If I had nowhere to be, I’d probably settle into about a midnight to 7 AM cycle. I actually do pretty close to that now, generally going to bed between 10:30 and 11:30 and waking up for work at 6.
I had the opportunity to do this once over a high school summer.
Ended up going to bed around 4:30-5:00 a.m. and sleeping until the the corresponding p.m.
On weekends currently it’s 2:00 a.m. - 2:00 p.m. I don’t sleep much during the week. I need about 12 and usually get 5 or less.
This is what I do. And then people who call me at, say, 9 am, are like “You’re sleeping so late! Lazy!” I tell them I sleep the same as them (probably less), I just do it at different hours.
Morning people always think night people are lazy.
I have the segmented sleep thing going on, so I’d fall asleep about 8 or 9pm, wake up about 11pm and do stuff, then sleep from about 3 - 6am. I might nap in the afternoon, but probably not.
Hell, that’s pretty much what I do now anyway (except the afternoon nap part), in spite of work and stuff.
Thanks, sounds to me like they’re chemically (or otherwise)] inducing sleep in most of her brain without her actually losing conciousness. That still sounds odd though as if it was possible to do that to/for people without ill-effects there would be a lot of money to be made, just look at how much drugs that increase alertness and concentation are worth…though even those can’t be used for any extensive period without bad things happening. We can overdraw but we have to pay the sleep-bank back sometime!
I vaguely recall reading about an American radio host in the fifties or sixties who stayed up for around five days without sleep as a promotion or other event, which I believe is the record for such events…its still the record because he ended up doing permenant psychological damage to himself.
In the absence of any work, school, or other schedule I don’t have a pattern. None at all. I stay awake until I fell like sleeping and sleep until I wake up. It could be 11:30 PM to 9:45 AM, or 5:10 AM to 10:30 AM or 2:00 AM to 11:00 AM.
I force myself to wake up at 8:15 because the world has a schedule.
I have 2 patterns
Summer: In bed no later then 8 pm, up at 3:30 am to go to work
Non-summer: In bed by 9 pm, up at 5:30 am to go to work
Weekends: In bed at 9-10 pm, my dog gets me up at 6 am because he thinks I slept enough and is paying be back for getting up at 3:30 am during the summer.
Same boat (and almost the same age). I suspect that my natural cycle is something like 20/10. I recently slept for 15 hours straight after staying up for nearly 50 hours.
Daily sleepy period is 3-11 and I’d probably maintain that when keeping to a 24 hr schedule, but I have to work to not keep rotating it.
Back when I was unemployed (about 6 years ago) I didn’t leave my apartment for weeks on end. Hey, World of Warcraft and a few thousand in savings keeps a guy busy!
Anyway, I found I adjust well to 28 hours awake, then 10 hours of sleep.
My ideal sleep pattern is to retire for the night around 2 a.m., sleep until around 9a.m. At 9 a.m. I then get up to prepare and eat breakfast and then around 10 a.m I return to the bed where I sleep until around 12 p.m. So altogether around nine hours of sleep a night is my sweet spot, and broken down in this manner. Unfortunately I don’t often get this ideal amount-I’d say my average is about 7 hours a night or less.
Hard to be sure what would actually work over a long period of time, since real life always interferes with finding out. But I think sleeping from around 9 pm to 4 am would be good.
Alternatively, if I were to be in one of those experiments where you have no natural light, only artificial light that you control yourself, I could see myself having a very short cycle: sleep for 4-6 hours, up for about 8, back to sleep. Needless to say, I have no idea if I’d really function that way or not. It just seems like I am wide awake after only a little sleep, but then I get tired again fairly fast.
In light of the discussion upthread, I’m surprised no one has yet mentioned fatal familial insomnia.
Sorry, missed edit window … this youtube video is a much more interesting introduction to FFI:
