I have to agree with KarlGauss. 90 minute cycles are the key for me. 6 hours is perfect, but I can run indefinitly on 4 1/2 hours per night. Three hours a night will work for about a week, and I can go for a couple of days with 1 1/2 hours per night, but then I pretty much have to sleep the clock around to recover. Asl long as it’s on the 90 minute clycle, it’s cool, but wake me after an hour, or let me sleep past 7 1/2 hours, and I’m useless.
Submarine dayly work rythms have given me the ability to go with extreme amounts of sleep deprivition, but that’s a young man’s game.
There is so much to do, so I hardly sleep at all. I go to bed at 5 and sleep until 7 on weekdays, and I have more energy than most people. On weekends, I usually don’t sleep on Friday, and sleep 4 hours on Saturday night, so I probably get a max of 15-16 hours of sleep a week.
I seem to do OK with 7-8, less than 5 sets me in bitch mode for the day.
I’m looking forward to retirement so I can see what my internal clock prefers. (yeah, yeah, it’s stupid, but think of it as intellectual curiosity) I wonder what my routine will be when I don’t have to get up at a certain time…
Sleep? Yeah, I do that most nights, but not this last one. What can I say? I’m a wild and crazy college guy.
I usually (:rolleyes:) go to bed around 4 am and sleep till noon or 2 pm. I have classes that I usually don’t go to, and (until I was laid off last week) I work the night shift. It’s not at all unusual for me to get 12-18 hours of sleep. Yeah, you read that right.
My sleep patterns also cycle around the clock, so for a while I’ll sleep at 2am, then 4am, then 6am, then pull a few all-nighters and go down at noon and up at 8 or so, et cetera. Pain in the ass.
I usually work best on around 7 hours, too much more and I feel groggy all day, too much less and just plain sleepy.
When I was a bit younger, I heard that Thomas Edison would simply take catnaps whenever he was sleepy, but not sleep in a big chunk at night, so I decided to give it a try. I’d go to work in the morning, come home for lunch and sleep about a half hour, then go back to work. After work another nap, and then go to my evening classes, then another nap. Maybe another around 3 a.m., then one more before work, usually totalling about 3 hours a day. It actually seemed to work. I felt a little funny, a little fuzzy really, but not too tired, and I kept it up for about 5 days. The problem was that I couldn’t find enough to do at 4 a.m. to keep myself occupied, so I gave it up. I wish I’d known it would work when I was in college, it would have been really useful during those all-night charettes.
Finally! I’m not the only one!!
I am convinced that I’m either nocturnal or should have been born on a different planet. I sleep at least 8 hours a night, usually 12 but sometimes it blows out to around 15, and then I’m awake for maybe 15 hours. Sometimes it changes on me, I’ll sleep 4 to 6 hours one night, and then I’ll be on a totally different set of waking hours for a while.
I wish I could just sleep when I want and wake when I want, but the world isn’t designed to accomodate people who are awake all night, asleep all day (or even for people who are asleep all morning, awake all afternoon and half the night). Ok, I have a medical condition that interfers with your sleeping, but I’ve been like this since I was a child - I just wasn’t sleeping up to 15 hours a night back then. I’m actually much better now. There was a time when I’d sleep 18 hours a night, and take an afternoon nap. I would wake at 2pm in the afternoon, nap around 4pm for an hour or so, and then go to bed at 8pm. I was really very ill back then.
Being a chronic insomniac since puberty hit, I almost never get enough sleep except on the weekends if I have nothing to do. It often takes me two hours to get to sleep. So during the week I get 6 or 7 hours (which is not enough) if I am lucky, and I try to catch up and get 10 or so on the weekends.
I swear, for optimum racerx performance I need one hour of sleep for every hour of being awake. Now, I’ve never been given a chance to test this theory for long periods of time, but I’d like to. That works out to about 9 hours of sleep during the night and a nice long nap in the afternoon. I looooove sleep and love even more being well rested.
I usually hate answering this question, because inevitably it’s being asked by someone who only needs four hours of sleep per night, and then I get looked at like I’m the laziest person alive.
I need 9 hours a night, but no less than 8. Even on 7 hours, I’ll wake up with a headache and yawn all day. I rarely have the ability to nap. If I nap, then I know I’m seriously sick or sleep deprived. I need the 9 hours in a row. Throw four kids into the mix, and I’ve been sleep deprived for nearly 11 years.
Between November 1999 and January 2000 I wouldnt fall asleep before 3 AM and woke up around 4:30. First I didnt mind much, just went online or read a book in the extra time, but then I got fidgety, would talk so fast nobody understood a single word and heared “voices”. I wasnt able to read anymore and had constant headaches. Oh the olden days…
I am currently reading “The Instinct for Sleep.” The author’s premise is that the need for sleep is instinctual, like sex (not necessary, like food and air).
I’d tell you more about it, but I keep falling asleep before page 23.
Actually as some of the people have already said I sleep very weird. My body loves to switch around the clock and some ays I need more sleep then others. When left to my own devices I generally sleep 10 or so hours but that never happens anymore. Now I usually go to bed at 10 but don’t fall asleep till anywhere between 11 and 12 and wake up at 6:30 in the morning. On weekends I generally get to bed around 11-12 and don’t fall asleep till 1. I would sleep in till noon but I get woken up around 10. If I could I would bypass mornings all together.
My Grandparent’s can’t understand that I like to sleep in on weekends and need more sleep then they do. They also seem to think I get lots of sleep but in reality I get less sleep then they think I do. Once I was having an insomniac episode and I was up till 3-4 am for 2 nights in a row. They woke me up around 10 demanding to know why I wasn’t up and moving yet. I nearly went crazy that weekend.
My family also has all these weird ideas about why I sleep like I do (having to do with everything from what I eat to what was or wasn’t done when I was a baby). I just wish I could be left alone and go on going to bed around 2-3 am and waking up in the early afternoon.
porcupine: Welcome to club. I’ve been a chronic insomniac since around 13. At 31 now, I’ve pretty much gotten used to it.
As a rule, I sleep around 4 hours a night on nights I can sleep. There have been more times than I care to count, though, that I’ve been up for 3 days running. Yes, by day 3 I’m pretty much a zombie bastard catching trails off everything and with w helluva metalic taste in my mouth. I rarely fail to zonk for a good 12 hours after one of those sessions, though.
I’ve found that I feel most rested when I can sleep in even numbered time alotments. 2-4-6 are okay; 1-3-5 are not, or at least less so.
As an aside, I’ve come to view sleep as a huge waste of time. (Defense mechanism? Probably.) I mean, that’s a chunk of my LIFE I’m spending there useless and unproductive. I have a full-time career (60+ hours a week). I also work out regularly, read voraciously and am a short story writer/novelist/poet. In addition, I like to spend non-activity based and activity-based time with my wife, and we’re touching up the house we just bought. Seems to me sleep is the only area of my schedule with any “give”.
I’m a lightweight compared to my oldest brother, though. He’s 53 and (excepting times of illness) hasn’t slept more than two hours a night since the early sixties.
FallenAngel, I’ve got you beat. I will be 36 on Saturday, and have had sleeping problems since age 12. That’s nearly a quarter century of not getting enough sleep. Obviously, I’ve gotten used to it, but that doesn’t keep me from bitching about it. ;p
I kinda vary, usually I do pretty well on about 7-8 hours a night, but during Comedy Festival, I average about 3-4 hours a night while pretending to work a day job and work/play as hard as I can at night. I tend to fall down and sleep for 2 days at the end of that month, but it’s worth it!
I think it has something to with Alpha Rythms, but my scientific knowlege on the subject is scarce. I just worked it (the 90 minute cycle) out by observation, but it it’s essentially a law with me.
Under the proper stimulii (General Quarters, Rescue and Assistance, Reactor Scram, Crying Daughter, etc.), I can be up and moving with crystal clarity anywhere in my sleep cycle, but I’ll pay for it later.
