A Post Written but Forgotten

"I'd blogged on Sunday late night and then this was meant to be the follow-up post. I couldn't get to it as sleep, child and basically life happened. So here it is now"-


24 is was. 4 or 5 episodes of it, after the last blog post. I tried to sleep (Red thinks I fight sleep once it's disturbed) but the cold and the unrest was making me toss and turn. 
It's an entirely different thing that am sleepy as HELL right now. Hang on...is there sleep in Hell? I always thought it was damnation without relief...but that's a topic best left for another day.


I finally called it a night around 7:30 in the morning and woke Red up. I'm up now only because Red had some work and MLM would never play by himself for too long before our spider senses warn us of some or the other of his shenanigans.


Thresholds are funny things. I remember in psychometrics we used to try to define them to see where it existed for the majority of the population in a particular experiment and then draw a conclusion w.r.t an absolute threshold. 
I find that conditioning works quite well in curbing or rather raising the bar. If you give into a physiological need (eating, sleeping et al) as and when it arises, you may mentally condition yourself to experience a low threshold of them viz you might not be able to sustain hunger pangs for too long, stay awake for too long etc.


If you try and defer the physical gratification, it may not necessarily lessen but the ability to tolerate the absence of gratification can definitely increase in time. It should be kept in mind that half the reaction we feel is in our mind. If you're hungry then seeing food that is available would trigger feeling of being sated in our minds leading to a sense of satisfaction and even relief, again leading to a sense of security that allows the body to relax.


Anything that causes a sense of want or need in the body tends to evoke some amount of anxiety along with it. Anxiety shouldn't be equated with panic here...just a sense of restlessness or elevated tension in our mind and body till the body's equilibrium is restored, along with that of the mind.


I have no empirical data along with this post, given that it's centered around psychophysics, senses et al. But I am sleepy, have become conditioned one could say, to sleeping by 10:30 pm at the very latest and here I stayed up more than half the night without dozing off. But am contemplating all this now because am QUITE sleepy, am required to be TOTALLY vigilant and it'll be HOURS before I can think of crashing. See, my Freudian slip is showing...am crashing into things anyhow because am not all rested.


So what's the conclusion that can be drawn from all this- GET YOUR SLEEP or bonk yourself on the head to get knocked out. Keifer Sutherland ain't going nowhere and neither will you if you're a deadbeat zombie for the next 24 hours that you are up and not running. 


Counting the yawns till I connect with a horizontal surface.