Get Dumber with Sleep Deprivation!

Um, Spike, that’s not how facial recognition works

In the past week, I have:

Left my coat on a plane and had to run back for it twenty minutes later

Spilled half a bottle of water into my suitcase by carrying it upside down

Worn a one-inch hole in my reusable shopping bag because I didn’t notice I was dragging it

Left town and forgot to pack deodorant

Dropped my sleep tracker on the bedroom floor and convinced myself I somehow lost it in a public restroom, then found it the next day and forgot to charge it

Put an important appointment in my calendar an hour late

Dropped my sweater on the sidewalk and kept walking, causing a passing driver to honk at me

Forgotten to auto-schedule a day’s content on my blog

Forgotten to lock our dog in his crate, risking another barking-related citation

I also gained four pounds, which I believe consists almost entirely of cortisol and bitter unshed tears.

What’s my problem? One of three things:

1. I am possessed by the spirit of an unusually dumb paranormal entity
2. I have early-onset Alzheimer’s 
3. I’m entering my second straight year of sleep deprivation

The last time I was this tired, my upstairs neighbor was a crackhead who would smoke crack on the porch in the afternoon, play guitar above my bed in the early hours of the morning, and bust up furniture in the evening. My hair started to fall out in patches then, just as it’s doing now.

Nobody cares about one person who is tired. The reason I talk about this stuff is that a lot of people are voluntarily running around in a state similar to mine. It’s a lot like being drunk, or snoring. Drunk people don’t think they’re drunk, and people who snore refuse to believe that they snore, sometimes even if you play them a recording of their 70dB clamor.

If you’re chronically sleep-deprived, you’re screwing up. Somehow. You’re stumbling around and making preventable errors. If you’ve done it for a long enough time, you might even think it’s just part of your personality, like Bella from Twilight always talked about how clumsy she was.

(Why is that supposed to be an endearing quality in female characters? I sure don’t find it endearing in myself).

Making silly mistakes is fine. It’s not the end of the world if you have, like I have, pumped liquid soap onto your toothbrush, only put deodorant under one arm, or walked around with a pair of nylon underpants hanging out of your sweater through the pernicious powers of static cling. Stuff happens.

We just have to ask ourselves how often it happens when we’re well rested, rather than when we’re really tired.

Why am I so tired? Because my upstairs neighbors do a lot of loud stuff between 5 and 7 AM every day.

What are they doing? Some guesses:

Training a donkey to tap dance

Roller derby

Goat rodeo

Three-legged race promoting Dutch clogs

Why don’t I just go to bed earlier? I have, oh, I have. It’s annoying to have to shift your schedule by three hours to accommodate someone else, for one thing, but it’s also only somewhat possible. The same people who are up banging around at 5 AM are also up and around at 12:30 AM, not to mention our other neighbors and passersby on the sidewalk. The rest of the world isn’t all that interested in facilitating some cranky middle-aged woman’s need to go to sleep at 9 PM.

9:00 PM bedtime: the ultimate luxury!

It makes me crazy to think of other people indulging in sleep procrastination, choosing to stay up late when they don’t have to. Oh, you’re not using your nice quiet bed? Can I come over? You can stay up and binge-watch TV episodes that will still be there tomorrow, even though you have to get up and go to work. Meanwhile I will try to sleep enough that my eyelid will stop twitching.

Twenty years ago, I would stay up until 4 or 5 AM for the occasional party, just because that’s where the action was. I’ve never been a drinker. I just wanted to socialize and eat chips and hope something interesting would happen. It took years to realize that these are my same friends from daylight hours. They weren’t going to, say, transmogrify into a wolf or a bat or anything. Now the idea of being awake until 4 AM strikes fear into my heart.

Out of all the persistent problems in the world, a sleep issue is in the top ten. It’s not like a messy garage that you can cheerfully ignore for ten years. It’s not like having a pet that isn’t housebroken, where you might swear a lot and go through a gallon of carpet cleaner. It’s not even like debt, although debt and sleep loss do tend to go together. Being exhausted follows you all day, every day.

Yawning through movies. Blanking out on chunks of conversation. Leaving a trail of lost items behind you everywhere you go.

Generally not doing anything with full engagement.

Getting headaches, getting sick all the time.

Twitching eyelid.

Desire to kick in neighbor’s door and ask, “What are you even DOING???”

I was talking to a young friend who just got his dream job after eleven years of planning. I asked what he was going to do next, and he promptly shared his five- and ten-year goals. Later I thought about my own goals and realized that they now consist of: Sleep twelve hours every day for a week.

If you’re out there being all tired and clumsy and stuff, pause for a moment. Ask yourself whether you could possibly find a way to sleep more every day. If not, is there somewhere else you could go? If so, would you tell me where that is?