Regardless of how interesting I find them, meetings at work trigger something deep inside me that cause me to sleep. It’s like a biological switch has been flipped. Cavemen talking around a fire into the night, getting ready for the long rest for the day ahead...
Sometimes I fall into a fugue in which I am semi-aware and a dream fills in part of the speech of meetings. I hear the most bizarre things when that happens, and worst of all, it makes sense!
I don’t have any sleep issues aside from this.
Standing up sometimes helps but cannot always be done.
It's not just the interestingness, but the lack of engagement. When that meeting starts, your brain is likely shutting off the flow of orexin. That orexin may have been the only thing keeping you awake. You get bored or disengaged; you conk out.
I'd guess, just from hearing that short description, that you don't get much natural sunlight in your workplace, the meetings are happening just after lunchtime, between 1 and 4 PM, and that you have some amount of sleep disorder that would be almost trivially manageable if your medical insurance plan were more reasonable. You can't drive more than a few hours without getting sleepy. On planes, trains, or buses, you conk out almost immediately, and somehow wake up just before arriving at your destination. But you don't fall asleep during movies.
Schedule a visit with a sleep specialist in the first week of January, after your deductible resets, and get a sleep study done. If you get a prescription for a CPAP, or some other durable medical equipment, buy it outright, and send a copy of the receipt to your insurer. Do not rent. If you have been putting off any other medical treatments, get them done next year too. If you can't hit your deductible with a sleep study and CPAP on the books, you probably never will.
Seems a bit of a stretch to assume the guy has _sleep apnea_ if he nods off during a likely pointless meeting. If he's passing out at his desk, then perhaps.
I assume nothing. Sleep apnea is simply one of the most common sleep disorders, and one of the easiest to treat, so it makes sense to test it out first. The sleep study required to do so will also reveal most other sleep problems that are not caused by apneas.
Falling asleep involuntarily in the middle of the day is not normal, regardless of the circumstances. Sleep problems can lead to heart problems, and preventable deaths.
> meetings at work trigger something deep inside me that cause me to sleep
I get this, though I know that it is in part because I don't get enough good sleep often (due to a mix of insomnia & bad sleep as symptoms of being a bit bi-polar, and life just being too darn busy) even at times when I am feeling well rested & wide awake it still happens.
A meeting room full of people, even the big "board room", tends to be warmer and cosier than our usual open-plan office which is definitely part of what causes the effect.
Also, the start of a meeting that I'm not running is a point where the brain shuts off a bit: I'm no longer concentrating on my work but there is nothing else to take my attention while waiting for others to file-/dial-in or the chair to get things started. Normally when I down tools it is to do something else, for instance my lunch-time march in the fresh air, rather than to just sit and stop for a moment in a warm room. Of course there is "networking" going on rather than it being completely dead time, but that isn't the same as concentrating on a work task or physically doing something.
I'm not a doctor, so please take this with a truck load of salt, but you may want to get tested for sleep apnea. You can apparently go a full night of sleep, waking up seemingly well rested, and then your body just shuts down to sleep all of a sudden because it turns out you barely slept at all. Snoring is a symptom apparently, but even if you don't snore it might be worth getting tested.
I thought I was the only person with a serious case of useless-meeting narcolepsy.
Keeping relatively active helps, just like taking walks roughly every hour at minimum during work. If I'm absolutely going to sleep I'll stop paying attention and focus on my work, but then I'll miss opportunities to talk when needed.
I'll owe my career to anyone who can find a solution.
Hate meetings as I know I will be doing all the tricks to stay awake. Pinching my legs, rotating feet, shifting about, hoping my drink lasts...
Which is why I hate meetings that are longer than 15 minutes. Hardly any need to be any longer. If they do then they are workshops, not meetings.
I get quite frustrated and often walk out before they finish as often a possible solution and plan has been decided on quite quickly, then people realise they got another 45 minutes to go of the booked meeting so might as well discuss another subject or worse: guessing hypothetical responses to what might happen after the meeting.
No, let's just quickly do what we just all decided was the best plan. If that doesn't work, let's talk again. Most of the time it will work and we saved a lot of wasted time. And frustrations.
I don't actually hate meetings. I just hate long meetings. 1 hour is a long meeting.
Cheerios (or some similarly nibbleable vittle). Eat one unit at a time, and space it out at minute intervals or so. That completely solved my mtg / conference / lecture narcolepsy problem.
Maybe don't see meetings as "opportunities to talk?" If that's all they are at your company, pushing for clear agendas and strong meeting facilitation might work.
Not sure if this is true, but I suspect certain sounds make me sleepy, such as the sound of airplane engines in the cabin, some projectors or airconditioning units. On most airplanes, it is near impossible for me to stay awake.
I have the same problem as your parent, and I'm convinced I don't have the usual sleep issues for several reasons.
1) I'm very sensitive of lack of sleep, and so I take having 8-hours or more of good sleep extremely seriously.
2) Most days I don't have any sudden sleep syndrome.
3) I've had cases of sudden extreme sleepiness for no particular reason since I was a child. The only thing in common I can think of in this cases is being indoors.
I never thought about it before, but I might have a case of narcolepsy or something similar.
In my senior year at Caltech, I flew out with some others to interview at HP. HP made a group presentation to us. I fell asleep halfway through the presentation and woke up halfway to the floor, and hit the floor with quite a crash. I inspired quite a bit of laughter with that.
This is why you always bring a coffee to presentations/meetings. Even if caffeine is not strong enough to stop you from falling asleep the activity of picking up a cup and taking a sip every few minutes will do.
I didn't get hooked on coffee until I started at Boeing. There's nothing like Boeing MIL-STD coffee. It was years before I realized that my Sunday morning headaches were caffeine withdrawal (I'm really not very smart).
I still like my coffee black and tasting like industrial waste.
I think the sleepiness in meetings is mostly related to lack of fresh air. I remember reading some articles that the air during meetings (talking about physical meetings in rooms here) has a very high CO2 count.
Regardless of how interesting I find them, meetings at work trigger something deep inside me that cause me to sleep. It’s like a biological switch has been flipped. Cavemen talking around a fire into the night, getting ready for the long rest for the day ahead...
Sometimes I fall into a fugue in which I am semi-aware and a dream fills in part of the speech of meetings. I hear the most bizarre things when that happens, and worst of all, it makes sense!
I don’t have any sleep issues aside from this.
Standing up sometimes helps but cannot always be done.