Saturday, August 20, 2011

Sleep deprivation math

We went camping last weekend, and so of course my children were awake until about 11 pm.  This is long past their normal bedtime of 7 pm (where most of them are asleep by 8 pm).  You would think that after coming home and having one good night's rest, that somehow this would equal out and they would be back to normal.  I've found that it almost always takes 2 good nights of sleep, though, to make up for every 1 late night.  And it's not just my children.  I think I have this same problem.  I'm never as tired the morning after a late night as I am the following day, as if there's a one day lag.

I started calculating what this means for catching up for sleep in my lifetime, if I have to have 2 good nights' sleep to make up for every 1 bad night of sleep.  I pretty sure I went through 4 years of high school and 5 years of college without many good nights' sleep.  So, 9 years x 2 to make up for it, would mean I would need 18 years of good sleep.  Maybe the first 13 years of my life I slept pretty good, so that gets me pretty close.  Then we get to starting to raise a family.  We can rule out about 6 months of each pregnancy x 4 children, so there's another 2 years.  Oh, and then there's the first 3 months of having a new child when you're up in the middle of the night regularly, x 4, so there's another 1 year.  That's 3 years, so I'll need another 6 years to make up for that.  I'm pretty sure that's not going to happen until all my children are older and done with night terrors, bad dreams, etc.  Oh, but wait, then there's are those teenage years when I'm up worrying about my children or waiting for them to come home at night. 

I've decided I should probably stop calculating it all and just go to sleep.  Apparently I need all the good nights' sleep I can get.

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