Can you (enjoy) rest?

Hi everyone, it's little Portuguese-flaming-guy-pony-thing here.

This came up to my mind, wondered what your opinions could be. Can you rest? Between job and real life responsibilities, usually my gaming time eats away my sleeping time. But the funny part is that once my cylinders start firing and my gaming-pleasure-glands start secreting their stuff, I don't feel all that tired. Usually I'm going to bed because I (f*cking) have to, not because I want to.

This results in me starting to behave like a little kid, looking at the clock, seeing 1:00 AM and saying "poopsies, I need to go to bed. After all, it's only Monday, and there's a Female Doggo of a week left to endure".

I usually reach weekends all busted, and recuperate some of my sleeping time then.

I know this is a pretty lame habit, unhealthy even. Funny thing is that I used to enjoy sleeping. A lot. Right now I'm constantly wishing I could shave 1 hour off of my mandatory recuperative state.

What about you?

I work nights, and let me tell you - nothing bothers me about sleeping. I sometimes sleep for 5 hours, sometimes for 14. I get more sleep on night shift than I ever do on days. I love it.

I even enjoy using the snooze button for an hour at a time and giving myself weird dreams or nightmares.

In short, sleep is awesome and I get as much as possible.

On that note, I was held over 3 hours late this morning and it's time for sleep.

I love sleeping too but it's always the first thing to get cut. I usually have no problems dropping sleep entirely if there's a few good parties planned for the weekend (or weeknights - I'm not picky). This means monday hurts a lot more than normal.

Basically, the day needs more than 24 hours. The earth's axis is entirely unfair.

If i'm tired i don't game.... simple as. My counter question would be: How can you not enjoy rest?!

Doug wrote:

Basically, the day needs more than 24 hours. The earth's axis is entirely unfair.

One could argue that the de facto 40 hour work week is unfair.

Sleeping is awesome. That said, my desire to go to sleep is far more intense when I know I can't (when I'm at work) than it is when I get home and could go to sleep whenever I wanted to.

I'm jealous of animals who sleep 18+ hours a day.

Doin' stuff is overrated, in my dreams I'm a bad ass.

Bright lights, including a bright computer monitor or television, work on the brain as a stimulant.

I hate going to bed, but I love being asleep, or hate waking up (not entirely sure which). I regularly miss one to two nights of sleep per week in the winter. Somehow I just keep on ticking. I've raided quite a few times this season after plowing the night before then working the entire day. Sleep is the enemy. Totally ripped off from the local coffee shop: "Life is short. Stay awake for it."

I need to improve my sleep habits. Thanks to the invention of Minecraft I'm not getting to bed before 1AM these days and then I can't sleep until the visions of blocks stop. Add my apnea to that, and I'm always exhausted. But I can't stop. Who's going to dig up all that iron ore if I'm not there?

Put me in the category of people who need a 26 hour day.

Tanglebones wrote:

Put me in the category of people who need a 26 hour day.

I'd prefer a 30 hour day, but if 26 is all I could get, then so be it.

I have two young children. I can fall asleep within 4 minutes anywhere anytime.

And I f*cking love sleep.

The world is full of too many wonderful things, including rest, sleep and dreams. Even if I didn't have responsibilities, I doubt I'd ever start half the things I'd like to finish.

I wish we were MIB, running on a 36 hour day. Then I could stay awake for 24, and conk out for 12 or so.

ELewis17 wrote:

I hate going to bed, but I love being asleep, or hate waking up (not entirely sure which). ... Totally ripped off from the local coffee shop: "Life is short. Stay awake for it."

This is also me.

Stele wrote:

I wish we were MIB, running on a 36 hour day. Then I could stay awake for 24, and conk out for 12 or so. ;)

You'll get used to it. Or you'll have a psychotic episode.

Jolly Bill wrote:
Stele wrote:

I wish we were MIB, running on a 36 hour day. Then I could stay awake for 24, and conk out for 12 or so. ;)

You'll get used to it. Or you'll have a psychotic episode.

I always thought it was weird that he implied those two things were mutually exclusive.

Sleep or rest? I am a deep, mostly "dreamless" sleeper. Depression and loving sleep tends to go hand and hand for me. I talk in my sleep and have had night terrors, sleep walking on several occasions. I talk in my sleep as well. So ladies, start lining up for the slice of paradise that is sleeping next to me.

I enjoy "rest." Sleep, like getting my hair cut, has become more of a necessary evil imposed upon my by social convention and biological weakness. By rest I mean sitting in a chair with a scotch and a book or a scotch and a movie or a scotch and my ipod(do we notice a pattern?).

I can fall asleep in less than five minutes and it seems like I start dreaming right away. I love sleep and prefer to get about 10 hours at a time if I can. I feel rested and mentally balanced on ten.

Then again,

oMonarca wrote:

...once my cylinders start firing and my gaming-pleasure-glands start secreting their stuff, I don't feel all that tired. Usually I'm going to bed because I (f*cking) have to, not because I want to.

This.

There are times I love my sleep. There are times I feel that I can sleep when I'm dead.

I'm glad you all brought this up, I thought I was the only person who thought this way.

I can't relax at all most of the time, I'll get a day off on the weekend, and find myself making 100 to-do lists and searching for things to fill my time. Fortunately I'm in a graduate program, so I have homework to fill time, but when I have "nothing," I feel crazy...

I can't play games right before bed either, because that's all I dream/think about (and I'd rather be nice to my wife rather than a robot breaking down why the computer converted a 4th and 17 with a Draw to win the game).

No.

Seriously. I'm really bad at this. I don't know if I have an answer. I'm a software developer and kind of a plugged in geek between phone, podcasts, books, consoles, graphic novels, games, etc. So it's all I can do to slow my brain down enough to get to bed before midnight. My wife can go to bed at 9 or 10 and knock out 10 hours of sleep. I wish I could do the same, honestly, but I get in bed and toss and turn. Get up, play some Fallout, go back to sleep.

The funny thing is that when I go on vacation and I'm unplugged and away from work, etc. I sleep 8-10 hours a night. I can feel a distinct shift in my mood, energy, everything.

I used to be in the same boat where I'd work 9-5, do chores and family stuff until the wife went to bed (10ish), and game hard until 2-3am. So, I'd get about 5 hours of sleep at night, barely function at work, and repeat the process again. Then, I'd get too much sleep on the weekend, game late even more, and go right back into the work week feeling like sh*t. It's a horrible cycle.

Now, I have a much different routine and feel 1000% better. I work 9-5, workout for an hour, do family stuff until wifey goes to sleep, and then I game and do other stuff and go to sleep at midnight at the latest. I get at least 8 hours of sleep and feel great in the morning and throughout the day. Sometimes I crash earlier because I'm so tired from exercising earlier. I also don't have the same passion for gaming as I did in the scenario above so the lack of the urge to play late works out well.

40-hour work-week?

I hate and envy you all.

Just as the Interns hate and envy me for only pulling 60-70 hours.

And the Attending laughs at us all during his daily one-hour of rounding.

I have an 84 hour work-week, during which all I do is eat, sleep, and work. I do 7 12-hour days, then get the next 7 days off. It's not a very stressful job though.

DS, I sort of am the opposite. I work at a school with students everywhere, and I'll come home and pass out by 9 some nights, but on the weekend, if I play a game late, I can't fall asleep because of all the sensory overload, and I become amped on beating whatever game I'm playing.

And 93, I've found that finally starting to work out again has helped me feel normal (compared to when I couldn't feel rested from a long work week). I tried running at 5am, and made it 2 weeks, but now am refereeing middle school bball games on Weds/Sats, and that is a huge workout. I can feel rested when I sleep and not dragging as much when I wake up.

oMonarca, it's the consequence of being time poor. The problem is you spend all the friggin day stuck at work, doing stuff for other people, then come home, and you only have a limited few hours to enjoy it before you need to go to sleep so that you're not tired the next day (which makes working soooooooo much harder).

So you try and squeeze every last bit of family/fun/entertainment/ into those measly hours. So it's inevitable that after a while you start thinking, I want more time and the first thing that you can cut back is sleep.

If your life isn't in a good balanced state, then you'll need to look at it and find out what you value more. Personally I've been happy to reduce my sleep. I use to get 8/9 hours a night. Now I'm lucky if I get 6/7. But being a parent of a 2 year old and another on the way, late evening/night is the only time I can really get to myself and play some games. That or sleep... I'll choose my games. Besides, after a while you learn to cope with the less sleep.

Stengah wrote:

I have an 84 hour work-week, during which all I do is eat, sleep, and work. I do 7 12-hour days, then get the next 7 days off. It's not a very stressful job though.

Sounds about like what I was doing a couple months ago, just distributed a bit differently; we worked Mon/Tues and Fri/Sat/Sun one week and then Wed/Thurs the following week. Wish I could say the job wasn't stressful, the sheer amount of nothing wore my ass out ><

So on that note, can you enjoy rest? I think you have to. If you're not enjoying your down time, the resting and relaxing, then you're probably doing too much of it.

BlackSabre wrote:

oMonarca, it's the consequence of being time poor. The problem is you spend all the friggin day stuck at work, doing stuff for other people, then come home, and you only have a limited few hours to enjoy it before you need to go to sleep so that you're not tired the next day (which makes working soooooooo much harder).

So you try and squeeze every last bit of family/fun/entertainment/ into those measly hours. So it's inevitable that after a while you start thinking, I want more time and the first thing that you can cut back is sleep.

If your life isn't in a good balanced state, then you'll need to look at it and find out what you value more. Personally I've been happy to reduce my sleep. I use to get 8/9 hours a night. Now I'm lucky if I get 6/7. But being a parent of a 2 year old and another on the way, late evening/night is the only time I can really get to myself and play some games. That or sleep... I'll choose my games. Besides, after a while you learn to cope with the less sleep.

Oh, I don't feel my sleeping time is unbalanced. I just usually don't go to bed because I feel I could use some sleep, but because I know that if I don't get at least 7 hours, the week will start to go sour. Sometimes I'll go on a binge (like when I'm close to finishing a game), but that's sporadic.

That said, like 93_confirmed mentioned, physical activity does make sleeping a much more attractive proposition. One of my work's new perks is that I can ride a bike to work. That amounts to around 13 Km's (about 8 miles) daily. At the end of the day I feel physically tired enough that staying awake playing games isn't as enjoyable as before.

To tie that with the idea of balance: I think we really need to tire the mind as much as the body so rest becomes both useful and enjoyable.

As to when I have kids, if they want to play videogames, I'll make damn sure they work as pack mules or something. Maybe carrying me.

I should get two. One for each foot.

I work on average 70 hours a week during university semester time. I resent the need to sleep greatly, once I've got home had a bath and whatever it's bed time. I still generally put in about an hour of either a game, TV series or reading to wind down.

Add to the fact I've had lifelong insomnia (literally, my mother used to get in my cot to get me to sleep), and what seems to be a recent development of some sort of sleep apnea (I wake up choking at night, occasionally) and I'm very frequently sleep deprived. My morning usually starts with 2 or 3 very strong coffees to get me going, but then I cope.

Sundays are sometimes total veg days, but with so little time I often need to run personal errands too.

God I hate my life.

KingGorilla wrote:

Sleep or rest? I am a deep, mostly "dreamless" sleeper. Depression and loving sleep tends to go hand and hand for me. I talk in my sleep and have had night terrors, sleep walking on several occasions. I talk in my sleep as well. So ladies, start lining up for the slice of paradise that is sleeping next to me.

I enjoy "rest." Sleep, like getting my hair cut, has become more of a necessary evil imposed upon my by social convention and biological weakness. By rest I mean sitting in a chair with a scotch and a book or a scotch and a movie or a scotch and my ipod(do we notice a pattern?).

Sitting?