Ivy,
I can't take naps either! Gosh I never heard of anybody else like this before...whenever I've been tired enough to let myself fall asleep for a few minutes during the day...I was REALLY SORRY for it later...when I woke up from a nap, I'd be so psychotic-feeling...I mean totally disoriented, foggy, fearful and just weird-feeling...it's just not worth it to me...I don't take naps because I feel like it messes me up so bad!!!!
Let us know how your sleep experiments go.
Personally, I VALUE the nights when I've been able to get 7 or 8 (I don't recall EVER getting more than 8 hours ... so I have no idea how that would feel... 8 has been the extreme for me) hours' sleep...I really feel good the next day. 5 hours is more my usual...and there's a difference...I prefer more than that, for me personally.
Anyone who has had a phobia knows they are different than just fears and anxieties...with a phobia, you really CAN'T function at all or be there in the particular situation. I had agorophobia, or more specifically demophobia...fear of crowds, and for about a year I could not go anywhere but just a certain patch of woods around our house. I was anxious if I got outside of the woods...and too terrified to even venture into even a little-bitty convenient store. The flourescent lights seemed to amplify the phobia, so any public place became off limits for me at that point. I struggled with everything I had to overcome that. It was really hard. Sometimes even now, we go to something like a baseball game or somewhere where it's really, really crowded...and I feel twinges of discomfort, and I have to do some things inside my head to stop the process, although I don't think it would ever get as bad as it was back many years ago. I've read there can be a connection with gluten in both depression and phobias...makes me wonder if it could be true in my case, now that I know I cannot tolerate gluten. I first got my phobia immediately after having surgery to remove my appendix as a kid. None of the adults believed me...they thought I was faking stuff to avoid school...and I didn't have a good grasp on what I was experiencing, myself, enough to know how to relay that to the adults...and it was just torturous and terrifying. Eventually, by the time I was graduating from high school...the panic and terror I had been forced to endure daily to get through school had just worn off; I was free of the phobia. But about six years later it became retriggered, somehow, and was even worse than ever...without the world of adults forcing me to do things...as an adult faced with such terror, I chose to avoid the situtaions, and the panic became so powerful I found myself frozen and unable to do things. I finally found help...struggled through for a couple of years, and gradually got my life back again. Wondering right now if the surgery had triggered some gluten intolerance, and, even though i had no intestinal sypmtoms...wondering if gluten peptides began crossing the blood brain barrier????? Okayl....groundhogs always have lots to wonder about...
Anyway... I'm curious to hear how anybodys sleep experiments go.