Forty-six and counting

I've developed a new system for tracking sleep-debt. It's sort of like keeping track of birthdays. A way to communicate how tired you are.

First, imagine an ideal period of sleep and waking. For the purposes of this example we'll say you're awake from 8AM to 10PM and asleep until 8AM. Every day this happens you've neither earned or lost any sleep time, you're starting from zero.

That's 10 hours of sleep and 14 of awake time. Good to be well-rested.

So, anyway, the system rates how tired you feel. Let's say you sleep until 10AM instead of 8AM. When you wake up you've gained two hours of sleep, or, you're negative two hours tired.

On the other hand, if you stay up past your 10PM bedtime, until 11PM, say, you've lost an hour of sleep, so even if you wake up at 8AM like you would on a normal day, you're one hour tired.

If you go for a week waking up at 8AM and going to bed at midnight, you're losing two hours of sleep per day, and not gaining any. If you sleep until 2PM on Saturday you've regained six hours, but you're still four hours in the hole.

Of course, it's cumulative, so if you've spent the last three weeks going to bed two hours too late, waking up an hour too early, only getting back three hours on the weekends, and today waking up an extra hour-and-a-half earlier to drive your stupid brother to school because "It's raining" you're now forty-six-and-one-half hours tired.

Except you're not you, you're me.

46.5, and it's only Wednesday. I now have to sleep for almost two days straight to break even.

This wouldn't be such a problem if they let me sleep on the job.

-t