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Sleep deprivation was a key factor in the loss of my faith. The catalyst even.

Throughout my life, I successfully shoved many annoying god and religious questions to the back of my mind. Sometimes I didn't even register that I was doing it, but other times, I did it very intentionally, thinking, "I'll look into it in the future." It's not like anyone ever questioned me. It was just me wondering things that I didn't think would affect my day to day life.

Well, the future was in 2019. I've had about seven years of sleep deprivation that started with my older son who is almost seven years old. Most parents eventually sleep again. I haven't slept much. For some reason, I thought I could handle a second kid. I thought, "What are the odds this one will be just as bad of a sleeper? Surely this one will be normal and sleep poorly for months rather than years." Well, my one and a half year old is worse, especially when he's sick, during which time I have to hold him all night. I cannot lie down or set him down if I expect him or my older son to get any sleep. My body is so used to not sleeping that even if both kids are sleeping well for a night, I'm still not. The worst of it was in December when I had three weeks of a mere half hour of sleep.

Since I have to be up, I am holding both my son and my phone and finally "looking into it." However, I was looking with confirmation bias and couldn't get satisfying answers.

Enter the end of December when the culmination of the years of sleep deprivation capped by those particularly horrid weeks, my failed prayers, and my growing anger at the thought that God was a sadistic bastard, that something finally popped in my brain: The fundamental premise of a god existing at all could be wrong.

I began my real research and finally everything started to click. The reason things hadn't been making sense is because it's all nonsense.

And that was what I have dubbed, "My Profound Duh Moment."

Anyone else have sleep deprivation play a role in shaping their religious beliefs or lack thereof?

Colibri 5 Apr 13
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20 comments

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0

This is the first I've heard of sleep deprivation playing an explicit role but I suppose it may have helped lower your cognitive defenses / resistance to finding better ways to explain and predict your lived experience.

We all have besetting problems that we expect religion to fix or at least ease and when that doesn't happen, the ship of faith tends to sink. In particular religion has a habit of being not just wrong, but 180 degrees wrong when it comes to problem solving. I can't think of many things other than sleep deprivation that would do a better job of shortening your fuse concerning religious bullshit.

1

. . . apologies if you have already heard this :

have you heard about. . . the dyslexic, atheist, insomniac who stayed up all night wondering if there really is a DOG

0

g: 681

1

. . . a good read 😛 :

[goodreads.com]

1

This is the first time I've heard of some of these factors. Very insightful!

1

I was a very hyperactive child. And I am told that when I was a year old, my mother tried to throw me out of the second floor window. I was saved by grandmother they say.

2

I cannot deal with your loss of faith but I hope you get some kind of relief from doing that.
I have a view from the other side of parental sleep deprivation. I have what must be normal sleep deprivation when I went through bringing up three children of my own to adulthood.
However this is about my own experience as a child and how I drove my mother and father crazy with constantly going into the bedroom and complaining that I could not sleep. This was from 8- to 10/11 years old. I cannot pronounce on the troubles of your two boys - it may be entirely a malfunction of the body but in my case it was mental anxiety and over-activity and this may be a clue to the cure of their troubles.

I am convinced that if someone had stopped up with me for a complete night then I would have seen that I would have been able to function for most of the next day. Have you tried exercising their minds and taking the pressure off "HAVING TO" sleep? Now I know ( I am over 80)that if I cannot sleep it usually takes just 1hr of normal mental activity and just forgetting about the actual time of night -does the 'trick'.

There are definitely techniques for building up to routines that help you set a pattern which ends in sleep and I suggest that you seek out a sleep therapist.

@MissKathleen I think it depends upon what overriding hypothesis is going on in your Mind. I thinkit is posible with practice to convince yourself that you know the benefits of sleep and that this is a serious attempt to get those benefits. The most important thing you can say to yourself is that you are in control (if not get help) and that this or that hypothesis IS going to happen. Why argue with yourself? It might work.

2

Sleep deprivation is not good for you. It actually is used by religious cults to brainwash people.

2

"My Profound Duh Moment," was when I was reading Atom by Lawrence Krauss. After leaving my Christian faith and becoming an atheist the only question left that bothered me was how everything seemed so ordered but yet was not made for us. Lawrence Krauss mentioned "Cosmic coincidences," events that occurred that allowed to eventually develop on the earth in the universe, and that bothered me until it finally hit me: those things being "cosmic coincidences," fits perfectly with everthing that we know about the universe and the world we live in. The age of the universe compared to when the earth showed up, how small a speck we are in the universe, how the earth seems to be an anomly in the universe concerning life, the age of the earth compared to when life even showed up, how life normally is in biological evolution and we are an anomaly, the random pain and suffering in the world, the millions of different beliefs about God and different religions, etc., all fit perfectly together in one coherent worldview of naturalism. I was an already atheist but that day was when I fully became an atheist with my entire conscience.

Andrew

6

I liked your story and especially one line:
The reason things hadn't been making sense is because it's all nonsense.

2

After my son was born and with so much acid reflux and waking up every couple hours to nurse, I thought I would never have another full uninterrupted night of sleep. He got better, but between work and school stress, I never got a quality sleep for years. I finally got 6 to 7 hours of sleep now. I still wake up in the middle of the night and my brain races through pending things and other ongoing stress situations that I need to find a resolution. I hate that.
I hope your kids get better soon and that you can eventually go back to a normal routine.
Hey! At least you woke up for all the good nonsense. 🙂

If I start to get somewhat decent sleep someday, life will definitely be so much better with a grounding in reality rather than a nonsensical foundation.

2

No, I have always slept like a log. Similarly, I have always been rational, used logic and common sense basically from my early days as an adult. Couldn't in good conscience continue believing in illogical things. If anything, since my early adult life I have never had one single night where I couldn't sleep.

@MissKathleen Do you try to have it perfectly quiet when you try to sleep?

Most of my life I haven't had any issues sleeping; but, sometimes, and more so recently with everything going on, I can find it difficult to fall asleep.

I have found what helps me, and I know this is contrary to what is recommended, is having the television on. It has to be reruns of a show I know very well as I cannot be preoccupied with wondering what is going to happen, or imagining what the characters look like etc. The volume is low, but not so low that I have to strain to understand the dialogue. I close my eyes and just listen. It seems that keeping my mind occupied in this way helps me fall asleep.

I generally wake up at some point and turn off the TV; and I am almost always able to fall right back to sleep. I know I am getting REM sleep because I rarely have a night where I don't recall dreaming. Sometimes, elements of the show that is on will make its way into my dreams.

When I was in college, and was writing a paper, or studying, I found that I could not think properly, organize my thoughts, in a quiet place. I needed background noise and music just didn't do it for me; so I would always work with the television on.

This is now my brain works, anyway.

@MissKathleen : I recall reading an article about insomnia. It basically read that the notion of getting 7 or 8 hours of solid sleep a night is quite modern and we actually evolved to sleep for shorter bursts at a time. I know that I tend to feel more sluggish if I get too much sleep, as opposed to getting what would be considered too little. Perhaps some of us more easily adapt to modern sleep patterns and others are more hard wired to sleep as nature intended.

2

Liked your story

1

In my late teens I was balancing 3 things in my life, a full time job at night, a full school load at a gifted school and a full love life with a highly sexed gal from Montreal - there just wasn't much time for sleep. For almost a year I would sleep for 24 hrs on Sunday, then just cat nap for maybe an hour each day until Sunday rolled around again, by Friday the hallucinations would start but I needed the work, the diploma and the gal so I did this until I graduated, quit the job because I was going to university out of town and the gal because that's just how things go when you are 18 years old.
What it did for me was get me to stop smoking pot and reassess a lot of things in my life, I was already an atheist but not as solidly grounded in godlessness, I think any shock to a person's routine can shake loose concepts and ideologies that are flawed and no longer work in their life, concepts you would probably just continue to go along with if your routine wasn't altered drastically.

"Routine" is sort of a false power (?) People take comfort in it. My lack of a routine certainly puzzles people....and makes me wonder too !!

@twill Absolutely, I think this is the hardest thing for people to go through right now, they have been taken off of autopilot and warehoused at home, very stressful for most people. My life has always been a matter of structured chaos, it makes it fairly easy for me but I still find myself having to deal with the stressed out Normals and allowing for their change of routine. Essentially, I have found it easy enough to deal with chaos because it was always within an infrastructure of other people's routines.

@MissKathleen You are a true introvert, this must be like paradise.

5

Sleep deprivation???? When I was going to church it was so boring I usually fell asleep during the sermon.

I was rarely in service listening to the sermon. I was a volunteer in the nursery, so the kids kept me awake.

4

I wish you all the best.

I have rarely been sleep deprived. My exit from religious brainwashing happened when I decided to research the scriptures. My purpose for researching the scriptures was to prove to skeptics that the scriptures were true. However, I discovered that they were false. My research showed me that the scriptures are full of false prophecies and contradictions. Also many of the stories, such as Noah's Ark, for example, contradict scientific knowledge. I gave the church one last chance, revealing my findings to a bishop, hoping that he could show me that my research was flawed. Instead, he initiated my excommunication, and I was expelled from the church. That's the best thing the church ever did for me. Now I am free from religious bondage, and my personal integrity is intact. 🙂

Just curious if the conflict between the scriptures and scientific knowledge was part of the catalyst that prompted you to doubt. A lot of people just assume that science is wrong and have no problem with the conflict--at least until after they've already begun to question things.

@DeCryingShame I learned to trust science in the public schools. Now I demand facts and evidence before I accept anything as true. When I found facts and evidence that the Bible is not perfect, as most preachers claim it to be, I knew then that religion was a fraud and a scam to scare us out of our money. I have not completely rejected the Bible. There are some passages that inspire me to live an ethical life. But I know that the stories are mythological, and I am confident that gods do not exist in reality. I do trust science, facts, evidence and knowledge.

@BestWithoutGods I find some of the metaphors in the Bible to be quite apt, like the house being built on the sand or the rock. It's a great metaphor so long as you understand what a "rock" really is (hint: it's not an imaginary being.) Still, those few metaphors are immersed in so much crap I don't feel any need to go looking for them anymore. I'm happy to pull whatever I need from memory.

1

I've always had trouble falling asleep, no matter what. Now, it's a lot better.

Did something in particular make it better?

@Colibri, the fact now I have a regular working schedule helped me a lot. I think age played a part on this as well.

3

My deconversion had nothing to do with sleep deprivation. It was in my case the ruthless application of reason and logic to the claims of the God Mob.

It took me 20 years to do what seems to have taken just 20 days for you to achieve.

2

Extrapolating, would that imply that insomniacs have a greater proportion of agnostics?

That's something I would love to know.

. . . apologies if you have already heard this :

have you heard about. . . the dyslexic, atheist, insomniac who stayed up all night wondering if there really is a DOG

5

there's a reason that sleep deprivation is used for interrogations and mind altering.

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