So here we are again at 0100, awake, feeling more rested than ever. I’m sure it’s because of dopamine signalling and internal timing issues, but don’t feel like it’s an issue.
To explain: I used to ‘sleep’ 8 hours a night but actually it would be 1+ hour of trying to sleep followed by a waking or two at night with 30 min periods getting back off. It was poor quality sleep.
Time blindness is apparently a thing though you wouldn’t have convinced me I had any issues. I actually… maybe I didn’t have too many issues, because I was high functioning I might have force-of-willed it. But now I’m medicated it’s different.
I have no idea what time of day it is. Have we eaten lunch or dinner or are we about to? I can think for an instant and know, but intuitively I haven’t a clue. Hunger isn’t quite so bad, but it is similarly impacted.
So time cells. More dopamine means more ticks, I think. This means more dopamine feels faster and less feels slower, in the moment; retroactively memory salience encoding can mean the opposite.
I go to sleep. I guess I need 10,000 ticks before my body says ‘wake’. Well now I am getting those ticks throughout the night, and it means that my body is mentally rested and recovered to the same degree sleeping 4 hours a night, as when I was sleeping 8 previously.
That means I am 50% ADHD.
Seriously; can we quantify someone’s adhd severity by how much their sleep changes when starting aripiprazole and establishing a time cell baseline? It’s a physical change in dopamine regularity. It’s science.
So I guess I somehow managed away my time blindness and hunger blindness, tiredness blindness, by just… adapting. And now the blindness is gone, my eyes are adapting to the glare?
I’m pretty happy waking up at this time, working on me, thinking about things, before the kids get up and I go back to the real world. I think I’ll just let it be. Why force 8 hours a night if you don’t need it?
3am is more ideal and I’d say I’m averaging about 5.5 hours a night though and a snort nap so it’s fine. I previously trained 2 hours a day, worked my ass off, and ‘slept’ 7.5 hours. I was so tired.
Anyway that’s over now. Hard to believe. Probably some pink cloud remaining but I think this is a new baseline.
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