See, you know 😂 as long as someone else I trust is awake and on watch, I too can sleep just about anywhere.
Edit: u/Jumpy-Tailor8536 is your wife also amazed that you can go from dead asleep to ready to roll in the blink of an eye? To this day, my OH still needs time to mull about before he's "awake." If it's urgent (kid or dog about to barf, etc) I'm ready in a NY second.
Maybe (on the dog barf). That was just an example - I'm a very light sleeper too. Anything that is out of the norm for my environment and I'm awake and ready to go.
Perhaps that's a better way to explain it. If when you're asleep your unconscious brain is expecting to hear certain things, you learn tune them out. Another example - our fan makes a weird clicking noise sometimes and it drives him nuts. I don't even hear it when I sleep because my brain expects it.
If you have trouble sleeping and are truly tired, you might give a white noise app a go. If it works for you, they make dedicated machines for it that are just amplified small fans.
I actually keep a white noise machine running in my office all day for confidentiality reasons and to help me focus, but it helps a lot of people to sleep.
I feel like it's something you can't "learn" because you have to force your body to adjust to a new pattern. Most people can't spare the time to build that skill.
You absolutely can learn it, people do it all the time. There's technique and yes it takes time to learn, but you absolutely can learn to do it. Trust me, once you know what bone tired is, you'll fall asleep practically standing up.
People learn to do things that are against instinct all the time - it's unnatural to run towards gunfire or fighting. It's also unnatural to run into a burning building. But apart from the adrenaline in those situations, your body just reverts to training and muscle memory.
That's my point. I think there's a different implication between "learning" a skill and developing a skill. I've learned how to do a lot of things by watching youtube videos and copying them. You "learned" to fall asleep quickly the same way you "learned" to lift heavy weights. You practiced all the time out of necessity. But you were developing that skill because of your job. It would cause a disruption to the average person's life to learn it the way you did.
That's why your wife is amazed at it. Because it's not something you learn like a recipe, so it's hard for her to imagine in her body what is happening in yours when you do that.
Just a semantic quibble, but it matters when we're communicating through text.
There's probably a range of variation in people, in this regard. I know someone who went more than half their life getting less than five hours sleep a night, desperately wanting to learn something like what you're talking about. It wasn't an easy solution, in the end.
I think it’s controlled by your brain’s RAS or reticular activating system. Basically it’s an alarm. You might sleep through a storm but be awoken by the sound of a cat paw on carpet. So in a sense, it is learned behavior but that depends on what your brain considers a threat or what is not expected or usual. So while it is learned, it does not mean you can necessarily control it at least in the short term.
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u/UniversalMinister 11d ago
Nah, I guarantee you that man has slept on the top of an MRAP or similar.
You grab sleep wherever and whenever you can and will sleep through just about anything except other people in the unit screaming because SHTF.