seatmate remembers me as “the drunk lady holding a cheeseburger who kept falling asleep and drooling on me.”
You forgot: Lie down because you keep nodding off at everything you try to do. The moment your head hits the pillow, brain starts its endless why is my life spiral. Stay in bed, feeling more and more awake with each passing minute, every sound in your house startling your nerves. Give up, get up, nod off five minutes into task you started because obviously you are not napping today. Lie down, brain starts racing. Repeat no fewer than three times. Spend rest of day in exhaustion fueled state of disgruntledness. Stay up until 4 AM just out of spite, or possibly because of all that coffee you drank trying to make it through dinner without face planting into your chicken parm.
I think it’s time for “Comments Left On Every Sleep Article Ever.”
Where do we classify “nap from 4pm to 6pm, followed by complete and utter wakefulness until 6am the following morning”?
I would like to see more posts with the tag “sleave is not misspelled it is from Shakespeare.” <3 This could be an excellent Toast writing challenge.
The worst is when thou nappest in public and wakest up to find thou hast drooled on thy sleave.
Actually, my worst nap is when I sleep really late on the weekend, eat breakfast, and “need” a nap two hours later.
But, oh, how I crave naps. I daydream about naps. I feel envious of my napping cats.
I wish I slept like a Sim.
But some take forever to get going in the morning! Too real.
On the kitchen floor because the cat was blocking the doorway?
What if I fell asleep when it was light out, then woke up while it was light out, but in between there was darkness?
“You missed your last stab at seeing daylight, and every day is finite, and your life is never going to get any longer than it is right now. Enormous despair.”
TOO REAL. I can’t take naps without experiencing existential terror.
I spent this summer researching and writing my MA dissertation, and the following cycle happened an awful lot:
– Do work in bed, because you do not have a comfortable desk to work at at home
– Feel sleepy. Convince self that you can just lie down and “rest your eyes” for a bit without falling asleep
– Fall asleep
– Wake up 1-3 hours later, disorientated and full of guilt and self-hate for wasting time
– Repeat daily
As a connoisseur of napping, this is so very, very true.
As it’s now dark here in Teh Northlands at about 4:30 and getting steadily earlier, sadly ‘dark to dark’ and ‘light to dark’ napping is inescapable, ugh ugh ugh.
And then tehre is me, who is not sleeping for a whole day, then sleeps for a whole day, hates himself, regrets, and starts over…
Lol, I’m there with you!