I think the great thing about our industry is that most of us can set our hours and work any block in a 24 hour period. Personally, I've had the best success going to sleep when I'm about to get tired, and getting up without an alarm when I'm done sleeping. That tends to be several sets of 2-3 hours a night. Generally, I don't get sick every year, but when I do, the first sign is I sleep a full 9-10 hour span.
I also notice that napping is not good for me. Unless I can sleep the full 2 hour span, I'm better off waiting until bedtime. I suspect shorter naps disrupt a rem cycle and cause a fogginess upon waking, where the full rem cycle being 2-3 hours I wake up feeling like I've had a good coffee. You can train yourself to notice this as you pass through various stages of 'awareness' while you're sleeping. Each time you remember seeing your clock, that is usually one complete rem cycle.
If the day were 28 hours long, it would match my needs perfectly. Why is this?
I also think I have this, though my lifestyle seems to play a big role.. if I'm very active I can stay on a 24-hour cycle; but the majority of the time my cycle is more like 24.5-26 hours, which slowly causes drift until I need to do a 2-3 day 'reset' (go to sleep at 6 AM one night, 12 PM the next, and 6 PM the next), which leads to me being really tired for the majority of those days.
Once I get to sleep at 6 PM I'm set for at least a couple of weeks though, I can slowly drift to sleeping at midnight - 2 AM which is pretty good for me.
> I think the great thing about our industry is that most of us can set our hours and work any block in a 24 hour period.
And the problem with this is, meetings.
Unfortunately, almost no one knows what non-24 is, including sleep therapists I've talked to.
People always look at me like I'm crazy when I talk about non-24. If left to my own devices I'll just go to bed an hour later each night, I can get into a bit of a midnight to 2am schedule also, but then pop a later night in order to be tired enough the next night to rest back a few hours.
Also recently diagnosed ADHD (in my 40s), and apparently sleep issues like non-24 are at least correlated to it.
Have you also observed that you're better able to adapt to the 24-hr day when you're not working and getting regular outdoor activity and exercise? I really think working with computers indoors is a large contributing factor to my non-24.
It's hard to say. I was doing a lot of hiking and outdoor activity last summer, and it didn't really make that much difference (if anything, being in better shape gave me more energy at the end of the day).
I do find I have an energy slump in the early evening and wonder if there is some way to take advantage of that, but haven't been able to push myself to try a sleep schedule change that drastic (and my hunch is that it'd just push that slump earlier and I'd start drifting again, just starting from an earlier point in the evening).
For me the problem is that I can't sync to the light day without really forcing myself — and I can only force myself so much. A day according to my biological clock is slightly longer that 24 hours, so with nothing to keep me in sync since I graduated from the university, my sleeping schedule is always slowly drifting. At some point it gets inverted and then goes back to normal. Without me disciplining myself at all (not forcing to go to bed at X time and not using an alarm), one cycle of this takes approximately 2 weeks.
Most people I know don't wake up without an alarm after 2-3 of sleep, assuming they were awake for 16-17 hour prior of going to sleep. How did you end up with this approach?
They're likely 'awake' and don't know it between cycles.
I just noticed specific intervals where I'd have a period of wakefulness categorized by the ability to remember the time on the clock when I'd see it. When you sleep your brain is cycling through phases between wakefulness and deep sleep. Between cycles of deep sleep where you're darting your eyes and twitching around, you have periods of semi wakeful sleep.
There are tools that allow you to try an experiment: Use a tool like sleepyti.me and input the time to wake up. Try to time out a single rem cycle for yourself by staying up late without a device in your hand or TV on, and wake up at the desired time. This isn't how I started, but when I saw the app I recognized the cycle immediately. When you wake up, you'll feel more rested than if you woke up at the midway point in one of the cycles, even if it is longer. In my case there's less fog, less agitated state, and quicker boot up time (my term for the time it takes to go from awake to writing code)
If you want to get weird, I'm happy to talk about another sleep cycle I had for a while, but I'm already rambling. The gist of it was many naps, many rems, less cumulative sleep.
Yah, I timed out my sleep cycles and it's about 90 minutes for me. Sometimes Fitbit and similar devices can show people this as well, but it's not always accurate (it was another confirmation for me rather than the primary way I determined the cycle length). And you are correct (and I encourage others to figure their cycle out), if I wake up on the cycle break (for me, 3/4.5/6/7.5/9) I am much less foggy and sleep inertia is reduced than when I wake in the middle of the cycle.
Another way to try to wake at the proper point is an alarm that gradually increases in intensity - you can set it about 30-45 minutes before you have to get up, and if you are already in a wakeful state, you'll hear it when it's low, but at the end it will get loud enough to ensure you get up.
Lastly (and not a shill for Fitbit, it's just the one I use), Fitbit has an alarm feature that will try to detect when you've moved into a light sleep stage and go off then (again, you tell it the latest time you want to wake, and it'll start monitoring 30-45 minutes ahead of that time, and go off when it thinks is optimal).
Long story short, I feel like, while they aren't perfect, we are starting to get some awareness of the importance of sleep cycles and some tools built around that awareness, which is pretty cool.
I'll do my best to explain, it does look a little confusing in retrospect. Let's say for the sake of argument that these cycles are 2 hour blocks: 0-2, 2-4, 4-6, and so on. If you sleep 0-2, and wake up at the end of that cycle during the wakeful period between 0-2 and 2-4, you'll feel more rested and have a faster bootup time than if you do 0-3 and wake up midway through 2-4 interrupting a period of deep sleep. You may notice more feelings of fogginess, agitation, and sleepiness, and a longer bootup time as your brain is shifting gears metaphorically speaking.
When you first fall asleep, you move through a few stages of sleep until you reach the end at the REM stage. Interrupting this stage is what causes the issue for me. I wake up still dreaming or speaking as I wake up.
Do you think it is possible that the longer sleep period that is usually associated with illness is a sign of a sleep crash for you? Like, maybe sleeping 2-3 hours per night eventually finally catches up to you physically and you need a longer sleeping period to recoup? Then again maybe that's unlikely if it only happens once a year or so.
I was curious because what you wrote reminds me of what happened to me, but on a different time frame. I would "naturally" have the energy to stay up really late and often get 3-5 hours of sleep per night. I felt alright. Then once a month or so on a weekend I'd sleep ~12 hours. Over time that once-a-month longer sleep period turned into every other weekend, then every weekend, and then 12 hours turned into 15. It took me way too long to realize that I'd be basically walking around like a sleepless zombie all week even though I thought I felt "fine" and then completely crashing due to lack of sleep on the weekend. It's like my judgement of my own resting state was impaired, thinking I was OK and rested when I wasn't. Starting to get more sleep during the week felt like coming up from underwater.
Weekdays I don't sleep much, if I had to guess I average 4-5 hours. Weekend comes and since I don't have many obligations, my day is almost entirely free, and I'm willing to sleep in, usually 10-12 hours, occasionally made more miserable by a night a alcohol.
The sad thing is I can get 3 hours of sleep or 12 and I'll wake up and not feel rested. Usually this translates to a thick brain fog (any effective OTC "sleep aid" just makes this worse) and I can hardly think straight for some hours.
> The sad thing is I can get 3 hours of sleep or 12 and I'll wake up and not feel rested. Usually this translates to a thick brain fog (any effective OTC "sleep aid" just makes this worse) and I can hardly think straight for some hours.
I felt the same way after doing my 15-hour-weekend-sleeps. I'd often feel _more_ tired than on weekdays, super groggy the whole weekend. The involuntary 15-hour "catchup" never actually caught me up, in retrospect it was just my body crashing but not properly recuperating. It was not until I put in a conscious effort to get 8 hours each night that things started improving in terms of actually beginning to feel properly rested.
I also notice that napping is not good for me. Unless I can sleep the full 2 hour span, I'm better off waiting until bedtime. I suspect shorter naps disrupt a rem cycle and cause a fogginess upon waking, where the full rem cycle being 2-3 hours I wake up feeling like I've had a good coffee. You can train yourself to notice this as you pass through various stages of 'awareness' while you're sleeping. Each time you remember seeing your clock, that is usually one complete rem cycle.
If the day were 28 hours long, it would match my needs perfectly. Why is this?