The serious side effects of sleep deprivation
While we all know that a couple of bad nights of sleep can make life suck, if it continues for any length of time, like say you have a crying infant to take care of, more things than a sucky time happen.
After Baby M was born, about two or three weeks into very little sleep I mentioned that I was more and more feeling like Dexter Morgan, the psychopathic serial killer from Showtime’s Dexter. It turns out that’s one of the serious side effects of sleep deprivation – symptoms that are similar to psychosis.
While I didn’t become a serial killer and as far as I know the worst I did to anyone that I’d publicly admit is become a bit bitchy and tired and overprotective, the other symptoms are more common and can be life threatening if not at least noticed and accounted for.
Symptoms of sleep deprivation
These include, but are not limited to:
- aching muscles
- confusion
- memory loss or lapses
- hallucinations
- headaches
- increased blood pressure
- increased stress hormones
- irritability
- involuntary eye movement
- mania
- pseudo ADHD
- pseudo psychosis
Sleep deprivation effects on Paul
As stated, at some point I became so exhausted weird thoughts were running through my head that were totally out of character and quite frankly a little scary. For me I became very much robotic in tasks.
I stopped paying attention to much, forgot quite a bit, and just generally adopted an attitude on worse days of wanting to be alone to sleep for as long as was humanly possible.
There were also times I decided to not go and do something due to feeling like I was a bit drunk on exhaustion even though I couldn’t sleep. I also felt I might be operating a vehicle like a drunk person.
I also felt unhindered by common constraints, although I did not act on anything a couple of times I almost threw things in rage. Most of the time the rage was unfounded. Severe grumpiness/
I also bought a lot of things on Amazon without doing much research and wrote some really terrible pieces.
Wrap-up
Know yourself, know when you’re getting too tired, if you don’t and don’t do something about it be that screwing your partner for a night of sleeping or taking serious naps to compensate, if you get to the points of exhaustion I got to life’s just not fun and you look at your newborn and see them as what’s keeping daddy up.
