rin inspired sleeping/relaxing

[inquisitivenegro]

Energy drinks are for the weak

[WorldlyWiseman]

It's obvious what has to be done, just the doing that is challenging. Waking up at 4 in the morning means going to bed when the sun is still up. I've picked up some melatonin capsules. It would be ridiculous to try and compare this to tobacco or alcohol or something else, but anyone else trying to kick a chemical habit?

Nappingbros isn't gonna catch on like Runningbros, but I guess I thought it would be chuckle-worthy to have a Rin-counterpart thread to the Emi-running thread.

[ShadeHaven]

Energy drinks and coffee along with other caffeinated drinks actually make me tired. I'm not sure why. I prefer Arizona tea anyway.

[Helbereth]

Tea is loaded with caffeine, you know.

Ask Lilly.

[Surreal-mind]

It's pretty weird with me...
Normally I can sleep without any problems, but if for some reason I don't get any sleep one night (like neighbours playing loud music or something) I'm not able to sleep for the next days either.

Then there was a time I just never felt sleepy and barely got any sleep in weeks, but lately I feel sleepy all the time and have fallen asleep a couple of times while watching tv.

So I don't know .. it's always weird with me.

[nemz]

You've obviously have never had prolonged periods of bad sleep.

I have actually, but that was typically insomnia due to stress. If the problem is the schedule then you just have to change the schedule, or at least recognize the parts of it that are flexible and see if you can find a better arrangement.

Also note that you don't need to get your sleep all at once.

[ShadeHaven]

Tea is loaded with caffeine, you know.

And I though their raspberry Iced tea had no caffeine. See? I can't even tell.

Ask Lilly.

Oh I'm aware, how else would she keep that sex drive so healthy?

[TheBrotasticBrony]

All this talk about coffee is reminding me of Jimmy from Pulp Fiction. Seriously though, watch the energy drinks and coffee, you can develop a dependency on the stuff and that can have serious side effects. It's probably better to go to bed at around 9:00 PM or so to guarantee a good morning and your overall health rather than staying up late and using energy drinks to fill the void.

[DrNonookee]

I thought it would be chuckle-worthy to have a Rin-counterpart thread to the Emi-running thread.

Funny, perhaps, but also surprisingly appropriate. Sleep and exercise are more related than a lot of people realize; I've been finding this out myself lately.

Until fairly recently, I've been very lethargic overall, and I now realize that part of this is because I wasn't sleeping right. In my case, a big part of the problem was simply that of procrastination - I'd stay up past my bedtime playing video games or watching TV or writing message board posts. I never seemed to have enough 'me' time and as a result I was always trying to squeeze out that extra half-hour or hour of entertainment before having to go to work the next day. I never thought much of it, for reasons I'll explain shortly.

Then I played KS, fell in love with Emi and realized from her playthrough that, if I started exercising, I'd probably have more energy. I tried it, and it worked - I've been feeling a big boost in my overall get-up-and-do-crap factor. The funny thing is, the exercise is only part of it.

See, the thing is, my 'sleepiness' doesn't seem to work like most other peoples'. If I fail to get enough sleep, I don't just go around feeling tired - I feel *achey*. Not getting enough sleep causes me to suffer from annoyingly persistant muscle pains the next day - lower back pain, leg and knee pain, shoulder pain, etc. The tiredness associated from lack of sleep is there, but that part hardly bothers me - I can just sort of ignore it once I claw my way out of bed. But the aches were, and sometimes still are, a big issue.

For a long while I'd let myself fall into the stay-up-late habit despite the inevitable pain - since I sat around on my butt all the time anyway, I was able to tough it out. But once I decided to start exercising, I realized that A) I was going to have to sleep well and stop the aching in order to be able to work out, and B) I'd probably sleep better after I started working out anyway. Both turned out to be true - ever since I started working out (even though it's just a little power-walking each day), I've felt a lot more energetic - partly because the exercise gets my feel-good endorphins flowing, and partly because doing it essentially forced me out of a bad sleeping habit. Doubly effective.

Of course, sometimes I still have issues with sleep. The biggest one is bathroom trips - I tend to drink a good bit (beverage-wise, I mean, not booze-wise) throughout the day and evening, constantly sipping on some drink or other (it helps me curb the urge to snack). By the time I've been asleep for about 5-6 hours, whatever I drank in the evening is ready to finish processing, so to speak, and sleep be damned. End result is having to make at least one pee break per night, if not two. Fortunately I've gotten so used to it that I can get up, do my business, and be back in bed asleep within 5 minutes.

But, I digress. Point being, exercising regularly will both help you sleep better (by giving your body a reason to be legitimately tired and burning off pent-up nervous energy) and discourage bad habits that interfere with sleep (via the exercise kicking your ass if you don't get enough).

As an added note, I've also stopped my caffiene intake. I've always drank diet soda all the time, but until recently I made a point to get caffinated diet soda to try and combat my lethargy. Now I've switched to decaf as part of my general "be healthier" pledge, and between the exercise and better-quality sleep, I don't even miss it. The others are right; caffiene is a stopgap measure, not something to rely on. Plus, coffee tastes like mud. There, I said it. I hate coffee.

As for energy drinks...feh. They're a rip-off. The small ones that come in bottles are like steroids - they might get the job done, but it's an ultimately-harmful quick-fix chemical shortcut for a bigger problem that should be dealt with in other ways. And as far as I know, the big ones like Red Bull are just overly-caffinated booze substitutes. :p

Of course, as for the actual *quality* of sleep, there's a lot of other factors. Stress is one - if you're the type of person who frets over, say, work issues all the time, or are otherwise high-strung, you can kiss quality sleep goodbye. Try to mellow out. I have a lot of free time at work where I'm sitting around at my desk babysitting a big empty lobby for hours on end; often during the afternoon I'll go sit in one of the waiting area chairs and just stare out the window and let my mind wander randomly. It's a nice mental pallate-cleanser from work and the audio-visual stimulation of my video games, and I recommend this sort of minor meditation to anyone having trouble with stress. The complete removal of any chemical-related substances, such as smoking or alcohol, will help too, but kicking those habits is beyond the scope of this thread, I think.

Unfortunately there may be other, more medical problems at work. My father has been sleeping poorly lately, and recently underwent a sleep study to find out of he has sleep apnea(sp). If you find yourself suffering from *really* bad sleep and can't seem to affect a change through improved habits, you might want to ask your doctor.

One last note: While some people (such as Rin) might condone naps, I can't say that I do. They don't work for me - I always wake up feeling *worse* than when I dozed off. I don't seem to get any rest, and then I have to struggle through the pain of waking up all over again on top of it.

[Helbereth]

One last note: While some people (such as Rin) might condone naps, I can't say that I do. They don't work for me - I always wake up feeling *worse* than when I dozed off. I don't seem to get any rest, and then I have to struggle through the pain of waking up all over again on top of it.

Actually, Rin likely isn't napping for any lack of sleep or for being tired. If you've ever been working on something creative like drawing, painting, writing or otherwise, you eventually hit a point where you hit an imagination wall (not an imaginary wall, mind you). You spend so much time focusing on what you're trying to achieve as an end result that you end up getting lost in the details between.

A quick nap to reset your brain can help you come back to a project like that, and continue prodding through the 'work' part of creativity. Basically, she's like a Windows-based computer - every so often you should just shut it down and reboot to clear the cobwebs and get back to smooth running.

I'm not sure as to whether it's healthy physically, but they do say 'what's good for the mind is good for the body'.

[Surreal-mind]

Yesterday a stupid neighbour was playing really shitty music all night and I coudn't sleep at all !

[Revvy]

I remember once about 3 years ago i stayed up for around 53 hours straight, started seeing shit and passed out on my friends living room floor, woke up on his sofa 18 hours later lol

[Helbereth]

I remember once about 3 years ago i stayed up for around 53 hours straight, started seeing shit and passed out on my friends living room floor, woke up on his sofa 18 hours later lol

I think my record for staying up was around 70 hours. I was 11 or 12 at the time, and it was like a competition between my older brother, his friend and myself. We sat up playing SNES games, punching each other and, eventually, having increasingly irate and or inane discussions about objects we found around the room. I don't even remember who 'won', but I'm pretty sure we all lost.

Surprisingly, I think the only drug involved was caffeine. We just decided to do it, too - like deciding to climb a tree, or jump off the swing, or throw rocks at a hornet nest.

I was a real dumbass at times.

[WorldlyWiseman]

I remember once about 3 years ago i stayed up for around 53 hours straight, started seeing shit and passed out on my friends living room floor, woke up on his sofa 18 hours later lol

I think my record for staying up was around 70 hours.

Mine is a very modest 34. I don't care to go into the reasons, though.

Until fairly recently, I've been very lethargic overall, and I now realize that part of this is because I wasn't sleeping right. In my case, a big part of the problem was simply that of procrastination - I'd stay up past my bedtime playing video games or watching TV or writing message board posts. I never seemed to have enough 'me' time and as a result I was always trying to squeeze out that extra half-hour or hour of entertainment before having to go to work the next day. I never thought much of it, for reasons I'll explain shortly.

Then I played KS, fell in love with Emi and realized from her playthrough that, if I started exercising, I'd probably have more energy. I tried it, and it worked - I've been feeling a big boost in my overall get-up-and-do-crap factor. The funny thing is, the exercise is only part of it.

See, the thing is, my 'sleepiness' doesn't seem to work like most other peoples'. If I fail to get enough sleep, I don't just go around feeling tired - I feel *achey*. Not getting enough sleep causes me to suffer from annoyingly persistant muscle pains the next day - lower back pain, leg and knee pain, shoulder pain, etc. The tiredness associated from lack of sleep is there, but that part hardly bothers me - I can just sort of ignore it once I claw my way out of bed. But the aches were, and sometimes still are, a big issue.

You wouldn't believe how much of this applies to me. Whenever I first got out of high school, I started sinking a lot of time into World of Warcraft, falling asleep in the late afternoon so that I could get up later in the evening and play with my west-coast guildmates until the early morning. I left WoW eventually, but I never had a set bed time in my mind and I still get a bit of a mental rush whenever 9 PM or so rolls around in preparation for a raid that is never going to happen. This wasn't a problem until I got a job that demanded early shifts. I still feel too awake to sleep if I stay up much past 8 or so, and it becomes really easy to start reading an article or a forum thread 'until I start to get tired'.

Add this in with my idea of exercise being 'go to the gym and do a bunch of random sets without any guidance or even a spotter', and my body is stiff all the damn time, no matter how much stretching I do. I look pretty trim, but it's just not healthy. All of this is an embarrassing lack of discipline and Shizune would hate me for it, so it has to change . So I've set a bed time and I'm enforcing it with melatonin. Hopefully I can condition myself.

I've tried naps and it hasn't succeeded in really resting me, but maybe I'm just bad at them.

[ZXRN]

I can only suggest a few things. 1 is megumeru's tip about staring at the clouds...yes, it will clear your mind. 2. close your eyes for a like 5 seconds when feeling a little bit stressed. (something I got from Rin) 3. Always get some sleep. Even in the busiest moment in my thesis at college, I gotta have at least an hour to sleep. Just to keep goin' later on.

Dunno much about energy drinks. But I guess it can't be that bad if you drink it..once a day probably?