Sleep
 

How much do you get? What wakes you? how do you feel when you wake up?

I've become an old person. I used to go to bed at whatever am and slowly start to come round about 10 hours later (student days). Then I adapted to parent-of school-aged-kids hours -going to bed at whatever am, getting up at 6:30 woken by alarm and feeling like shit.

Now I still go to bed at whatever am (but it's smaller numbers these days) and I wake at the crack of sodding dawn (5:15). Sometimes, I can get back to sleep, often I can't. sometimes I feel crappy, but mostly I'm ready to deal with the day. I wonder what happened to the girl who could sleep through 3 alarms.... And I'm pretty damn sure 5 hours is not enough

I'm not getting enough. I'm grumpy all the time.

I need more sleep!

Of course, my answer here is probably redundant since we all know why I'm not getting enough sleep. :(

But your answer is the same as mine....

Yep well I need more sleep. lol Plus, my 5 to 7 hours is broken, so it's not quite as invigorating maybe.

eta: before becoming heavily pregnant and then mother to a newborn, I would have put myself in the 8 to 10 hour bracket and said I woke up feeling fine and ready to face the day.

I am very bad about sleeping.

"Whatever a.m." for me tends to be something crazy, like 3 or even later. Then I have to get up at 5:30 to get my daughter off to school. After she leaves I get to sleep for an hour and then at 7:30 I get up with my son and get him off to school. If I feel particularly crappy, I go back to bed for another hour or two. This is not healthy. :(

I go to bed around 10 or 11pm, stare at the ceiling (now vaulted, with a nice fan) & listen to my husband snore for two or three hours... finally nod off. Then get up around 6:30 or 7am.

I can't remember the last time I woke up and didn't feel like shit. I'm pretty sure it was in the 1990s.

I *have to* get up at 6.30 to get to work by 8. Not too bad really, except that my student habits linger and I tend to stay up 'til well after midnight.
So I've put an alarm clock in the lounge room which beeps at 10pm, and tells me it is time to go to bed. I'm normally in bed by 10.30, now that I've done that and it seems to be helping. Still, I take a long time to get to sleep, maybe an hour or so.
To wake up I bought a clever alarm clock/radio. Clever? It has TWO alarms. The radio comes on at 6.25 to wake me gently, and then the beeper sounds at 6.30 to make me get up. (EVEN CLEVERER - its a digital clock that can be adjusted either forwards OR backwards! I've been wanting that for YEARS! No more running through 23 hours and 45 minutes to set an alarm back 15 minutes! If only the LCD screen had a viewing angle of more than about 30 degrees, it would be great.)

During the week, I get to sleep around 11 and get up at 3. I try to make it up on the weekend.

Depends on how stressed I am. During times of high stress I either sleep very little or far too much, but normally I will go to bed around 12 and wake up at 7:30, pretty alert and refreshed.

10 is my "bedtime." I'm asleep at around 10:30 to midnight, depending on if I read in bed or not. The alarm goes off at 6 AM. On Saturdays, I usually wake up without the alarm clock at around 5. I have no idea why. It pisses me off. Sometimes on the weekend, if I'm lucky, I'll be able to stay asleep until 7:30. That's sleeping very late for me.

I used to be able to sleep into the afternoon on the weekend, back in my 20s. I miss that. I'm becoming an old man.

Mom says when I was a baby she had to check on me a lot because I slept all the time. I can still sleep like an expert, mostly. I had a rare night of bad sleep last night.

I'm a night owl, so I often stay up too late. I get up at 6:30: once I've had a shower I feel rather awake but until I get here and start mainlining coffee I am still pretty sluggish in the morning.

@ Zen: I bought an alarm clock that projects the time on the ceiling. It's pretty cool. I don't use it for the alarm clock...I have a beepy one (that also can be adjusted backwards...my old one couldn't and as I set it for 6:15, then reset it every morning for 6:30, it was a pain to set it back again at night) for that, but it also has ambient noise like thunderstorms, rain, the ocean. Mostly I fall asleep to crickets and I feel like I'm camping.

I get around 4-6 hours a sleep a night, which I assume isn't that healthy either, but I honestly have not felt much difference.

But I rarely am asleep past 9:30 even on weekends so I don't know if I just have a natural body alarm clock or my body just doesn't need that much sleep anymore since I probably did stop growing a few years ago.

I need 8 hours to be healthy and happy.
When I'm going through a bad patch I get 3-5. Or sometimes 6-7 but all broken up.

I've had trouble sleeping all my life.
I have a burning envy of people who look forward to going to bed at night, and drop off without even realising.

There was a study done that linked depression to dreams, in that the middle of the night dreams are supposedly negative in nature. If you wake at the end of that cycle (symptomatic of depression) then you absorb the negative impact of the dream, rather than carrying on into the positive dreams which follow. No idea if it's true, but as someone who wakes between 02.00 and 05.00 almost every night and has trouble getting back to sleep, it's interesting to me.

I'm on Trazodone, but it makes my feet itch. I assume it's that anyway, they weren't itchy on Zopiclone.

ugh. I'd be totally useless if I only got 5-7 hours of sleep. 7 is okay for a few days; 8 is better.

I'm a lucky person in that I generally don't have sleep problems.

I actually have struggled with my sleep the whole night...mild apnea (possibly, still not tested) insomnia. I went to a sleep clinic and registered really high on their sleep deprivation scale. I've tried all sorts of crap. exercising alot, not drinking. cutting down and out caffeine. no results. no matter what time I wake up I wake up exhausted.

the sleep therapist told me to lose over 10% of my body weight (those who have met me know this is..well, extreme...I am definitely more meaty than I want to be but still within my BMI range) and see if that helps. so that's on the agenda. that and dancing the tango in brazil.