Aside from a 45 minute nap yesterday(?) afternoon I have been awake for 37 hours*.
I've had trouble sleeping / had a messed up sleep schedule for quite a while now, and I think that I can safely say that I have tasted sleep-deprivation.
2016 was a crazy year for everyone, and for me it was a continuation plus magnification of the craziness of 2015. For about a year after the beginning of my life and the finding of theatre I held up really well, but then in February 2016 I started getting tired. But did I slow down? No. In fact I did something which I had vowed not to do after doing in the year before: three shows at once. Now, if you aren't familiar with theatre you might not understand the insanity of that so here is a quick
x + x = X
1 show/production requires X amount of: energy (also seen in the forms of: time, blood, sweat, and tears.)
In order to function your body needs to retain X amount of energy.
And lets say that my life has XXXx of our slowly replenishing resources of the afore mentioned items.
Most healthy people would have approximately... more than me. And they would spend 1 on work/school, 1 on social life + hobbies, and then if they are in theatre they'll spend 1 on that.
anywho. I was in 3 shows at the same time. now i don't have a social life or work, but i did have school. so lets do the math (i'm terrible at math AND analogies so hang in there) we have
- Kayla = XXXx
- 1 show (x3) = XXX
- school (two light semesters) = X
- energy used for life = X
which becomes
XXXx minus XXXXX
which means I'm in debt.
whether that made any sense i don't know.
So what happens when you are awake too long? well according to my five minutes of research, when you reach 36-48 hours of consciousness, you gain appetite (which is actually good for me) some times hallucinate or blur reality with fiction, your powers of memorization get bad, likelihood of making bad decisions goes way up and:
"One of the things that happens when you're sleep deprived is that your ability to regulate emotions goes haywire. Your brain becomes disorganized in its capacity to process information and your sensitivity to information also get scrambled," says Jason Silva, the host of "Brain Games."**
in my personal experience things have mostly just been silly. I laugh at everything. I play with my face, and in general act like a toddler. my brain jumbles words and letters, my typing is greatly hindered (this writing has been a challenge), my eyes might refuse to focus, and when i sit still i start to lose feeling in my body - not like numbness, but more like my consciousness is withdrawing, leaving behind the molt. I have a few times nearly fallen asleep standing, my mind goes blank and i sway without the ability to do anything about it or even to tell if its real.
people have said that if you are kept awake for too long you will go insane, but i've also heard that the human body will perform a forced restart and make you pass out - much like a sim who wasn't taken care of. so in that case, if you are being forcefully kept awake wouldn't the cause of the not sleeping be the cause of the insanity? and not the act of not sleeping?
{edit} OH YEAH! I remember now where I was going with the theatre talk. I was gonna say, that I've been sleep deprived since last summer when I nearly destroyed myself with the combination of how much I was doing and how little I was eating and sleeping. I've lived how ever many months with the symptoms but just kept going. Until Christmas when I decided that I wouldn't go back to MCC this semester - which was a good choice, cuz im getting better! I haven't managed to take as much of a theatre break as I had planned though...
SO YEAH.
that was me. rambling on while sleep deprived.
* I went over the math to check my numbers like 10 times.
** apparently there's a great episode of Brain Games that covers this but I wouldn't be able to process it right now, so I'll watch it later.
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