{"id":4298,"date":"2016-10-04T15:51:24","date_gmt":"2016-10-04T15:51:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.iowabiker.com\/?p=4298"},"modified":"2025-01-19T01:28:30","modified_gmt":"2025-01-19T01:28:30","slug":"the-great-sleep-mystery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.iowabiker.com\/?p=4298","title":{"rendered":"The Great Sleep Mystery"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sometimes I don’t sleep well. I believe this happens to most folks at some point or another. And with the exception of David Lee Roth<\/a>, who claims he “hasn’t slept since the 70s,” I don’t think people’s sleep issues are as bad as they tend to make them out to be. But I do believe they seem that bad in the middle of a bout of insomnia.<\/p>\n

My problem has never really been an inability to get to sleep, but rather an inability to sleep as long as I want. I have the premature waking type of insomnia. I’ve had it for years, but not consistently. I can go several months with no issues, but then, for no discernable reason, start waking up an hour or two early for a week or two. Somewhere in there I’ll be so tired that I’ll sleep a full night, but for the most part, when this starts happening I know I’m in for a tired few weeks. <\/p>\n

Part of me thinks this is because I taught myself to do it. Until a few years years back, I was a morning person. This was by nature, but also by design. For over 10 years I taught myself to wake up early because the less time I spent sleeping the less shitty and debilitating the headaches I had in the morning were. But then came the blessed, blessed CPAP.<\/p>\n

It’s no joke when I tell people the night I did my sleep study that the 4 hours I slept with the CPAP was the best, most restful sleep I’d had in over a decade. Imagine that! Continuous breathing makes for better sleep!<\/p>\n

Once I got the CPAP I went back to sleeping the whole night, but eventually the premature waking started in again. I have no idea why. I do have the anxiousness and excitement of looming fatherhood, but as my brothers and sisters know, it’s hard to be stressed when your motorcycle is your main mode of transportation. My life is pretty low-stress all around. <\/p>\n

And for the “You’ll Be Dreaming of Getting 4 Hours Of Sleep When The Kid Gets Here” crowd, yeah, I know. I’m OK with that. Because I’ve had plenty of practice. Whether it’s premature waking or being a Systems Admin that gets woken up by annoying as fuck pages at all hours of the night, I can handle the no sleep thing. <\/p>\n

(Seriously, you try getting woke up from a dead sleep at 3AM and being forced to figure out why the mail servers went down and now 100,000+ people are without mail and the pages don’t stop coming, one after the other, Tech Support is getting hit by angry customers and now here come the phone calls from the NOC asking if I know that mail is down. If I can handle that, I can handle changing a diaper, a feeding, or soothing a kid that screams themself to sleep. And if worse comes to worse, I have great earplugs.) <\/p>\n

But none of that matters when my eyes pop open at 4 AM and I am fully awake. I’m not gonna get back to sleep at that point. Sometimes I lay there, but there are times like this morning where I get up, spend some time with Sid, make some Valhalla Java Odinforce Blend<\/a> coffee, fire up my Xbox, turn the sound down, and play some Destiny. Some mornings I read a book. Neither are a bad way to spend an hour or so, but all in all, I’d rather be sleeping.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sometimes I don’t sleep well. I believe this happens to most folks at some point or another. And with the exception of David Lee Roth, who claims he “hasn’t slept since the 70s,” I don’t think people’s sleep issues are as bad as they tend to make them out to be. But I do believe… <\/p>\n

Read More<\/i><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4298","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-random"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.iowabiker.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4298","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.iowabiker.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.iowabiker.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.iowabiker.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.iowabiker.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4298"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"http:\/\/www.iowabiker.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4298\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4338,"href":"http:\/\/www.iowabiker.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4298\/revisions\/4338"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.iowabiker.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4298"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.iowabiker.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4298"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.iowabiker.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4298"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}