Last year I tried polyphasic sleeping, with little success. This year, in the continuing effort to find a sleeping schedule that works for me, I am now attempting to sleep as if there were 28 hours in a day. Multiply this out and you find that 28 x 6 = 24 x 7: each week I'll have six sleeps where most people have seven.
The picture below shows the schedule I'll be sleeping and working on. The red is when I'm scheduled to sleep and the green is when I'm scheduled to work. I am starting this on Wednesday, April 1; or arguably Thursday April 2, as the 2AM sleep start is the closest to what passes for normal for me otherwise.
I have earplugs and an eyeshade already. I'll add steps here every day or so to track my progress. We will see how it goes!
The picture below shows the schedule I'll be sleeping and working on. The red is when I'm scheduled to sleep and the green is when I'm scheduled to work. I am starting this on Wednesday, April 1; or arguably Thursday April 2, as the 2AM sleep start is the closest to what passes for normal for me otherwise.
I have earplugs and an eyeshade already. I'll add steps here every day or so to track my progress. We will see how it goes!
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For a very long time I've been unable to get to sleep 8 hours before I have to wake up. In other words, if I regularly wake up at 8, I regularly can't get to sleep before 1 or 2. Midnight just doesn't do it. A few times in my life I've had several weeks of leisure to wake up Whenever, and what happens is I go to sleep later and later, until I'm nocturnal, at which point I usually have to start doing something during the day again.
I have heard vaguely of an experiment with people living clocklessly in caves, where the cycle they slept on tended to be 25 hours rather than 24. It's well known that circadian rhythms are 'about' a day long (thus the name). I think that my innate sleep cycle at least is longer than 24, so now I am testing that. No I haven't really done that much research. If you have ideas for stuff I should read, I'd love a comment about it.
I have heard vaguely of an experiment with people living clocklessly in caves, where the cycle they slept on tended to be 25 hours rather than 24. It's well known that circadian rhythms are 'about' a day long (thus the name). I think that my innate sleep cycle at least is longer than 24, so now I am testing that. No I haven't really done that much research. If you have ideas for stuff I should read, I'd love a comment about it.
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I am nocturnal by nature... I seem to be happiest going to bed around 5 am, and getting up in the afternoon around 1. IF I allowed my body to sleep when I felt the need to and get up when rested....that is the schedule.( I recently broke my arm and was off work for 2.5 months...and that was the schedule I ended up on allowing myself to go with the flow of the rhythm of my body)
I know my ancestors aren't from America entirely...( I am going back a long ways...not just grandparents....but maybe their grandparents grandparents....LONG LONG ago)
It is seen by different people, that children will have tendencies to behave like an ancestor, without training to. Could this be yet another throwback to our roots?
I really hope I explained what I am trying to say here... I don't seem to be as articulate as I normally can be...lol But I wanted to throw this thought out there and get some feedback from everyone!!
Good luck on your study of your own sleep pattern!!
I cannot say, but I love that it provokes thought and serious consideration. WHAT does make us tick the way we do?
Think it's called fractal memory or something along those lines, but don't know how legit it actually is. If it is though, I think it would fit into your theory of possibilities.
I also read somewhere that most of our genes contain "junk". Science doesn't really know what it is for, one possibility is that it could contain memories in some manner?
The junk chain in the DNA might actually be the most interesting aspects of our ancestry and to understand why we do what we do, what we like, why we behave why we do... and to think we are are playing it forward in our own children and adding our own piece of "junk"....
I would love to know more about all of this... I wonder if it is too late to get into this science for study? At my age, I am not sure I would be able to go back to school and change my life, but it would be wonderful if they broke that coding in my lifetime !
Win Guy
As for the headaches... they are more likely caused by your lack of sleep, not because you aren't getting caffeine. I would try getting at least 8 hours of sleep each night, take a benedryl if you have to. Ask your parents first, but it's a mild allergy and sleep aid and will make you sleepy. When you get a headache you should probably take an advil or something instead rather than caffeine, which can actually make your headache worse. If you REALLY do get migraines then you might want to see a doctor, but natural cures are normally the best first route. :)
The problem is not that the kid is going to bed too late, but that its school is starting too early.
Incidentally, the 28-hour-day is among the more dangerous strategies, so of course I tried it for a while. I have also tried staying up for two days and sleeping fifteen hours every third night (which will make you extremely crazy, to the point of constant hallucinations) and have now settled to simply sleep four or five hours, tops, a night, because that is all my insomnia will allow if I'm not really tired.
It's very confusing on your brain AND body. Even though you get those 9 hours, something still seems off. I can be WIDE awake when I wake up at 4 or 5pm, but by 2am I am tired again and ready for bed. Sometimes my brain even tries to tell me I am tired at 9 or 10PM.
It's quite interesting how our mind and bodies work even though we may try and program them differently. I'm sure though that if my schedule were more consistent that it might be a bit easier. I used to get up at 4am and go to bed at 8-10pm. I seemed to do GREAT with that, but my lifestyle was also very different. There are a lot of factors. In middle school I only slept 3-4 hours a night and I was ALWAYS tired, but I was a nerd who stayed up reading all night, so I guess that's another story. :P
Anyway, it is easy to train yourself to a difficult, lacking sleep schedule, but difficult to train yourself to an easy, plentiful one. Taking sleeping pills actually deprives you of your deep sleep, so therefore doesn't help at all, but can actually exacerbate the situation much of the time.
However, nearly every individual person is somewhere between being a "morning person" or an "evening person." Evening persons typically have lower body temperatures, and eat larger lastmeals and break their fast more lightly, whereas morning persons have higher body temperatures, large breakfasts, and small lastmeals. Morning persons are typically more amiable, and evening persons are typically more distant and rational. Morning persons sleep between six and four, in extreme cases, though typically an hour later, and evening persons between two and nine, though usually about an hour earlier. Most people fall somewhere in between, around ten-six. Most young people, though, are evening persons, and most elderly people are morning persons. This means that high school students, who ought to sleep between one-two and nine-ten, are sleeping between one-two and five, due to bad school hours.
Anyway, in 2 months time I have a big BJJ tournament and so have quit work to train for this. I can sleep whatever hours I like so long as 5 days a week I can get to the gymn any time between 9am and 9pm to train. I would like to do a measures experiment like you, but at the moment, im just effing around.
Since I quit 3 weeks ago, again every night I go to bed upto 2 hours later than the night before and match that to the time I get up, to the point where at the end of the week I force myself not to go to bed and stay up right through till 9 the next night and just sleep 6 nights of the week. I would not recommend this, the day after having no sleep everythings all whurry and everythings quite spaced out. I say I wouldnd recommend this but I do like it, just buying something from a shop or walking down a busy street becomes epic, although I do think theres a much increased chance i'll get run over in this time.
Also I use this as my rest day from training, I get loads of sleep that night and feel fantastic for the new week. Its funny to mess around with your body like this if you can, plus other nights of the week running through the empty streets of London at 3,4 or 5am is quite awesome.
On a more sensible note, in the past, when starting work at 8 or 9am, to avoid the not enough sleep thing, i would always go for a big run at about 6 or 7pm, atleast 10 miles and after food and a shower I would be out like a light at a normal time.
It is my belief that now the majority of people do such little activity, the sleep schedule for many is badly hurt as a result.
http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-be-a-morning-person-and-have-more-time-for/
That might do the trick. But thanks for posting your results. It was interesting.
Why are you so intent on artificial sleep patterns?
We spent 2.5 million years evolving with 10-14 hours of darkness a day, probably 8-10 of which we would spend sleeping, repeating over a 24 hour cycle. Personally, I think that tampering with evolved biorhythms is a terrible idea.
You also said previously that "Other animals do not necessarily get 8 solid hours, and in fact the idea that people need 8 hours of sleep is only a couple hundred years old - prior to cheap artificial light, all you could really do when the sun was down is sleep so people mostly slept according to the length of the nighttime." IIRC, we most of those 2.5 million years that defined what we became as a species was spent with 8+ hours of darkness a night. Hence, I would think that we, as an evolving species and until the development of cheap artificial lighting, probably slept 8+ hours a night.
I'm not throwing out your hypothesis that you're possibly on a different "innate sleep cycle" than most people, I just find it really hard to believe. With your claims of "developing a nocturnal lifestyle," I'm forced to believe that you spend a lot of time in front of a computer or under artificial lighting after the sun goes down.
"I have heard vaguely of an experiment with people living clocklessly in caves, where the cycle they slept on tended to be 25 hours rather than 24. It's well known that circadian rhythms are 'about' a day long (thus the name). I think that my innate sleep cycle at least is longer than 24"
It's also well known that the duration, length, and intensity of one's exposure(s) to light drastically affects hormonal production -- and primarily those hormones involved with sleep.
So before I dig myself an even bigger hole here, might I ask a few questions?
1. Have you tried limiting (or totally eliminating) your exposure to light for at least half an hour before bedtime?
2. Have you tried exercise as a sleep aid? I find that I never sleep as well as on those nights following a tough workout.
3. Have you tried other sleep aids, such as contrast showers before bed?
I hear this all the time, and though it worked well for me when I was in shape; I have also eaten only 3 meals a day and been the same weight. I fail to see how it's "healthier" other than the fact that every fitness guru on the planet says that it is.
Also take in mind that this aren't full featured meals. An apple, some carrots, a little sandwich, you know things, that you can actually stuff in your pockets :P
:P
Anyway, the following link is a paper about dealing with jet-lag, which is a temporary situation like yours, but not just it: http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pcbi.1000418