I sometimes wake up around 3 or 4 am to pee, but usually I’m able to get to sleep. Occasionally my brain will not shut off and I’m half awake, half asleep with various thoughts racing through my head. Then I finally fall back asleep about 15 minutes before my alarm goes off. But thankfully that doesn’t happen too often.
My wife will sometimes wake up in the morning, have a cup or two of coffee, then go back to sleep for another hour or so. She calls it her “coffee nap”.
Several people have weighed in on that and I will, too. Usually I just go back to sleep. I’m talking about the times when you wake up and are fully awake. Apparently this group does variations of that-- very interesting replies.
Yes! I will second this enthusiastically. Now I don’t have to care about sticking to a sleep schedule.
This is important. Identify YOUR pattern and declare it to be okay.
It sure feels natural to me. I fall asleep at the same time every night (not long after sunset, depending on time of year), then I wake up after 3-4 hrs of sleep. I’m up for 1-2 hours around midnight. I used to fight this but I’m very awake at that time, so it’s maddening to lie in bed for that long. So I’ll do some light reading in the kitchen, maybe putter around in the garage until I’m tired again, then I’ll sleep for another 3-4 hours and wake up around dawn, usually a few minutes before my alarm. I’ve done this for years, getting 7-71/2 hrs of sleep every night.
I can see an evolutionary advantage for these varying sleep patterns. Within a troop/tribe/town some people would stay up after dark, others would be up before dawn, and a few would be awake during the gap.
Bravo! Wins the thread! 
I’ve officially synced my sleep schedule with my 5 cats. This not only lets me witness their 3 a.m. parkour sessions up close but also helps me prevent them from turning my house into a feline demolition zone. Plus, sleeping 20 hours a day isn’t half bad—my dreams have way better plot twists than my actual life! 
I’m raising my hand here. Get to bed somewhere in the ten-to-midnight period. I’ll often wake up about four o’clock, give or take some amount of time, for a bathroom break (that time seems fairly reliable-ish even if the bedtime varies).
Then back to bed. Whether I’ll get back to sleep in a timely manner is a fifty-fifty proposition, and if I can’t, I’ll get up for a while. Usually I’ll sit down at the computer and do some work until after mrs. dirtball has gotten up and gotten ready and gone off to work, walking out the door shortly after eight. Then I’ll be back to bed for another couple of hours.
I do not fall asleep easily. No matter how tired I am when I go to bed, I’m likely to be lying there for an hour or so before the Sandman visits.
I have no reason to think that wouldn’t also be the case for a “second sleep,” and that’s a lot of accumulated time lying in bed awake. Nope, when I do fall asleep, I’m staying asleep.
Yep! Sometimes I go to sleep, wake up to mess around on the internet, and then go back to sleep.
I get up right before I have to go to work. When I get home from work, I will often doze off on the couch for 2 or 3 hours, then get up for a few hours, then go to bed for 5 or 6 hours.
I live alone, so I can easily do this. If I had a wife and/or children, I doubt I would be able to.
I don’t “practice” it. I have often woken up in the middle of the night for a small to not really small amount of time. Since reading about this several years ago I no longer worry about it. Continuous sleep is no longer my ideal.
Not worrying about sleeping improves sleeping.
My understanding is that sleeping more briefly but more often is associated with aging – neither a good nor a bad thing, just a thing. Fortunately by the time it happens to us we’re usually retired and don’t have to worry about keeping to a schedule.
It’s definitely happened to me. Going to bed at “x” time and then waking up 6 or 8 hours later is a thing of the past. Somewhere around four hours is about my average. Sometimes I stay in bed and pick up my tablet or Kindle for an hour or two and then go back to sleep. Sometimes I’ll actually get up and do things, regardless of the fact that it’s 4 AM or some ridiculous hour of the morning, and then have a nap later in the day.
But I’ve always been eccentric about my hours, anyway. I’ve bucked the “regular hours” trend in every job I’ve ever had, at least as much as I could. As a night person and not a morning person, I considered it a hardship to have to show up before noon.
For the last few years I find myself invariably waking up after about 2-3 hours. On my doctors advice I’ve been taking low-dose melatonin at about 8pm and gabapentin an hour or so before I go to bed. but it doesn’t really help. I usually don’t have any trouble getting back to sleep, so I’ve never thought of trying to get out of bed.
However, occasionally I will wake up about 4 or 5 and have trouble getting back to sleep. Sometimes I’ll pick up my bedside kindle and read for a bit until I get tired enough to sleep. I am familiar with the idea of first and second sleep, and occasionally have thought about getting out of bed and doing something “as long as I’m awake anyway” but only did it once.
Part of the reason I’m reluctant to try it is that I have a cat who thinks it’s perfectly okay to start climbing all over me, meowing loudly and pawing at the parts of my face not covered by my CPAP mask, at 6:30 in the morning. So going back to bed only to have a cat waking me up in 15 minutes seems counterproductive.
I go to sleep around 11 every night but Saturday, when I am listening to a jazz show that ends at midnight. I get up at least once in the night to pee and can usually go back to sleep within a half hour, but not always. If not, I will read for an hour and then usually get back to sleep. But I would rather go right back to sleep.
I didn’t know what verb to use in the title of my thread. “Indulge in,” “partake of,” “demonstrate,” “do that thang”…? So sue me.
Absolutely this! If I get up in the middle of the night for any longer than a quick pee, both cats assume it is morning and therefore breakfast time followed or preceded by playtime. If I just sit and read or watch TV and ignore them, there will be some disruption, and as someone mentioned above, midnight parkour. But if I can hold out, they will settle down. Or sometimes I go back to bed and shut them out of the bedroom, taking my chances WRT what I will find when I do get up.
This is an absolutely true statement.
Unfortunately, completely shutting Rascal out of the bedroom is not an option, as the litter box is in the bathroom off the bedroom and I really don’t want to have to clean up what I might find if I do so.
Sometimes if I push him away firmly enough he will decide to go away … just long enough for me to fall asleep, at which point he returns. On rare occasions he will actually let me sleep in until 8.
Ah, I grasp this situation.
This one, too.
There’s the opposite route where you grab him and do some extreme squeezing. Then release.
Yes, sometimes that drives them away.