[toasterwater]

I appreciate all of your input, but I think some of you are making incorrect assumptions (which of course is my fault for not putting out enough info).

But first, I would like to debate the common assumption that most of you seem to be basing your responses on.

Easily summed up by this quote from Thomas H: "When you get enough sleep you don't feel tired."

Based on personal experience I find that to be completely false. I try to get "enough sleep" every night, but first you have to determine what exactly is "enough sleep". Currently I'm trying to get 6 hours per night. I have however slept for many different lengths of time, and during any day, having slept for any length of time the night prior, I can still end up feeling tired.

To expand on the above, I have gone weeks on end sleeping until i feel like rolling out of bed, this may end up being 12 hours or more! During those days, I still can feel tired, in fact, days that I sleep too much, I feel groggy and more tired all day. So we know that you can sleep too much. It's obvious already that you can sleep too little, cuz i'm sure everyone has tried to operate all day on a few hours of sleep or less the night before. So we know you can sleep too little. Now, I would like to point out that there are times that I feel awake and alert all day, on various amounts of sleep. I've gone days where I only got 3 hours the night before and felt fine all day, so on and so forth.

All of this draws me to conclude that feeling tired and sleepy is not NECESSARILY a product of not getting enough sleep. Further evidence of this concept is seen when you do something to "wake yourself up". I'm sure I'm not the only one who has felt tired, and then done something (aside from going to sleep) that "wakes" me up. Such "things" may simply be changing activities from something more sedentary (like reading or writing) to something more active (exercising, building something, playing an instrument, playing a game, etc).

Now that that's out of the way, I would like to note that in addition to getting "enough" sleep, I also believe I eat a relatively healthy diet. I don't eat sweets, typical junk foods, or drink sodas or alcohol on a regular basis. I do consume fruits and vegetables and lots of water every day. I'm not a vegetarian (although I did try it for 6 months a few years ago) but I also don't eat excessive amounts of meat in a day.

So with all of the above information, I would like to re-ask my first question. What do you do (if anything) - aside from taking a nap - to combat/eliminate/postpone/mitigate the feeling of fatigue or sleepiness?

For those of you stuck on the sleep subject, imagine that you have slept a full night's sleep, and for some crazy reason, feel tired anyway... whether you worked a long day, or are studying a lot, or it's cloudy outside, or whatever the reason you want to imagine.

I am open to diet suggestions, so if you have particular foods that you include in your diet that you have seen specifically increase your energy levels, feel free to include those (and while some ideas may work really well, I may not be able to afford/justify some expensive options, so maybe try to keep it to generic foods, i.e grapefruit, squash, bread, pasta, steak, fish, nuts, etc...). Also, while I don't want to hear "sleep more", if you sleep in a different manner (biphasic/polyphasic, etc.) and have definitely seen big improvements in your alertness/wakefulness levels, etc. feel free to comment with that.

Thanks!