4 ms·
For whatever reason I cannot do this. Every time I think I have my sleep schedule stabilized, and I'm falling asleep at night and waking up 7.5 hours later with
by zeta0134 5y ago
For whatever reason I cannot do this. Every time I think I have my sleep schedule stabilized, and I'm falling asleep at night and waking up 7.5 hours later with perfect mental clarity, inevitably I can only hold onto it for a few days in a row. Then it slips; the bedtime drowsiness arrives later, and later, and later in the evening. Eventually I end up shorting my big sleep at night to make it to work on time, and shortly after that I crash, the schedule goes to hell for a few days during which I am biphasic or worse, and then it stabilizes at a new earlier time again. Lather rinse repeat for my entire adult life.
So far I haven't found a magic solution to this. Monitoring my diet certainly helps, and so does regular exercise, and so did greatly restricting my caffeine intake, but nothing seems to stop the slow, steady drift of the sleep clock into the future. It's like my body just ignores the daylight cycle and does whatever it wants.
What I did instead was talk to my manager, explain the situation, and gain an OK to essentially work for one big block of time in a day wherever it falls. That didn't solve the sleep drift, but it did relieve most of the associated social pressure and stigma. But I'd like to solve this properly, since it's a massive pain even when mitigated in this way, and I might not be so lucky to have a support network at my workplace in the future.
- puzzlingcaptcha 5y ago> It's like my body just ignores the daylight cycle and does whatever it wants. How about artificial light cycle? I found that cutting light to just a yellow reading lamp after 9 p.m has really helped me sleep regularly.
- globular-toast 5y ago> but nothing seems to stop the slow, steady drift of the sleep clock into the future. I've always struggled with this. When I was still in school (pre-university) was the most extreme. I would stay up late on Friday nights (01:00-02:00) then sleep until at least midday on Saturday. By Sunday night I couldn't sleep until 03:00-04:00 so got a very short sleep before Monday. There was a reason for it back then: night time was when I could use the internet. Because there was no pressure to get up early the next day, I would spend as long as I could online. I wonder if this caused my later problems or if they were innate. Later in uni it was normal for me to be completely nocturnal. I overslept my alarm every single morning, which just became more and more of a joke as it would go off a mere hour or two into my "night". I remember well the first time I "lost" a day. Woke up and made a cup of tea and it was already dark. I hated it. I hated that other people had actually done stuff that day and all I'd done was slept. Now I'm older I find it much easier to stay on top of. At some point something in me switched and now I can't stand it if I'm not ready to do something by 09:00. I remember my brother expressing a similar sentiment when he was 12 (me being 15 and in the aforementioned weekend routine). I wonder why it took me until my late 20s to feel the same way.
- pydry 5y agoI had this problem too. For me it was solved by dimming lights and screens right down about 4 hours before I went to sleep and routinely eating as soon as I got up (especially when my stomach felt knotted). I used to think my body had a 25 hour schedule lol.
- jgwil2 5y agoInterestingly, I recall reading that when they've experimented with having people live in caves, absent of sunlight, for extended periods, they did tend to shift their "day" length to 25 hours.
- maximus-decimus 5y agoI'm reading Why We Sleep and it sounds like your circadian cycle isn't syncing. Basically our internal clocks are not exactly 24 hours (can differ by even a few hours) so your body relies on some signals like sunlight and a meal in the morning to resync.