Ok fuh-rill though (that was pure Utahn...had to throw that in there), I get up every single morning, Mon-Fri, at 4:50 am. I leave the house by 5:15 am and get to work by around 6-6:15. I plug my car in and go to work. I generally work a 10 hour day, so I leave around 4. If things are flowing well I can get out at 9 hours. I don't really ever take a lunch, too much to do and I don't like eating during the day, makes me feel sluggish. My commute home tends to be in the hour and a half range, so leave at 4, get home at 5:30. 12 hours round trip, commute included, every day. If things at work are rough it can easily morph into 12 hour or longer days. That sucks.
I try to get to bed at a commensurate time, like 8:30 or 9 or so, but I am a chronic insomniac with issues getting to sleep, so it is common for me to get to sleep around midnight on good nights, sometimes as late as 1 or 2, then back up again at 4:50, every day. Very rarely I have the all-nighter, when I just cannot sleep no matter what. AJR has that nailed down in their song "Way Less Sad"...
The part about trying to hard but I can't not try is 100% spot on. Although I have taught myself to get up if I can't get to sleep within a half hour. Get out of bed, do something else, only go back when I feel like I am nodding off. I try to keep good bedtime habits but it often doesn't matter. Sleep comes when it wants to, not when I want it to.
When I was younger the short hours of sleep didn't affect me as much, but into my 50's I am really feeling it. I used to have an hour maybe of sluggishness if I had short sleep and then was fine, but recently, read: in the last year or 2, I feel it well into mid-day. I avoid caffeine as I want to give myself the best chance I have to get to sleep at night, but on days like that I usually sip a red bull or monster or something for the first half of the day. Because I don't do much caffeine as it is, it tends to give me a real crash if I drink it all at once, so I space it out and it is a little better. That at least gets me through and I try not to have any at all for a full 8 hours before I go to bed.
One scary thing recently is that my percocet has been causing me sleep disruption. This is common in long-term users, but I had largely avoided it until the last year or so. It causes my brain to fire in weird ways and I end up in this strange limbo thing where I am not really asleep and not really awake. I lie there for a couple hours this way usually then just get up and say, **** it, another night with no sleep.
Interestingly the best things I have found for sleep aids before bed are chamomile tea and valerian root. Valerian has been very effective without leaving me with medicine-head the next day. This is the one I use, one capsule maybe an hour before bedtime.
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And for pain, kratom has been an absolute god-send. When my pain is moderate, I take a measured dose of kratom extract and it is every bit as effective as a percocet. It is crazy. And it has fewer side-effects for me. When the pain is severe I still need the percocet to really make a dent, but maybe 70% of the time kratom does the job just as well. The problem it, it is expensive. I found a place to get it online and it costs me about $13 per bottle of extract. It is actually supposed to be a "shot" of it, like a 5 hour energy, but I take about 1/3 of it because I am looking for pain control, not to get high. Although it does that as well. I wish they would do more research on kratom. They have found it can cause liver damage, I think, so they really just stopped working on it, although there are a few groups out there taking a look at it. But for me it has been a miracle, kid you not. My
I know this thread wasn't necessarily for this kind of thing, but I feel it is all related.