I recently read my brother’s entry on Sleeping Less while Getting More Done, and it was some food for thought.
As many of you know, I’ve worked nights for the past year. For several months, I tried keeping a consistent sleep schedule, and that worked… mostly. Recently, I’ve been “slamming” my schedule, staying up all day Friday so that my Fridays and Saturdays are normal before going back to work Sunday night. Kinda’ miserable, but do-able. It just meant that Mondays were awful, Tuesdays through Fridays were OK (long day on Friday), Saturday was a little sleepy, and Sunday was “normal”, except for that part about leaving for work at 11 PM.
So I did some reading on different sleeping patterns, and was pleased to discover a thing called Polyphasic Sleep. This is just a fancy name for “taking multiple naps”. There are various programs, but they center around finding ways to reduce your total number of sleep hours in order to make sleep more restful and invigorating. The key seems to be setting, and keeping, a schedule. Which, of course, my night schedule didn’t really allow if I was attempting to lead a “normal” weekend life with my family and work graves during the week.
BTW: I think the whole “sleep debt” idea is pure baloney, and have for several years. So any argument which includes this concept doesn’t wash with me, because an ever-accumulating “sleep debt” doesn’t jive at all with my personal reality. One good night’s rest has often been enough to wipe away weeks of short-changing myself. And before anybody jumps down my throat about it, I understand the implications of long-term sleep deprivation. I’m living them due to shift work. My body, my science project 🙂
Anyway, have you played with various sleep schedules, trying to find a good balance? What worked for you, and more importantly, what didn’t?
A little bit
So I’m following a slightly “polyphasic” schedule this weekend: taking 20 minute naps every 4 hours, yet trying to get a reasonable (if short) night’s rest.
It’s not the “uberman” thing, but it sure seems like taking a 20-minute nap every 4 hours on the weekend definitely helps keep me awake! So far, I got a full day’s rest on Thursday, went to work Friday night (taking naps every 4 hours), came home, took a 90-minute nap, then took a 20-minute every 4 hours. I even took one in the car on the way to the drive-in during our date.
This means that I spent effectively from 6 PM Thursday to 2:30 AM without a “full night’s rest”, and I felt fine at the end. Considerably less tired than I usually do on a Friday night, even if I get 4-5 hours of sleep during the day!
Overall, it made me much more alert for the period. I think I’m going to play with the schedule a bit, but taking several short naps, IMHO, helps immensely with shift workers (like me) who want to spend time with family. I don’t know that I’ll every succeed in doing the Full Monty of only getting 2-4 hours rest in a day, but just knowing that I have a technique now to manage my exhaustion on weekends is really cool.
Time will tell, I suppose. Now it’s time for my nap 🙂
—
Matthew P. Barnson
Actually I have been
Actually I have been figuring something out along the same line. For the longest time I had ‘weird’ sleeping hours, I got eight hours when I could get them and would take them whenever I could, at noon or 6 pm or midnight or whenever.
So recently I sorta ‘reset’ things and now I am sleeping from midnight to 5 am. I noticed that I am WAY more awake during the days and more ready to try to accomplish stuff, although when midnight rolls around, even if I am in the middle of a game or something my body shuts down HARD. It’s time to push the gamers out the door and crash before I fall over.
Still, 5 hours of uninterrupted sleep seems almost a miracle for me, who was struggling desperately with severe insomnia for about the last 20 years. I think the biggest problem has always been trying to get 8 hours of sleep, because I’d wake up and be listless and grumpy during the day and unwilling to do ANYTHING at all. I think for me, 5 hours has been the key. It’s nice to be able to sit down and think CLEARLY about something instead of being foggy all day after a full 8 hours of sleep. Of course, it kinda freaks Melissa out that I go to bed 2 hours after her and get up an hour before her, without an alarm clock.
Hmm. I think it’s time to get a real job.
-Democracy: founded on the principal that 1000 people are automatically smarter than any one person. Excuse me? -Dictatorship: founded on the principal that one person is automatically smarter than any thousand people. Come again?
Third week, good times
Well, so I’ve been using this sleep method and averaging 3-5 hours of sleep a day with few problems for the past 2 weeks. This weekend I “rebooted” and slept about 4-6 hours a night over the Memorial Day holiday.
There seem to be some benefits and disadvantages. Chief among the disadvantages are a “crash” 1-2 weeks after starting. You literally feel like a zombie, moving around but totally numb (classic sleep deprivation). If you an push through it, your body gets the idea that your sleeping pattern has changed, and starts actually getting deep sleep in 20-minute increments.
I hit the crash my first weekend. I’m guessing I hit it earlier than many because I was already sleep-deprived working graves. I pushed through it (mostly), and it became easier and easier to fall asleep — fully asleep — during my 20-minute naps.
It’s also a unique phenomenon, living life in discrete 3.5-hour increments. Nobody I know sleeps this way, so some people kind of think it’s weird that, during a party, I’ll ask to borrow a quiet room for 30 minutes. If I weren’t working grave shift anyway, I doubt I’d try this kind of sleep schedule. For a day worker, it would just be too disruptive. In effect, you’d be losing about an hour of daylight every day that you could spend with other people, because you’re sleeping.
This is the factor which dissuades most people who actually go on the schedule for months or years at a time: being out-of-sync with everybody else is wearying.
Also, my bedroom used to be a sanctuary during the day. When I was sleeping from 10 AM to 6 PM, my kids would stay out of the upstairs entirely, and I could get very solid sleep. Now, my bedroom is often vacant for the hours I’d sleep before. However, when I do sleep, I need it to be more uninterrupted. The other day, I had 3 sleeps in a row interrupted by children, and I had to leave work early due to exhaustion.
Your tolerance for lost sleep goes way down when you’re getting less of it 🙂
The advantages are, of course, more time to do things, and a more even schedule for those, like me, who already have messed-up social lives due to working grave shift. My regular night terrors and insomnia have disappeared, and my frequent back and neck aches, usually experienced right after awakening, are pretty much history. I still have a bit of trouble with sleepiness around 6 AM every day, but when I think about it, I had similar sleepiness around 3 PM every day anyway when I was working days “monophasically”.
Really, sleep isn’t a terribly exciting thing to write about, so I’m not going to spend time keeping a sleep journal or anything. But I’ve been going since Friday, May 12, and so far it seems like, for a shift-worker like me, it’s a decent sleeping plan with a really steep initial discipline phase.
Beats being exhausted half the time, at least.
But time will tell. Really, if it doesn’t work out, I haven’t lost anything. Purely optional. My body, my science project.
—
Matthew P. Barnson