How to Sleep Really Badly
Sleep is a darned annoying thing… without enough of it you die, you tend to need it most at the least appropriate times and you can’t bank it for future use! Anyway, I have compiled some tips to ensure that you never get a full nights sleep again and that you live the rest of your life in a zombie-like sleep deprived state, feeling terrible, looking haggard and being generally grumpy!
Top of my list in how to make sure you’re really shattered all the time is to have kids! If you can can bring a new one into the world every three years or so you will me maximising the amount of time you have terrible sleep for. It’s not just the screaming to be fed and nappies changed etc that takes chunks out of your sleep each night, when they get older they’ll be out late and you won’t be able to sleep without worrying about them. Parenthood is not for the feint-hearted, the impatient or those lacking in stamina!
Another thing to do is to have a really badly sprung bed. An uncomfortable bed will be something you can wrestle with all night much to your annoyance and sleep avoidance.
Have a TV / office in your bedroom! From a psychological point of view it’s important for there to be a clear distinction between where you work / watch TV and where you retire! If you’re used to feeling hyped watching action movies in bed etc then you’re not going to find drifting off to sleep the easiest of tasks. So to really confuse your body and ensure that sleep comes far from easilly you should have a telly and computer etc in your bedroom.
Make sure you drink lots of caffeine. Caffeine mimics adrenalin and keeps you wired and hyper making it difficult for you to unwind and it reduces the quality of the sleep you get. This habit becomes self fuelling because you drink coffee / cola… you sleep badly… you wake up and need a ‘lift’ so you… drink more coffee, round and round you go. So, abuse caffeine, especially later in the day for really unsettled sleep.
Go to bed on an argument. Got a spouse, parent, kid, sibling, friend that you can have a fight with? Go for it, make sure you say lots of stuff you don’t mean in the heat of the moment and that they do likewise and then go to bed without actually making up. You’ll be a seeting tangled mess of anger and guilt that will surely take you some time to wind down from.
Eat a good sized fatty meal before you go to bed. Late night munchies? Have a pizza before you go to bed, this will raise your metabolic rate and keep your body ’stoked’ as it struggles to digest the fat (which is more difficult to breakdown than carbohydrate). Both of these mean that sleep will not come quickly and will probably be quite fitful when it does finally descend on you. Also, in the case of pizza, all that cheese will give you wierd dreams (dude!).
Go to bed at a specific time i.e. before you are tired. Going to bed before you are ready to sleep is a good way to feed your insomniac tendencies. All that tossing and turning in bed getting increasingly frustrated at your inability to become enveloped by sleep will be great at keeping you awake longer and conditioning your body that the bed is not a place for sleeping in, but is really a place for not sleeping in!
Not a very practical one this but if you get the opportunity then move next door to some really noisy, party-animal neighbours. The sound of loud techno music at 2a.m. is not renowned for its sedative effects and the associated sounds of people screaming and shouting, car horns honking and wheels screeching will ensure that you arise bleary-eyed and thoroughly unrested.
Leave the curtains open and / or a light on - the production of sleep hormones tends to be stilmulated by by darkness so lots of light, especially the early morning sun in summer, will ensure that struggle to sleep and then awake early. This is why people in Canada and the Scandanavian countries struggle in Summer so much with their sleep, so I guess takling this to the extreme you could emmigrate to Canada, Greenland, Norway, Finland, Sweden etc…
Sleep on a very narrow bed. Preferably not next to a wall. You will be uncomfortably concious of not wanting to fall off the bed when you roll over and this will be an unsettling distraction when you are sleeping / trying to sleep.
Make sure you are too hot or too cold and just generally uncomfortable. It’s difficult to be soothed by sleep’s calm embrace if there’s beads of sweat grouping on your face or you’re shivering uncontrollably. A couple of blankets too few or too many can take hours of sleep away from you. As indeed can tight bedclothes that threaten to cut you in half or act as tourniques with every move you make.
Have a lumpy pillow - guaranteed to annoy the hell out of the most saintly of people. The icing on the cake would be to have a nylon pillow case - I can almost feel the prickly heat now!
Last on my list is an unusual one as it tends to make you sleep more! Yes drink alcohol before you go to bed - while it does induce sleep it’s the wrong kind of sleep so even if you get an hour more sleep than normal you’ll wake up feeling like you only slept half the night (or worse!).
That’s it, I reckon that by following these tips you’ll be able knock at least three hours of sleep off a day and make yourself look about 10 years older! If you have any other tips about how to feel shattered 24/7 then please share them… assuming you’re not too tired to tell me!
Tags [ Fun | Funny | Humour | Humor | Life | sleep | insomnia | dreams | work | Sleep Disorder | Healthy Sleep ]
Add comment November 12th, 2006