It is said that the average adult needs 7 to 8 hours of sleep to function at their maximum potential. Children need more than this, starting as newborns of course, a LOT more, most of the day really, then down to 10 hours or so by about 10 years old, and gradually less on through their teen years. It is also said that as you get older, especially past 50 or so, you need less and less sleep. I am not to that point yet, so it would be hard to say.
I probably average about 6 hours of sleep a night. I should get a couple hours more, but I have always had difficulty just laying in bed forcing myself to sleep, so I tend to wait till I'm dead tired, so that my head hits the pillow and I pass out. Not the best way to get a good night's rest, but it works for me. As for D, she is smarter about it, goes to bed at a reasonable hour and reads a book for awhile, then shuts out the lights, and goes to sleep. I should likely trying to get more sleep, but it is hard to change your sleep habits. I do notice something rather interesting though: when you sleep more than 8 hours, you seem to be more tired throughout the following day, as though you only slept 4 or 5 hours the night before.
The reason for this, quite frankly, is scientific. Through vast and expensive research, I have discovered that there is a secret place in the brain that stores negative sleep. Negative sleep is when you don't get enough sleep at night. Say you sleep for only 5 hours, you would need 3 more hours of sleep to get to a full night's rest. Well the body stores that 3 hours in a special cache, and then whenever you go over 8 hours, the body taps into that cache of negative sleep, and you end up feeling more groggy and tired the than if you had slept only the required 7 to 8 hours.
By this point in my life I would probably need to sleep a full 2 years to completely clear my negative sleep cache. While in Iraq for a year, I don't think there was ever a time when I slept for a full uninterrupted 8 hours. Usually it was 4 to 5 hours, if I was lucky, then catch up with an hour or 2 later in the day, during down time between missions. This made a lot of days in Iraq seem very surreal, especially when you consider the bleak terrain, and the contrast in temperature and light, as you go from a 78 degree living area with the lights out, into a 125 degree blinding sun blast with light reflecting off the light colored sandy rocky ground. After I got back CONUS (stateside), it was more than 6 months before I got back into a regular sleep cycle again. Iraq was probably the greatest single contributor to my negative sleep cache.
So, why am I writing about this today? I don't know, I am using up leave, so it allows me to sleep a little extra, and I was thinking about negative sleep again, so what the hell, thought I'd write about it. I would say that I could be dreaming right now, but apparently the kids (the second biggest contributor to negative sleep) are tearing up the house, so I know I'm not dreaming. In my dreams, they are being perfect angels, they would never dirty up the house.
