Of all the activities I do on a daily basis, sleeping is often the best feeling to embrace me on most days.
There’s a different energy about sprawling slowly on a bed, releasing all that tension from a rough day, and just melting into the bedsheets.
My love for sleeping transcends all time and space.



Sleepiness vs X

Here are a few honest graphs on Sleepiness I made using xkcdgraphs.
These are an accurate description of what I go through, and I hope people trying to catch up with sleep will find these relatable.

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Personal Thoughts On The Affair Of Sleep

When I was a fresher, I remember that I often chose to sacrifice sleep on any whimsical thought of staying up the entire night, only to sleep in classes the next day.
My sophomore year, however, taught me the link between good sleep and efficiency, and brought me a plethora of revelations.

  1. Honestly, 24 hours is limiting. There are times when I’ve had supreme productivity just because I stepped out of the daily monotonic routine and spent the entire night doing something interesting. Ofcourse, I become a blob of human flesh for about 6-8 hours after staying awake for 36 hours, but then, I better become a blob after 36 hours rather than have an active mind after 24 hours.
  2. As unfortunate as that might be, the circadian rhythm is done with. Just by staring into a phone screen, we have unintentional control over how much melatonin our body generates. It’s time for us to start drifting into longer (>24 hour) workdays. I understand that sleep shouldn’t be ignored, but it shouldn’t be forced either.
  3. People need to stop focusing on how early they get up. With modern work culture shifting dinner times upto 9 PM, it is imperative that an increase in the wake-up time be exercised. The early bird definitely gets the worm, but it misses out on all the midnight snacks.

Actually, the problem with inadequate sleep is a problem so overt that it has probably become covert.

A Google Search for “less sleep” returns 78,10,00,000 results.
lessSleep

For reference, a Google Search for “mental peace” returns just about one-third of the previous number of results.
mentalPeace



My Personal Affair With Sleep

I don’t have a routine, because I cannot know what I’ll prioritise doing two days from now.
People often prioritise random activities over sleep.
Conclusion: Everybody sleeps less, just at different times in our limited 24 hour clock cycles.
Had everyone been sleeping at similar times, nobody would be able to disturb someone else’s sleep. Viola! You have a perfectly healthy population.

The fact that I am a lazy guy and that I love my sleep makes me slightly immune to schlep blinders, and I end up doing weird stuff that’s probably an overkill, like this script.
Here, it means that I do not like people knocking on my door to realise I was sleeping, because:

  • A dumb poker face opens the door for them.
  • It disturbs my sleep!

I wrote the script (read: forked an existing repo and patched snippets from StackOverflow and my previous projects) the night this thought latched on to my brain.
The setup isn’t very aesthetic, unless someone finds wires and cables running around on the walls very pleasing.
The script runs on a Raspberry Pi connected to my college’s intranet and is basically a webpage that tells whether I’m available, or sleeping. I hope I can expect my friends to be lazy enough to invest ten more seconds of their time to check my availability on a website just after they think about coming to my room without dreading the thought of leaving their comfort zones only to find me unavailable/sleeping and them having to return all the way back.

Overkill? Probably.
Comfortable? Definitely.