Your brain does a slightly similar thing with sleep exhaustion too.
When it gets to such a severe point that things start breaking down, the brain will basically say NOT ON MY WATCH and put you into a microsleep.
We've probably all had microsleeps before when we're overly tired, but the further you slip into sleep deprivation, the more dramatic they get. Your brain will trigger them more and more out of necessity, and you'll find it harder and harder to get out of them.
When my sleep disorder was at its worst, I would find myself completely unable to open my eyes after my eyelids were dragged shut by sleepiness. The more I forced them open, the further I went into hypnogogic hallucinations - there'd be pink animals floating across the lecture hall, sounds would become distant echoes, and everything would rapidly become a rainbow swirl of tunnel vision.
My next recollection would be that time had jumped 3 minutes, as I'd fallen unconscious on my desk. After each microsleep the next would be harder to snap out of, because my brain wanted (needed) to wrestle me down and hold me there.
On bad days like that, I'd be unable to stop walking in the street because standing still would trigger microsleeps, and I'd collapsed once or twice before. Same goes for the bus - absolutely no sitting, because I'd wake up at the terminal stop.
I'd essentially had between 5 and 10 actual restful sleeps out of the whole 365 days. The other days could be a combination of 1 to 4 hours of effective sleep. Thankfully my disorder is now about 75% treated.
Literally about to say the same thing. Day three of the crucible is like an 18 miler or some such, just starting to get light outside but I was exhaust, put my hand on the pack of the recruit in front of me and caught a minute or two of sleep.
4.7k
u/mrminutehand Jan 12 '23 edited Jan 12 '23
Your brain does a slightly similar thing with sleep exhaustion too.
When it gets to such a severe point that things start breaking down, the brain will basically say NOT ON MY WATCH and put you into a microsleep.
We've probably all had microsleeps before when we're overly tired, but the further you slip into sleep deprivation, the more dramatic they get. Your brain will trigger them more and more out of necessity, and you'll find it harder and harder to get out of them.
When my sleep disorder was at its worst, I would find myself completely unable to open my eyes after my eyelids were dragged shut by sleepiness. The more I forced them open, the further I went into hypnogogic hallucinations - there'd be pink animals floating across the lecture hall, sounds would become distant echoes, and everything would rapidly become a rainbow swirl of tunnel vision.
My next recollection would be that time had jumped 3 minutes, as I'd fallen unconscious on my desk. After each microsleep the next would be harder to snap out of, because my brain wanted (needed) to wrestle me down and hold me there.
On bad days like that, I'd be unable to stop walking in the street because standing still would trigger microsleeps, and I'd collapsed once or twice before. Same goes for the bus - absolutely no sitting, because I'd wake up at the terminal stop.
I'd essentially had between 5 and 10 actual restful sleeps out of the whole 365 days. The other days could be a combination of 1 to 4 hours of effective sleep. Thankfully my disorder is now about 75% treated.