Sleep

One thing I have never been able to understand is how my parents manage to sleep as much as they do. Now I get it. I may not get exactly why, but I can get what they’re going through. A few years ago, I could sleep 8 or 9 hours and be bouncing off the walls all day until it was time to go to bed at night, Now it seems like no matter how much sleep I get, I’m still tired, and I’m still a teenager. Perhaps we sleep much less efficiently as we get older. Or maybe all those sleepless nights in high school catch up to you quick and you never really make up all those hours you should have been resting your brain. Because a lot of the time, it’s not physical sleepiness, it’s all mental. It gets tiring to just think.

Sleep is a pretty intriguing thing to think about, especially because we spend almost half our lives in a state of unconsciousness, in a state that we really know very little about. Or maybe we know tons about it, I’m just not a sleep expert. We had a sleep expert come and give a lecture at my school once about sleep spindles and how REM sleep allows our brain develop spindles between the different neurons in our brains so that we can remember things, and how not getting enough sleep has a direct effect on how much you can remember. You’re also more likely to go insane if you don’t get enough sleep, and you might even get hallucinations. All this makes me take insomnia much more seriously than I previously did.