The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Well, TIFU.
Today I managed to achieve the incredible feat of making it to work over two hours late. I was so smashed that I slept for 11 hours, through an alarm, and made it to work at 11:35 AM. Was expecting to be raked over the coals once I got there and apologised, but instead my superior repeatedly told me it was alright and that she was just worried if something had happened to me.
While I am usually a very reliable worker and often work close to 50 hour weeks (for a job that pays far lower than the median Australian salary), I don't feel good about it. At all. I stayed three hours after close of business just to try and make up for it and got off work at 8pm, something I was told I didn't have to do but did anyway. I feel especially bad because my superiors are genuinely nice to me and even though the job is tiring, requires a lot of task juggling, and doesn't pay very much at all, that's not their fault and I would really like to not disappoint them.
Interesting, this has never happened to me.
You understand this is going on your permanent record, right?
As I said, I'm not ecstatic about it. It's probably one of the biggest marks against myself I've earned while I've been there, and while it didn't affect any deadlines or critical tasks (I was able to finish all my work) it probably does have an impact on perceptions of reliability.
At the risk of sounding self-aggrandising, though, I will say I'm not too concerned about people's perceptions of me in the long run since I am aware people are generally happy with my performance. In the org I work at, there's a monthly meeting where you can nominate someone who's performed particularly well, and last month I received three separate nominations. I am told regularly that people have good things to say about me, and often have to be pushed by my superiors into going home. The reason why I was "smashed" enough to sleep 11 hours was not because of any particularly indulgent behaviour, it's because I have consistently tired myself out for the past month or so.
The main practical concern I have at this point is more that this could happen again and I want to incorporate protections against that into my routine. But if three alarms isn't enough to make me get up and stay up, it's hard to imagine something that will.
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My hospital has the fun aspect of being incredibly anal about punch-in timings, so since everyone later than 2 minutes gets in a similar amount of trouble in the system, the administrators have long stopped giving a shit and rubber stamp all efforts on the app to "renormalize" the discrepancy.
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Yeah, I've had colleagues show up about this late, and even more than my irritation, I'm genuinely baffled. What the fuck is going on? How is it even possible to sleep through an alarm? Obviously, different people have very different reactions to the world, but this just seems completely impossible to me. I'm not claiming that I'm a paragon of responsibility, I've had to take a sick day for a hangover, but I still woke up, put the day in the system, and canceled meetings.
I think it is honestly a function of how much you care.
When I think it is important the alarm is almost unnecessary, I will wake up at the correct time, 5-20 minutes before my alarm was scheduled to go off.
If it is only something I sort of want to get up for ... an alarm will help. I will get up when it buzzes, maybe snooze it once.
Occasionally, when I am incredibly tired and don't care too much about sleeping in. The alarm will not be registered in my memory. I think in most of these cases I have gotten up, turned off the alarm and gone back to sleep in a semi-daze/sleepwalking state. I have no recollection of turning off the alarm, but that is what happened.
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I've never been that late, but if I'm tired enough, I'll turn off my alarm without completely waking up, go back to sleep, and not remember the alarm ever having gone off. That has only ever meant sleeping for another hour at most though.
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Not only have I slept through alarms, I went through a period where I would dream that I was waking up in my room, walk over to the alarm clock, be unable to shut it off, realize I was dreaming, wake up and go to turn off the alarm clock, realize I was still dreaming, and so on. I think the worst instance was three layers deep.
It helps to be extremely tired, and to make a habit of hitting the snooze button and otherwise increase your exposure to the alarm sound while on the edge of sleep.
False awakenings are fun and fascinating experiences. I used to have them here and there, though I haven't had one in a long time. I too had the habit of hitting the snooze button while in the half-awake state, and that half-awake state I think is a big factor in making these happen, along with the related phenomenon of lucid dreams.
I think there's a common idea, popularized in part by Inception, of dreams-within-dreams, where your dream-self falls asleep and dreams, and that dream-self can sleep and dream, and so forth, and when you awaken, you awaken to the previous dream layer, then awaken from that, and so forth, until you awaken to reality (presumably, anyway). I don't know how much research there is in this, but my pet theory is that it's nothing like that, and that it's all just one "layer" of dreaming. Dreams are, almost by definition, fictional experiences we have in our minds while we sleep, and at some point, we might have the fictional experience of awakening during the dream. This, when viewed retrospectively through our memories, then cleaves our dream to what came before that experience of awakening and what came after, with the former being the 2nd layer of dream, dream-within-a-dream. But, in fact, we hadn't fallen asleep while dreaming like how Leonardo DiCaprio's character fell asleep while riding a fictional van in a fictional cityscape contained within a dream in Inception. This would also be why we can shoot up multiple "levels" of dreams in a night and remember those (to whatever extent we remember dreams, which is a whole other issue), but we don't go down the "levels" by actively going to bed and falling asleep in a dream (at least, I haven't experienced this or heard other people mention this).
I've also independently slept through 3 separate alarms intentionally placed in 3 different places in my bedroom before, but not for reasons related to false awakenings. I just had bad sleeping habits and was a heavy sleeper.
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A few years ago, I went drinking with some friends, forgot to set my alarm and woke up at 11am on the day of a critical pitch (which I shouldn’t even have been in, but had been drafted into at the last minute), which started at 10.30, 20+ missed calls on my phone. Firing me would have been at least arguably justified. Instead, when I met my boss that afternoon, he said some variant of “This happens to everyone once. Consider this your one get out of jail free card. I won’t mention it again. If it happens again, you’re fired”.
I thought that was pretty fair.
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You got there, apologized, and worked hard; a sincere apology does a lot to defuse anger. I remember reading an anecdote about martial arts classes. Often, when someone is late, they get told to warm themselves up and are given some number of pushups "as punishment". But the important thing about the pushups is once they're done, they're done. The student is to let go of the shame of being late, and the instructor is to let go of any frustration towards the tardy student.
You probably feel like shit right now. While it is correct to be ashamed of getting smashed and missing work, it is not correct to blow that all out of proportion. You've apologised, and you've done your pushups. Let it go, and be on time from now on. Work hard and work well, but don't flog yourself into further slip-ups. That's better than carrying around anxiety over this.
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