Okay, sure, I could just look up the answer on Wikipedia, but I wanted to know all your opinions on this. These past couple weeks, there have been three nights (well, days; I work nights) where I sleep good for a couple hours, wake up, and be unable to fall back asleep even if I feel tired. It just happened today, for example. I'm not sure what the deal is, or why I'm having these sleeping problems all of a sudden.

I don't know about for other people, but for me it is because I am nocturnal. I absolutely love the night and hate the idea of turning myself off during the best part of the day.

A never-ending, ever-shifting list of potential instigators is all modern medicine is able to give us.
This is in part because it is almost always psychological, and rarely physical, so the instigation is personal and the most we get to say about it is that it fills a trend.

Some things off the top of my head:
Stress, nicotine, caffine, any other stimulants, a disheveled internal clock that doesn't know up from down, adrenaline carry-over from the day's work or play, love, hate, and matters which get at the mind through the heart.

The problem that most often arises with people working night shifts and attempting daytime sleep is that the body and the mind are programmed to reboot when given a certain dose of light. So your body could just be recharging every time it gets into the sun, and forgetting that it has nothing but food and sundry chemicals to run on.
Because it's only a few recent occurrences, I would have to say that could be unlikely, and would wonder like a doctor what other circumstances surround this change.
Have you introduced anything into your routine, environment, life?
Are you especially self-loathing or do you have a tendency to wear women's undergarments?

One other thing might be that since you work nights, when you go to bed you are probably more influenced by the fact that you are tired rather than sleepy. So when you sleep it is more like a power nap than a full night's sleep.

What's the difference between tired and sleepy?



Not yet, I'm not.

Only thing I can think of is that work was especially busy during the holiday season. But I'd expect that to actually help me sleep better, not worse.
Or it could be that I had started making it a bad habit to go to bed at 8 or 9am, and I've been making an effort to go back to sleep at 6am. But I'd actually expect that to make it harder to fall asleep the first time.

Tired is exhaustion, sleepy is sleep kicking in.

I personally wish I knew myself.

I've always attributed my late hours with my love of the night. I'm a night person.

Insomnia is created by the bi-polar shift in the anatomy late at night when one wishes they were the opposite sex, consciously or unconsciously. It also happens, an identity crisis occurs in which one may believe he or she is a furry creature as opposed to a human being.

Also brought on by wanking too much. Can never forget that one.

Happens to me all the time.

Well, I was very tired so went to lie down but couldn't fall asleep because I wasn't in the right emotional mindset. So I decided to look for the right Youtube music and now I've been watching a bunch of videos. I'm listening to this ridiculously awesome harpsichord sonata by Scarlatti.

i'll tell you what, being cold doesn't let you sleep very well. nope.

Yay, electric blankets? And yeah, cold sucks... unless you are a wild animal, then you'll sleep for months. But even if that were possible with human beings, I'm pretty sure your job wouldn't benifit much from that. =/

Sleeping in cold is actually more draining than nourishing.
Your body expends too much energy.

You know too much.

Anyway, tired vs sleepy, I don't see how it'd all of a sudden matter now.

These are the worst, in my experience.

Also, in my case, I get restless and not able to sleep when I've spent too little energy during the day. If I spent a whole day just sitting at the computer screen, I wouldn't be able to fall asleep easily at all.

If you're looking for possible solutions, I'd recommend boredom (always gets me sleepy as hell) and exercise (use some of your energy so you'll make your body want to rest to recover).

You'd think laying in bed for two hours would be boredom enough.

Someone explain this to me. At the end of last night, I decided to work on my game some more. But I was so tired, I was falling asleep in the middle of the boss battle. So I go to bed. And manage maybe three hours of sleep before I'm left laying in my bed in a state of wide awake.

maybe be more active during the day and then you'll drop dead at night ^^
or you could try sleeping during the day instead. i find that works best for me. no matter how active i am or if i havn't slept the night before i have a harder time sleeping at night than in the middle of the day.

I don't think you're using enough energy during the day, so you don't need as much sleep.

Maybe.

Sometimes this happens for no reason, though. You get home tired as hell at 5 in the morning and wake up perfectly fine at 9:30.