Importance of sleep and weight loss

This is really interesting...I have always suffered from excessive sleepiness when I drive anywhere that takes longer that 30 mins, and in lectures and lessons. I'm an apprentice gas engineer and i'm sure my training officer at college thinks i'm rude because i'm known for drifting off in class if we have to sit and listen, or worse, watch a powerpoint. No one understands that there is literally nothing I can do to wake myself up, I just about manage to stop myself from completely falling asleep, but I fight to keep my eyes open, and i've got quite a few example of my 'sleep writing' where i've forced myself to take notes in my drowsy state (it amuses everyone anyway!).

Driving is worse, when we're training away it's just over an hour drive, I drive my boyfriend and I there (he has the same job) and he has to keep an eye on me because every time i'll start to drift off, and i'll have the window wide open, radio on, i'll even smack myself in the leg to wake myself up but I just have to keep fighting it until it passes. On my own, I used to have to pull over on the way home from college (60 miles each way) and take a nap because i'd start drifting into another lane. I even started falling asleep kneeling down at work the other day watching my mentor doing something! And today when I was drowsy in the van I was having a weird hallucination of a truck in front driving sideways across the motorway - of course he wasn't though. Friday I made my boyfriend drive and I instantly fell asleep for most of the journey!

Trouble is..if I got diagnosed with narcolepsy I would have my licence taken away, and lose my job, and then lose my house
I'm going to try and get 8 hours of sleep a night and see if there's any improvement...i'm not great at getting enough sleep, but my boyfriend's the same and he doesn't have these problems!

So me being tired all the time at work is a bad thing! I am, I guess, lucky because I don't have any sleep issues as you all have stated... but I DO have a Beagle puppy and 2 needy cats... so I wake up a few times throughout the night and I always feel like I only got an hour of sleep due to that... maybe I'll be kicking the animals out of the room one night and see if that helps!

Does getting sleepy during long boring speeches count as a disorder?? :-) I think we all suffer from that one!

daytime sleepiness is what trigger me to finally go see a doctor back in Dec. 2009. I was in danger of losing my job b/c I kept nodding off while @ work. I was nearly 500 lbs. and I assumed I had sleep apnea and would need a CPAP machine too. I found out it was diabetes.

I got on meds, slept better, day time sleepiness went away, more energy to excercise, etc. etc. it all fell into place so to speak.