If I go to bed at 9 PM, I wake up at 2AM. If I retire at 10 PM, I wake at 3AM. If I retire at 12, I wake at 5.
Am I harming myself? You are supposed to get 8 hours of sleep/night.
This has been going on for years…is there anything I can do?
Been there.
No clue as to why.
You aren’t unusual. As long as it doesn’t interfere with your daily life, there’s nothing you need to do about it.
The biggest misunderstanding about the “8 hours per night” cliche is that it is an average, not an absolute. Actually, the normal range is between 6 and 10 hours per night (+/-2 hours.) I’m on the 10 hour side, and have been since I was a child.
Some people just require different amounts of sleep to each other - the 8 hour figure is at best a rough average and at worst, a number someone just pulled out of their ass.
You are DOOMED! :eek:
BBC News - Lack of sleep 'linked to early death' “Lack of sleep linked to early death”
They said people regularly having less than 6 hours of sleep were 12% more likely to die over a 25-year period than those who got an “ideal” six to eight hours.
What’s the point of living longer just to spend those extra hours unconscious?
I sympathize with you, all of you that can’t sleep for very long or at all. I’m a chronic insomniac and have been all of my life. I can remember as a teenager being unable to get to sleep at night and then not being able to get up to go to school the next morning.
As the years went by, my sleep problems turned into Can’t get to sleep, Can’t stay asleep, Can’t get more than about 4 or 5 hours. I wake up just about every hour and then it takes awhile to drift back off.
Are you staying asleep the whole 5 hours? If you are, then you’re probably getting what you need. Are you waking up because you just aren’t sleepy anymore or because of pain? My body actually starts aching if I lie there too long. If you’re feeling ok, then I wouldn’t worry too much about it. Talk to your doctor if you aren’t feeling well or feeling tired all the time. Not enough sleep can certainly cause health problems. Good Luck…
I don’t think I’ve ever slept 5 hours at a stretch. Since I work at home, I can pretty much sleep whenever I want. Which means I have an extremely irregular sleeping pattern, usually broken up into 3 segments . . . probably not adding up to more than 5-6 hours all together.
When I was working graveyard shift, and living on a very noisy street in Manhattan, I often went without any sleep at all. I’m still dealing with the health problems that caused.
I used to often have this form of insomnia; learning to relax, doing progressive relaxation exercises, and doing meditation pretty much cured me. Now if I wake up too early, I do a little relaxation, do a little bit of mindful breathing, and I drop right back off again.
I’m not alone!!! I have terrible insomnia as a general rule, but when I wake up I’m often in agony. Most commonly it’s my ears or my elbows that hurt but it can also be shoulders or legs. It is excruciating and makes it impossible to fall back asleep, regardless of how tired I still am.
Do you feel tired when you wake up? If not, then you’re fine.
Are you well-rested when you wake up? If so, there’s absolutely no problem. There is no arbitrary amount (“Everyone needs 8 hours of sleep!”) that everyone needs. Your body knows how much sleep it needs.
Hey dingus, read my posts next time before you reply 
Reading the thread before posting is for noobs!
I guess I’m doing it wrong.
Segmented sleep is a partial answer.
I had a sleep study done for obstructive sleep apnea - I snore like a bandsaw.
In I shuffle at 7 pm … spend a couple hours answering a questionaire and getting wired up like some andriod. Go to bed, and fall asleep. I popped awake at 2 am just like I told the guy running the study on me, decided to get a drink of water and go pee. Went back to bed and read a book on my droid, fell back asleep at 4 am, just like I had told the guy I would, and woke up 2 minutes before 5 am, just like I told the guy I would.
Nary a leg twitch, nary a drop of breath, impressive volume snoring. I just have what is called segmented sleep. Doctor decided I could be drugged off my ass for a full nights sleep, with the possible following addiction. I could do some sort of therapy to ‘reorient’ my sleeping, but she noted I fell right to sleep, and that my popping awake was all naturally my sleep pattern, and unless it was seriously disrupting my life, she couldnt see trying to retrain me out of it.
I do fall asleep during the day, but it is related to the damned pills I am on. Of the 9 meds I am on, 5 of them have drowsiness as a side effect :smack:
My sleep study results said “Insomnia due to mental disorder” which is pretty much exactly what I’d always told everyone.
That may be a bit narrow. I would say rather that if one is not fatigued, listless, irritable, anxious, etc. during the day, that’s fine.
If one is suffering from symptoms like that, then it may well be worth looking into some mechanical/behavioral/pharmacological sleep aids.
My shoulders, legs and back area will start to bother me. I wish it was just due to a bad mattress but no such luck. My head will start to feel achy, too.
One thing that helps with insomnia is to keep yourself on the same sleep schedule everyday if at all possible. Going to bed and rising at the same time weekdays and weekends. I learned this when trying to deal with chronic migraines. I also learned from the migraine specialist that most migraine sufferers also suffer from insomnia.
Five hours? In a row?! how lucky are you!. If I sleep 3 hours without waking, I’ve had a good night. I usually go 1.5 hours, wake up reposition, lie there for 20 minutes to an hour. I do go back to sleep and sleep a total of 7-8 hours, but never in my life have I slept straight through the night.