I have done this experiment myself a few times. The longest was when I lived in an isolated house in Vermont for 4 months. I cycled down quickly to a 4 am - 1 pm sleep schedule. The same thing has happened every time I have had sleep freedom based on time off or trips. Some people call that sinful. I call that screw them. I don’t trust morning people at all. I am glad they get the deliveries done and I never make fun of them but the species has definitely diverged beyond repair.
Do you know what your sleep would cycle without any obligations to force the issue?
Similar to yours, actually, like 2-4am to 10am - 12pm. This is not conducive to my lifestyle, but in the summer I have to struggle really hard not to revert to it. Why does the whole world have to operate on an 8am - 5pm schedule? That has always seemed cruel to me.
ETA: I concur with your dislike of the morning people who judge us night owls. Wanting to sleep late does not mean you’re lazy. It means you want to do things at a different time of day.
I’m right in there with you two: about 3:30 p.m. to 1:00 p.m.
I’ve read that due to some mechanism in the human body’s circadian rhythms a person can work the graveyard shift for 40 years but never get fully accustomed to it. I must be the opposite: I can’t get accustomed to mornings.
Exactly. If I go to bed when I’m actually tired, as opposed to when I should, I’m up until very late. Or early, if you want to look at it that way instead. I think 2am-10am is probably what my body craves most as a schedule.
I’ve been left to my own devices since May. I basically go to sleep at 3:30 and wake up at 10:30. Happily, I got a job that has night hours, so I don’t have to disrupt my preferred sleeping schedule.
I have been left to my own devices these past few months (as I am unemployed) and my sleep schedule has been one of two scenarios:
(1) 5 am to 1 pm
or
(2) 5 am to 10 or 11 am, then 9 pm to 11pm or midnight (two sleeps per day)
I agree with the others - we should not be judged for our preferred schedules. The amount of snarky comments I get about when I sleep drives me crazy!!!
After midnight to late morning is also my preference. My best sleep hours are often ~6 a.m. to ~11 a.m. and I’m prone to occasional bouts of insomnia in the ~2 a.m. to ~5 a.m. period. The nice thing is that I typically work a 2 p.m. to 10 p.m. schedule, so all that is doable, if not necessarily conducive to accomplishing much.
That said, I’m still a morning person ;). I can wake up at 7 a.m. and pretty much be instantly awake and cheery. I require no rounds of coffee and long hours of quiet to get myself going in the morning. My step-mother and two step-brothers, all emphatically NOT morning people, found me quite insufferable :D.
My natural bedtime would be around 2 a.m., I think. I’m still amazed that I get to work at all these days, because lately I’ve had to be up before 5 so I can be at work by 6.
4-1ish. It may be the fact I’m a teenager/18 though. The thing is, it’s almost useless to make me go to bed at any other time. I’m seemingly immune to sleep medication and just end up lying awake until 2 or 3 anyway (or at the very least waking up a lot). During my high school years (in college I have afternoon classes from 1-6, Mon-Thu, with very few breaks) this tended to be a mixed blessing and curse.
On one hand, I could very easily stay up late and work on a project if I didn’t feel it was ready when others who did that had their projects show a distinct lack in quality where you could almost pinpoint what parts they made while they were up late. However since my sleep schedule was so condensed to a consistent 3-4 hour period, regardless of when I actually lied down I felt ill more often and every month or so it would catch up to me and I’d end up absolutely crashing (and I mean trouble standing crashing) around 5PM until when I normally woke up (6 or 7 AM) for one or two nights.
I think I’d be most comfortable with a 2 am - 9 am schedule as it’s how I prefer to spend my free days/vacations. Give or take an hour every now and then.
If I’m at home with my internet and my super comfy mattress I’ll stay up til 3am or 4 and sleep til 1030 (if I need to get to the deli in time for breakfast) or 1pm or 2 or later.
If I’m upstate with just a book and a stiff mattress then I’ll fall asleep by 10pm or 11 and be up without an alarm clock by 7am.
But it’s hard to really tell, there’s always some motivation to stay up later or sleep later. If I was just in a tent on a beach with only the sun to tell time by and no one else around, it might be a different story.
I’m self employed and do not have an alarm clock, and whether or not I’m working, I generally wake up between 4 and 5 am raring to get my day going. When I go to bed in the evening depends on whether I fall asleep after supper.
When the rest of you guys hit 50, some of you will adopt a schedule more similar to mine.
Midnight to 8 or 9 AM. I’m pretty much on that schedule now since I’m big baby sales guy and my first appointments are generally at 10:00AM. I don’t even set my alarm clock unless it’s for the Tuesday morning meeting which happens at 9:00AM.
Sleep from 2am to 10 am. On days off – an afternoon nap from 4-6 and stay up until 3am. And I have a work schedule to accomodate. I’m nearly never tired at work and I have 9-10 hour shifts. Very unlike the crowd that starts at 7am. They’re always tired and cranky by the time I get there at 11am.
Will this really happen? My parents used to tell me I’d grow out of staying up late/sleeping late. I’m 36 and nothing has changed. I keep hoping that someday my sleep cycle will get more normal.
Also, I always, always feel like crap when I wake up, no matter what time I go to bed, how long I sleep, or when I wake up. It takes at least an hour for me to feel human. I have never in my life woken up “bright eyed and bushy tailed” as my mother (an 11pm-6am sleeper every day no matter what, with no sympathy for insomniacs or night owls) would say.
If I could take a pill that would make me not have to sleep at all, I’d take it. I actually hate sleeping. Maybe that should be a separate thread…
I’d tend to go to bed around 6-7am, wasting time on the internets, and then I’ll wake up around anywhere from 11pm to 1:30pm. And then I’d feel tired and possibly take a nap sometime around 6-9pm for anywhere from 30 mins to 2 hours. And then once again stay up from at least 11pm until 6am.
But it’s a terrible schedule, and I don’t really feel all that refreshed during it. Just REALLY lazy and bored. I enjoy waking up to watch the sunrise, but I’m lazy enough that if left alone- I just wait for the sun to rise before going to bed. But then I feel like a slob.
Oh and at some point I’ll get diminishing hours of sleep, until at some point I’ll go to bed at 5am or so, and then wake up at 8am feeling bright and sunny and refreshed. I’ll then continue with the rest of the Day, and then COMPLETELY Crash by around 4-5PM. When that happens, I can either take a Nap (and the cycle will once again continue with me being up at 11pm again), OR if I can force myself to stay awake, I’ll go to bed around 11pm-midnight. And if that’s the case, I’ll wake up at 9am feeling normal and healthy and refreshed, and I can actually TRY to create a decent reasonable schedule for work/school/etc at that point. but it’s SO hard not to Nap during that “crashing” period the day before.
And yes, this is all extremely specific. :dubious:
Being a bum for the summer gives you time to reflect on these sorts of things…