Our bodies, our tormentors

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Any idea what causes the air quality to change so drastically? The aircon / heater not circulating air? Doors closed and no one going in or out?

Just curious if there are other ways to remedy the situation without opening a window in the (soon to be) middle of winter.

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Just as a sort of tangent to this - it used to be normal (apparently all over the world) for people to wake up after a few hours, get up and do stuff for a while, then go back to bed. Basically, there were 2 sleep periods each night.

BBC has a rather long and overly detailed article about it:
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220107-the-lost-medieval-habit-of-biphasic-sleep

Maybe all of us waking up at 2:00 or 3:00 is a remnant of that?

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If we were freed from the needs of a specific schedule, we would take this as signals of when your body wants to wake up and follow a polyphasic sleep schedule. If you're waking up at 3AM all the time, that's a signal your body wants to get up. If you're comfortable sleeping at 7AM, that's a signal that your body wants to sleep. So you would wake up at 3AM and do something for a few hours, then go back to sleep. Overall sleep time ends up the same, though there are some polyphasic schedules out there where you can theoretically sleep as little as 2 hours. They are extremely regimented on the schedule.

But good luck doing any of that while having a regular job.

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Room is too well insulated and sealed. Once the bedroom door is closed, the air exchange is too low. I'm planning to fit a heat exchanging fan system next year to permanently fix it.

Opening a window isn't as bad as it first seems. Most of the heat in a home (at least a brick one) is in the structure. Change the air, close the window, and it will rapidly warm up again. It's only leaving it open for longer periods that cool it down.

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Cool. Understood. Thank you.

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Cool stuff, thanks for sharing!

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Great read. Thanks for sharing it! Genuinely learned something today

Lenny

For me, there is a "yessss let's go!" moment that will happen eventually that let's me know I've truly slept enough, but I truly do think we're all exhausted in a way we're not evolved to properly deal with yet. Maybe 15-17 hours, while excessive, is what we all collectively need to start the repairing process. Who knows.

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This time of year it might be random bouts of 3AM fireworks.

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I get to that point if I had like 4+ days off work, or if things all fall into place (no one needs me, allergies weren't triggered, the weather didn't make all my joints hurt...) It seems to happen around 9 hours of sleep.

It doesn't happen often, but I'll say my brain just seems to work so much better when this happens. It does make me wish that things could be slow enough that this is typical, but I suppose I'm better off than I have been so I can't really complain.