#my sleep schedule is fixed at 8 hrs so i naturally will be tired until its fulfilled

[namjoonchronicles]

Okay... here we go-

1. Read a book/ebook/fic

2. Listen to a podcast

3. Clean your room or toilet or medicine cabinet or stove or pantry

4. Create a journal page or doodle

5. Scroll through Pinterest and find something special

6. Eat (don’t look at me like that now)

7. Watch a rom com or an animated movie

8. Watch old videos or pics

9. Plan your day tomorrow.

10. If you have a sibling draw a mustache on them

1. Gets stress on how good other people write and why I bother writing at all

2. I listened to religious podcast usually, and when I do, I get dragged to self-induced sadness

3. I had to vacuum my room, and its loud... I don't want to wake the whole house do I emptied the sink and washed all the dishes

4. I wrote a small quote on ig with an aesthetic background of "room full of people, but he's the view", logged out when I see friends updating love life

5. Found this : googled my name and soft aestheric clothes, room and stuffed animals

6. Emptied the rice cooker and ate 2 eggs. Before I emptied the sink.

7. Watched Healer, 3 episodes in. Wondering why my life is so dull.

8. Switched to a new phone last year, didnt leave the house bc of covid, no new pictures or vids. Only BTS and I get envy bc they are millionaires now, how we started as nothing in 2013, they are up there and I'm down here.

9. Had to leave the house to get stationaries for uni that begins monday, have a terrible feeling I might meet someone I dont want to, dreads it.

10. My bro is still awake doing assignments and his rooms smells like death, so I rather not.

11. Stalked on Kim Seonho's soc med and uwued hard.

Thank you for your suggestion. 😗

[bettsfic]

hey betts, i was just wondering (based on a recent reply), have you always needed more than 10 hrs sleep to feel rested? just bc i've realised recently i'm a "long sleeper" (i'm p sure its not vitamin deficiency) and my 9-5 is ruining my life lol and would like to commiserate with others like me :P sorry for the weird/possibly invasive question, feel free to ignore

oh goodness, yes i will absolutely commiserate with you. unfortunately i don’t have a solid answer for myself because i’m still figuring it all out. in 2014 i was diagnosed with “hypersomnia” (which i call narcolepsy because everyone knows what narcolepsy is and the symptoms are virtually the same), which, to quote my doctor, meant, “you’re just a really sleepy person.”

the results of my sleep test were intense. it was an 8 hour daytime test in which i took five 20-minute naps over the course of the day, and they measured how quickly i hit REM sleep. a normal person should not be able to hit REM during the day in twenty minutes. not only did i hit REM every single time, in the third nap, which was well past noon, i hit REM in 11 seconds. i also cheated on the test and took illegal naps between scheduled ones. 

but hypersomnia never really felt right to me. the diagnosis got me where i needed to be, which was working from home 10am - 7pm, but i knew there was something else wrong. i spent 2014 experimenting with my energy levels and fixing my disordered sleep. prior to my diagnosis, i slept from 2am - 6am and 5pm - 8pm. on the weekends i slept midnight - noon or 1pm. it was horrible. my doctor told me i had poor sleep hygiene, but offered no treatment or assistance to rectify it. 

what happened was that over time i realized i had been existing in an extreme sleep deficit. since i was 6 years old, i remember being ungodly tired. i knew i had a problem when a coworker told me, “you should want to be awake,” and it was like sirens going off. i had never, in nearly 20 years, wanted to be awake. if you had asked me at any point “if you could do anything right now, what would you be doing?” i would always, always want to be sleeping. 

i slept 10 to 11 hours almost every night for six months-ish, and sometimes napped during the day. i felt like i’d been making up for all the hours of sleep i’d missed my entire life. eventually it kind of fixed itself. i slept 6.5 to 8 hours a night, felt tired naturally, woke up naturally, and didn’t get tired during the day (most of the time). i became acutely aware of the dips in energy i had throughout the day (4pm - 5pm has always been hard for me).

but then in 2017 i was diagnosed with PTSD, and that shined a new light on the sleep disorder, which i see now as a symptom of something much bigger. the amount of fear or anxiety i face in a day is directly correlated to the number of hours i need to sleep. so with a new job, i’ve needed much more sleep than usual, until my body stops being in this weird survival mode. (one of the worst triggers for me is feeling trapped, so i always drive myself everywhere i go in case i need to nap in my car or run away)

mostly the task has been listening to myself all the time. when monkey brain says to sleep, i do, even if human brain says “it’s 2pm!! wake!!” but it’s very hard to listen to your monkey brain when you’re living in a world where everyone tells you your tiredness/fatigue is laziness and you just need to get up and go for a walk.