Occasionally people on the internet ask for the community's collected wisdom about sleep. This is what I can think of for my own sleep routines, tips, and tricks, plus what I do about various confounding factors. Maybe one of these days I'll go through the paperwork from that wretched sleep class and write up my notes on that, too.

I have Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome, primary insomnia, sleep maintenance insomnia, and ADHD.

( long )

My current sleep chart is probably going to get overhauled at some point, because the setup is labor-intensive.

15 columns, 14 of little squares, followed by a line.
Column 1 is the day of the month.
2-14 are hours of sleep, top row color-coded.
The line is for total hours of sleep and notes.

Color coding:
Red for insufficient sleep. If a sleep length is of this, I am likely either unsafe to operate heavy machinery or make important decisions, or I will only be okay for a few hours before I will need to restore my forces by napping. If circumstances are bad, I may have depression symptoms that I should inform my providers about immediately. I should attempt to nap or at least lie down quietly with my eyes closed.
Yellow for the bare minimum of functionality. If a sleep length is yellow, I can drive and decide things, but my mood and creativity are likely impacted. I may have breakthrough depression symptoms, be crabby and unlikely to want company outside of my nearest and dearest, not be up for novel media, and be generally unwell.
Green is sufficient sleep, at least technically. If I am tired and draggy, it is likely something other than sleep that makes me so. I have a good chance of being coherent. I should be able to operate heavy machinery and make decisions.
Purple is extra sleep. It is likely that something has made me more tired than usual, including medication changes, illness, and insufficient sleep the previous day.
Dark gray is for awake time that replaces or interrupts sleep, since Dr. V asked about that.

Generally I color all the squares in one day's record with the color for the total, but sometimes I will color the first section of divided sleep with the color that it would have been if I weren't able to get more sleep.

The notes line gets the sleep hours, or sum of sleep hours, a note about meds changes, pain, or whatever might fuck with my sleep. It gets highlighted with the color of the total.

This would probably work better with a wider page, a longer page, graph paper, and/or Excel.

I've been doing the less-than-six one night, more-than-8 the next night pattern, rarely getting to sleep before 2 in the morning. I suspect some of this can be put at the foot of the new meds. Yay.

Last night was pretty bad in terms of revenge bedtime procrastination, because of course it was, and I was exhausted and absolutely ready to go to bed around midnight but then I wanted to do a *thing* and I'd been reading so much of the past days, and anyway I sneaked into bed and hoped I wouldn't wake up Belovedest.

And then of course I woke up sometime after 6 in the morning, probably not by Alex waking up, and then there were alarms and cats and the Roomba. All told I didn't get to catch up on those other hours of sleep before my appointment, and I was very glad Belovedest had taken the day off because I wouldn't have been safe to drive.

I showed Belovedest where to reboot the heat pump without using the stairs. It went on the blink again the other night. Sigh. I suppose we should ping the company about the bollards and this too.

I didn't get any sleep when I got home either, but at least I did get some horizontal before popping back up to get dinner and help out with the monitor arm laptop concept. I called some of the attaching screws and their washers some extremely unprintable things.

Gems-wise, we are pretty well caught up with where we want to be this week.

I made a double batch of jello this time, using up the second of the two boxes of "berry blue" which doesn't seem to have a flavor, and one of the cherry (which I like but Alex doesn't) with a jar of peaches (which I like but Belovedest doesn't). For whatever reason jello has seemed like food, and I'm not going to argue with that this month.

( The penultimate bits of the router saga )

I looked over the offerings, picked the one that seemed best, ruled out the "gaming" model which sported an entire 8 ethernet ports (for a handsome $100+ more than the 4 port model), and delivered my recommendation. Alex poked and found the site that was price-matching The Bad Place.

And so, quailing slightly at the price, Belovedest bought the new router, and soon our unhappy days of the network dunking up and down like a frantic tea ball will be at an end.



( Mattress!!! )

The mattress was rolled, then folded, and the whole operation shrink-wrapped. Belovedest and I unrolled it, unfolded it, debated which way was up, rotated it, and let it inflate. I didn't get video, alas. Getting the plastic out from under was another small operation, and then we got the new, deep-pocketed sheets on. I fell over. It was comfortable.

I popped out long enough to let Belovedest determine that the plywood was doing more harm than good, since the mattress was smaller than the wood, and there followed an interlude that I am pleased to have not been in the way of. I resumed my flomp after some lunch-ish items, and only poked my head out when it got dark out. Guide Dog Aunt was pleased that she'd been able to give me such a thoughtful birthday present. It's a nice item for a milestone birthday. I explained the thing to norabombay, and may have sold her on it.

We will have to finish deploying the rest of the blankets before bed.

I have decided that the main agenda for my first week post-job is to sleep, like the moderately disabled person I was pretending not to be.

I made Experimental Brownies from a Box. This didn't go quite as planned because I decided to fuck with the timing due to using a smaller pan.

The ones where I added glacé cherries and pecans came out better.

I have ambitions to take apart a certain piece of equipment, now that a) I know how it goes back together, and b) I am aware of what a mess it is.

Next week is planned to have more productive content.

So because not only do I have insomnia, I also suffer from it, the most-recent in the chain of moderately alarmed sleep-adjacent professionals (the neurologist at Deer Creek) referred me to the Improve Your Sleep! class, which has been eating my Monday evenings over the last month.

The main feature of this class, in the eyes of the neurologist and my counselor, has been the CBT aspect of it. Apparently the number one thing that cures insomnia is CBT. So everyone was hopeful. (I had specified to the neurologist that I would in fact be running anything suggested in the CBT past my Supervisor and my therapist. Which was a good call to have made.)

It turns out that when Guide Dog Aunt loaned me a book on sleep a few years ago, the one that pointed out that there was not in fact any moral value to any specific sleep schedule, and that instead of saying stuff like "I'm lazy because I sleep until noon", one should look at it in terms of "My most productive hours are in the evening, and I schedule my life in a way that suits my sleep schedule" -- that general tool of re-framing the guilt and fear around sleep is in fact the very CBT that this class relies on. So, unfortunately, the CBT that I had hoped would be new information was not, in fact, new information at all. The book specifically addressed Negative Sleep Thoughts. The class then expanded the concepts of re-framing runaway negative thought chains in a better light, which is also a Fishmum trick that I've been teaching my little fishies and my partner...

The other main leg of this class is meditation and the relaxation response. I believe that I can trace my habit of meditative breathing in particular to the summer when I read ... some Heinlein book or other ... and thought that taking up meditation would be a grand idea. The latest that could have been was 1996. Then I formally took up meditation (and learned all of the techniques discussed in the meditation unit of this class) in 2001-ish, when I went to DeVry to get a degree in Holistic Massage join a coven. So depending how you slice it, I've been familiar with, and practicing, meditation for anywhere from fifteen to twenty years.

The main new information I got out of the class, in fact, was that sleep-maintenance insomnia was recently discovered to be associated with a sleep-time body temperature that has not dropped as it ought to for that part of the night. And I do, in fact, routinely overheat while attempting to sleep. Which means that if I'm in bed and even slightly think that I might not get to sleep soonish, I should immediately go and get the ice pack, and not try to be a hero.

Also, low doses of sedating antidepressants are also used as sleep medications. The instructor was down on this practice, because antidepressants are only good for people with depression. FUNNY THING, THAT.

Pretty much all the rest of the class was review, and (due to my internets research) I was often in possession of more detailed information than the instructor. I came to feel that I could probably have taught the class myself, given the curriculum.

The first class was pleasant enough. I think there were about ten of us. One woman came in late, and borrowed a pen from me. We had a pleasant chat while she was waiting for her husband to pick her up. She's sleep-deprived to the point that she can't safely drive, and caretaking for her autistic son has done a number on her sleep schedule and ability to stay asleep.

I reviewed the materials in the packets for the four weeks. The second week, the cognitive re-framing, was going to be hard, since the materials blithely suggested that "most people" could get away with abbreviated amounts of sleep with nothing more terrible than a loss of creativity and a bad mood. Pro tip: when your patient reports ( very bad effects ) tied to as little as one night of abbreviated sleep while under stressful circumstances (and the current Republican administration is nothing if not stressful circumstances) telling the patient that everything is probably going to be okay if they blow sunshine up their own ass is life-threateningly bad advice. So I realized that I had better sit next to the door in case I had to step out of the room.

During the second class, the instructor was trying to impress upon us the way that a poorly timed nap can fuck up your sleep schedule pretty badly. My friend said that this was going to be a problem for her: you put her in the car (as a passenger) and she passes out pretty much instantly.

"It should be easy to stay awake in the car!" said the instructor.

"It's hard."

"Well, life is hard."

At this juncture, I decided that the most constructive action I could take was going to be going and sitting in the hall for a bit (and angrily texting my partner). I came back in after about five minutes.

Later in the evening, the instructor planned to lead us through more meditation/relaxation, to include the rest of the class period. I abruptly realized that I did not actually feel that making myself vulnerable to and in front of this instructor was a good idea, and grabbed my stuff and left the building.

In the third class, I sat by the door. (My friend did not show up for this class, or the following week.) When the meditation/relaxation section arrived, I popped both headphones in and proceeded to listen to podcasts, and only emerged when that bit was done. At the end of class, I asked the instructor about the bits in the next one, saying without explanation that I would not be taking part in the relaxation exercise, and would likely leave the room. He said when the long one would be, and there would be another short one later.

In the fourth class (tonight), I sat by the door, and took a chair with me when I popped out for the duration of the exercise. The instructor came and fetched me when it was done. And I did other things for the short one.

I did ask, this time, what he recommended to keep you awake when the sleep pressure is high but it's a bad time for a nap. And if there were resources on being a millennial and not having a whole house to work with in terms of keeping stress out of your bedroom. (Do something loud. And, probably, somewhere.) I asked about next steps. He recommended the meditation class, or the anxiety class. "That really doesn't seem to be a recommendation geared for someone who has been practicing meditation for fifteen years," I said, smiling aggressively.

He recommended tai chi.

"That's really rather along the same lines," I said, still smiling.

There was a class evaluation form, which asked about how much we learned from the class, and how helpful it was. It was ... not.

So I'll be asking my GP, my counselor, and my psychiatrist about next steps, then. Now that I've taken this miserable class so they'll take me seriously.

09:10 PM Thursday, December 29, 2016
Plan for Friday: chill with Purple before dinner.

Could also get half-and-half.

Thursday, I tested the UI on the daylight lamp, and found that it had failed to turn on this morning due to it not being intuitively obvious when something was activated, and also the directions kind of suck, and the UI also sucks. Perhaps it'll wake me up Friday morning.

09:18 PM Saturday, December 31, 2016
Chilled with Purple before dinner. Half-and-half (and other groceries) waited until Saturday. The daylight lamp turned on both these past mornings, and was turned off with a moan. Apparently the part where it wakes me up is too effective, and I can't be having with that in the middle of a sleep cycle. Also Saturday: Ordered a new phone, since mine is fucking dying.

Friday: I slept longer than I planned to, and then wandered over to Purple's. He was watching some keyboard tutorial videos, which were actually fascinating. Partway through, a cat jumped into the lap of the guy doing the demo and began washing his hands. It's a small enough community that Purple knows the cat's name.

We then watched Mystery Men, since Purple had mentioned it to me but we'd not watched it. It was cute for what it was. He paused at the business card of the weapons guy, as I'd gone "... Chicken rentals?!?!" which made some later bits make a little more sense.

Purple called Ms. Antisocialest Butterfly to arrange dinner. He'd assumed that she'd be working, because she's her, and had thought of a few places on that end of town. However, she'd been working from home, so those were no longer convenient. We settled on a time and place. There was a little more time left, so we watched some Key and Peele.

After that was dinner. We got there early. Ms. Antisocialest Butterfly was late, on account of El Camino Real had suddenly developed a hilarious thing where none of the southbound traffic was moving. My meal came out substantially underdone. At a decent place, I'll chance a medium-rare steak on occasion. I do not prefer to chance a medium-rare hamburger, and could have sworn I'd asked for medium-well. (Purple could have sworn so also.) We wound up getting some extra dessert, as well as a do-over on the burger.

Purple and I watched some more Key and Peele, followed by what he swore was a Christmas episode of Black Mirror. It was "Nosedive", and while the word "Christmas" was uttered, it wasn't specifically Christmas-y. Uniquely for Black Mirror, we found ourselves giggling helplessly by the end, and in a lovely mood. I totally ship it.

Saturday: very quiet, stayed at home, a certain amount of chat with partner.

Sunday: went to my aunt's to gossip and watch GBBO and Frasier. This was put on pause when Infamous Cousin, his girlfriend, and two friends showed up to pick up Boat.

Boat is a dog. She's a German Shepherd (perhaps a mix?) with one constantly upward-pointed ear and one ear that mostly flops but sometimes flaps and points when she's doing radar-ears about something. She is 70 pounds of complete love, love that wants to hug you without your permission and share your peanut butter. She's also dog-reactive, got separation anxiety, and has recently learned how to climb 8 foot wooden fences. (Her rear legs were off the ground and front legs were over the top, according to my aunt.)

My aunt very much misses the poodle.

Monday: also quiet, wrestling with sleep schedule and preparing for Fishie's visit and chatter with partner (always). Plus some undignified laboratory homework.

( TMI )

Today: whooooo boy. Aforementioned lab drop-off, then I picked up quartzpebble and we went all the way out to the back of beyond to talk with the sleep neurologist who wasn't Dr. Asshole.

Appointment went okay. This doctor wasn't at all sure what to do with a patient whose depression is rapidly and *extremely* worsened by sleep deprivation (she inquired with some urgent concern whether I was feeling like that now, as she'd have to report that; I was not; she recommended that I see my psych crew to get that taken care of, which MISSED THE POINT ENTIRELY, that if I follow her instructions I'd probably need to be taken inpatient, and if I don't try to fuck with my sleep schedule, I'm pretty much all right except pretty fucking disabled due to the level of difficulty I have maintaining a modern business type schedule), and whose AD(H)D interferes with any and all "sleep hygiene" things that amount to "just get fantastically bored and you'll go to sleep", and whose budget does not presently include a CPAP. (Also, the mouth appliance thing costs more than a CPAP, and stuff in my mouth when I sleep is a hard limit after the misadventures of 1996/1997.) And there's some advice (not all of which can be followed and keep me sane), and there's a CBT class (cognitive behaviour therapy, not the other one), the contents of which I will be running past my Top and perhaps also my morail, as they are among the safeguards against me putting stuff in my head which needs to not be in there.

I only cried a little.

Soooooooo... compared to the appointment with Dr. Asshole, this went astonishingly well.


F and I had a few misadventures in finding a place for food. We settled on a diner. Lumpy's was closed already, since it was a Tuesday. Digger's was astonishingly difficult to find. I refueled, then we finally located it. The sign is not night-friendly, and very stylized.

Food was good. One of the great things about a diner that plays oldies and classic rock -- very little chance of getting the Wham!


The drive back was pretty much uneventful. Except now quartzpebble smells enough like Purple that I kept getting the "Oh, there's Purple!" pings in my brain. THIS IS WEIRD.

My partner called when I was on the way home, and we talked about stuff. Logistics for some things are difficult.


I talk to my (prescribing) psych tomorrow, and I'll probably poke Purple for dinner. Whee!

Thursday was kind of rough, because I didn't get enough sleep. Sweetie and I discussed the root cause, and I have standing instructions about the proper response to directives that fuck with my sleep. When safe and practical to do so, the proper response is: "Fuck off."

Friday, I had a doctor's appointment. The gyn appointment had two high blood pressure readings in a row, and that gets me sent to my GP for another blood pressure reading and maybe a lecture about salt. So I went in and got my blood pressure read by an assistant who (despite the helpful presence of an honorific in my name as displayed) managed to gender me. The first reading was high. The second reading was okay-ish. And that was it.

I had scheduled my day for a rough interaction with the medical establishment, so when I got home (early) I decided that I would call (eep, phone) the office with the sleep doctor, to request a re-match with a different doctor. (And I came home to a message from my friend phone, asking was I going to come down to the beer bash. I decided I would think about that after the sleep doctor interaction.)

I called and talked to the scheduling person, and explained that I had been referred to the sleep doctor, I had had an appointment, but I had had a bad experience in the appointment and ended it early. And I would like to talk to a different doctor.

The scheduling person apologized that I had had a bad experience, and asked me the nature of the bad experience.

I opened my mouth. No words came out.

One of the problems that I have with the phone, and one of the things that sort of drives Purple bats about talking on the phone with me, is that where a normal human might go "Uhhhh", I just go silent (unless my verbal output buffer glitches and I get the same word or syllable repeating). It's a problem because in the day of phones which helpfully silence background noise when they can, it sounds more or less equivalent to a dead line.

She started making the "Are you there" noises. I made "Yes I'm here" responses in response, and tried again to make words about my experience come out. "I, ... I, ... I, ... "

It went on like that for a while.

"No," I finally said.

It turns out that this doctor is the only doctor in the department. I had to say "And I don't want to see him ever again" fairly firmly, several times. This office could not refer me to a different location; I would have to go back to my GP for that one.

So I looked up and called the scheduling office of my GP. The person on *that* phone was nicely responsive to the "Reverend. I don't have a gender." which is becoming my standard response to any sort of gendered honorific. (Exception: Purple and the Gentle Caller are allowed.) He corrected himself and moved on. The desired situation was that my GP give me a referral to the sleep department in Oakland, and that any phone calls to discuss this should be scheduled via email. (We appear to be learning.) This guy was the most gender-aware of all the people there that I spoke to all day. Yay. (He was sorry that everyone else sucked.)

It turns out that attempting to explain out loud the sleep doctor related fuckery (especially because it's got such potential for gaslighting) threw me into a really vulnerable and unhappy state. I looked at phone's message and decided that no, really, I was not going to be up for beer bash, not with shenanigans after.

I fell over into bed a little, and my Gentle Caller offered empathy and snuggles via text. (Also various forms of Protective Anger, which from them is nicely reassuring.) quartzpebble has volunteered advocacy time for the next sleep appointment, because fuck so much of that noise. The Gentle Caller calmed me down enough to nap, and nap I did, and woke refreshed.

I then picked up cleverthylacine, and we headed off to dinner (excellent fun) and thence to shopping.

It seems that if I am an Alpha, I have acquired a very *very* sensible Supervisor who reminds me that "Fuck off!" is a complete sentence non-compliance is a social skill. Also, sithjawa and inoru_no_hoshi were playing internet shopping games, where the object is to find the most ridiculous item in a given category. ...And this time, that category was dildoes.

Unfortunately, shopping was marred by technical fail, so we were out later than intended. Alas. But we did have fun, which was important. And the hypo-allergenic earring selection these days is much better than when I developed my metal allergies two decades ago.

My sleep schedule was unfortunate.

Left for work at 7am, rather than 6:30. This was not my best decision. I arrived at 8:30 rather than 7:15-8. Researcher Carmageddon said that traffic was ass for him too, so apparently it was more ass than usual.

Meeting happened, no notable disasters. Though we really do have to get internal people to label themselves better. (Ordinarily Researcher Carmageddon wouldn't have asked an internal person to introduce themselves, but it wasn't a familiar name.)

Desk shenanigans followed. The Hipster Researcher had engaged in desk-moving shenanigans; the chatter about the sudden appearance of a corner desk in the team table area attracted the attention of the Stage Manager and then my manager. While I had been aware that it was at least an unspoken no-no, apparently removing the second desk from a two-person office is in fact an actual no-no upon which managers will Frown. Also, facilities is supposed to do the heavy lifting. I filed a ticket.

Today was yet another instance of helpdesk "fun". My feelings are that the helpdesk software should go away entirely, the helpdesk staff should be re-educated, and the responsible developers should perhaps find another line of work.

( Read more... )

I got a good chunk of transcription in. And then there was the team meeting. Unfortunately, they seem to have turned down the a/c, either on account of the repairs or the season. The room was hot, although my sleep-deprived state possibly contributed more to my nearly dozing off while the Grandmanager went through some stuff.

Mr. Zune and I decided that the guy on his team who I nearly accidentally clobbered with my cane that time, the one who is organizationally his eccentric bachelor uncle, should be henceforth known as his Overlord, as the guy gets to boss him around in time-honored Overlord fashion. When passing through Mr. Zune's department, I saw to my delight that Mr. Zune had indeed ordered a Caution: Bees sign for his teammate the beekeeper on the occasion of his wedding. It is now proudly posted on the beekeeper's office door. (And now I can actually ask "And your wife? And your bees?" in the same tone of voice for both when we get coffee at the same time.)

lb was still out sick, and Purple and R were still at the hackathon; radius and phone were either working from home or working from Australia or maybe in a meeting, so it was just Mr. Zune and me who went on the trek for ice cream. We compared scar stories and I introduced him to both the game prime/not-prime (by way of introduction) and the game lube/not-lube. He mentioned a very bad and perhaps apocryphal piece of sex advice as found on Reddit: ( Read more... ) So that's a thing that has been said on the internet. We saw R going thattaway on our way back. We said hi. Purple was at the next table over from her, so she promised to relay our greetings.

I managed to knock over a glass of soda. Fortunately, it was carpet-cleaning night anyway.

Eventually I decided it was time to go home. I figured the hackathon was probably still going on. I pinged R and asked her if she wanted some chocolate-covered espresso beans. She did not, but told me to ask Purple. Purple being notoriously hard to get ahold of via text, and this not being a world-shaking emergency that warranted calling, I didn't bother to check. I came by with my vat of the confection, and grabbed a couple paper bowls on my way down. Purple seemed happy to see me (when he registered my presence), and "This is probably a bad idea, but what the hell" accepted a few. I put them on the table, and added a warning label (as it's not immediately obvious what they are if you don't know, and accidental caffeine poisoning often offends). I hung out at R's table for a bit, then bade Purple goodnight. (I did not get any more caffeine tonight. I will probably want it tomorrow. I had sufficient caffeine today already. I did not have sufficient sleep. I did not have even half sufficient sleep. Purple winced.) (My weekdays feel oddly incomplete without saying goodnight to Purple.) One does not hug goodnight at this hackathon, and we did not.

I called zarhooie on the way home, yay!

Once I got home, I basically stripped, brushed my teeth, and hopped into bed. I may have made sure that nothing blew up in IRC, and emailed Purple to advise him that I had arrived home safely, but that was about it. I chatted with sithjawa, who had pinged me just as I was getting home, for a few minutes while horizontal, but conked out with alacrity for four hours before waking up hungry (as I had not bothered with a meal). Soon I will sleep again.

Tomorrow's big plans: door sign party with the Dean! I can't wait! Plus more transcription.