The impact of lack of sleep on you

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I am a bad sleeper and so often have days where I am pretty wiped out. Last night was a bad one.

my question though is what impact this has on you? I find I kind of retreat into myself when I am exhausted like today, I sink back into my own brain and switch off the outside world a bit. its hard to explain but I just kind of get a bit lost inside myself. maybe that is the easiest place to go rather than deal external demands. I was going to say I become more aspie when exhausted like this, but not sure if that is the correct way to say it.

i sleep very well every night but if i havent slept properly for whatever reason im more likely to have meltdowns over nothing and cry more

I have periods of insomnia. I'm alright at the moment but I still wake up at least a couple of times a night. I get a sort of brain fog, the feeling of being more removed from the world - like I've stepped back in my brain and I'm looking out of my eye sockets from further back, with reduced awareness. But the worst impact of lack of sleep on me is that I get increased sleep paralysis experiences.

Ask your doctor for a Trazadone prescription. Works wonders for me.

When I was young the only ill effect I noticed after not sleeping for a whole night was ordinary but more intense tiredness towards the end of that following day. The morning didn't feel any different from normal, which surprised me.

These days it's rather worse. If I'm underslept I have some nausea from the moment I get out of bed, I feel as if I've consumed some kind of poison, and my brain function is impaired to a degree. It's harder for me to concentrate. I start to get mild double-vision. Not surprisingly, my mood usually takes a turn for the worse.

I can't sleep unless I'm lying flat, nor can I sleep at an airport, so when I travel between London and Memphis (which I've done 7 times there and back, on my own, since 2013) I'm awake for at least 35 hours, but surprisingly I've always mastered the adventure in spite of all the curveballs it throws at me which require a lot of good focus, rapid decision-making and social skill. How? They say a little bit of stress helps people to function. I wouldn't call the stress I go through little, but with a lifetime's experience in managing stress I can cope with quite a bit of it, and I think the adrenaline (or whatever it is) helps me to keep me alert for solving the problems and possibly acts as an analgesic. Of course I know that however badly things go wrong I'm not likely to die through incompetence. The task is so important and demanding that it distracts me from all the crappy sensations I'd experience from being underslept if I were just slobbing about at home. It's amazing what people can do in an emergency.

It's no use as a general intervention for the ill effects of being underslept of course, and I wouldn't recommend anybody jumping into the deep end of life as a remedy (I suspect it might occasionally work but it sounds rather dangerous). But if an underslept person who can't simply sleep it off can find something reasonably safe and fascinating to do, the resulting hyperfocus might distract some people from those symptoms, to a degree at least, if the symptoms aren't too intense to allow that to happen.

Sleep is really an important part of you. Deep sleep (REM and NREM sleep) allows the other part of you to file away all the events of the day into long term storage. Without it your brain reaches a breaking point and you wake up the next morning in a very stressed and fractured state.

On one hand, I associate lack of sleep with good times I didn't want to end. Sometimes it was a party, but more often a project that I didn't want to forget the details of. Those projects had me sleeping only three or four times a week when I was around 20, but I caught up each time. I think I'm also a natural night-owl. I like the freedom from interruptions. However, I was badly traumatized in a dangerous marriage that made it hard to sleep, and that wore me down to the point that I just had to abandon my property. For years afterwards, my goal was to get enough sleep to be safe to drive. Eventually, I saw that if I got another hour or so, I also felt a lot safer around people, and got along much better with a smile than a frown.
Chronic lack of sleep also makes me stupid and/or stubborn. I'm often a handyman, but after I moved here to improve my sleep it took me years to notice some basic things about the house. I was still doing some good custom work when I applied myself, but I'd been too lazy to just think a little bit more about other things to understand them.

I need a lot more sleep than most people

Sometimes 8 hours not enough

And often exhausted regardless of sleep

Brainfog, brain fart, slow reflexes, even under the best case scenario

The quality of my sleep is uneven. I am often tired, too tired even for things I want to do.

Fatigue makes me want to retreat to my bed, sleep and read.

If I can’t do that, I am cranky, irritable, have brain fog and make mistakes.

During the times that I sleep poorly, I have psychotic episodes where I have unrealistic plans. My imagination also becomes very colourful.

I also get fatigue from mild dehydration. I work hard at remembering how much I've had to drink, and considering that as a cure first. With enough water, I have a pretty good chance of only having to cancel my thinking plans, and still making progress on the mindless stuff like exercise, cleaning, or sunbathing in season.

Limiting blue light in the evening is really important because your body won't realize it's night if you have daylight temperature light bulbs in your house. Also use night shift on your phone/computer which makes everything more orange at night.

- Sentences fail to come together.

- My reading ability is impaired significantly more than it is typically.

- Spacing / Zoning out more than usual.

- Irritability.

- Fatigue.

- Not wanting to eat or wanting to eat the entire kitchen.

- Confusion (e.g. pouring water on cereal, grabbing a fork, then standing there buffering )

- Visual hallucinations.

The hallucinations are quite something. I once visualised a small ballerina sat on my windowsill. She had the teeth of a shark and her eyes seemed to be endless voids. I looked at her and said "point yes, sleep is now".

My student days certainly taught me about the importance of sleep.

That reminded me of a strange effect I had after my last transatlantic flight adventure had stopped me sleeping for 36 hours or more - not a full-blown hallucination but something akin to it. Once I'd arrived at my final destination, many of the objects I could vaguely see out of the corners of my eyes appeared to be people. It was really weird. I knew they weren't people, but the impression that they were was quite strong and striking. I wondered why this was happening, and came up with this explanation - for several months I had been spending most of my time alone, then suddenly I was among crowds of people at the airport. In order to avoid colliding with them and for other reasons, my brain had the sudden urgent challenge of quickly recognising it when I saw them out of the corners of my eyes, so that later on when I was very underslept, although the crowds were no longer around me, my brain continued for a while to interpret anything remotely resembling a person as actually being a person.

I hallucinate every day now before going to bed. I don't see people but I see myself being in a different room in my peripheral vision. The furniture and everything changes. Sometimes I startle and think there's someone walking past although I don't actually see anyone. I get a sensation that I'm on display in public and I physically jump to snap out of it. This is all when I'm still sitting up, before I get in bed. Sometimes I'm still online.

I've had auditory hallucinations when falling asleep / waking up, on and off for years. That's when I'm actually in bed in the dark. They happen maybe once a week.

Lack of sleep: It's hard to say how I feel since I have chronic sleep deprivation. I don't really notice a change except that my body feels heavy and it's harder to move.

I can deal with some lack of sleep, but if I get less than a certain amount it starts to affect me. The less sleep I have the more it affects me. I definitely am 'more autistic' on those days and the effects are far more than just being more withdrawn. My wife also noticed that very quickly. I also have a compounding issue at play when I am sleep deprived; I have a dysfunction of the autonomic nervous system (POTS), which is aggravated by lack of sleep among other things. So when I am sleep deprived I also am dealing with the plethora of issues from POTS and trying extra hard to stay on top of drinking and managing symptoms. Basically, being sleep deprived makes me sick. When I am sick from pots I feel out of it and can't think or process things as quickly.

Even when I am not dealing with feeling sick from pots, I definitely get 'more autistic' when I am tired. Same with when I am stressed.