I have the same general proclivities that you describe. I’ve got some flexibility in my schedule (grad school is kinda awesome), but realistically speaking it’s not reasonable to go with a full schedule inversion—while sleeping during the day is not difficult for me, my lab and occasional classes make it necessary to be up in the morning sometimes.
I have tried two extremes in how I handle sleep, and liked neither of them: forcing myself to a slightly abbreviated ‘normal’ schedule of 7 continuous hours of sleep from ~12-1 to 7 or 8 AM, and burning the candle at both ends and just existing on 3-4 hours a night, and ‘catching up’ for a 12 hour binge on Saturdays.
The first, as you might expect, annoyed me because I feel like my evening’s only just starting by 10 or 11 PM; the second doesn’t work well because it brings down my baseline functionality during the week. I’ve considered trying out one of the popular polyphasic schedules, but my work is variable enough as to make that difficult or infeasible to implement.
The best solution I’ve found is this: Starting from the basic knowledge that human sleep ‘cycles’ (in which you go into and then back out of REM) are considerably shorter than the ~8-9 hours that’s considered a ‘full night’s sleep,’ I experimented with different shortened sleep amounts (or, more accurately, in undergrad when I was often getting only 3-4 hours/night anyway, I kept track of the exact times I slept and how I felt the next day). I found that, for me, I feel like absolute crap if I wake up after 3 hours, or after 4.5, but somewhere between 3.5 and 4 there’s a sweet spot where I can wake up fully and have high functionality through most of the day afterward.
Since that ‘high functionality’ doesn’t last all day, it works best if I grab a half hour (in my case) nap in the late afternoon/early evening.
Staying slightly sleep-deprived (this is fairly slight for me; I just never have slept a lot when left to my own devices) allows me to shift the schedule essentially as needed (whether for work or to account for social activities), since I can always fall asleep when I want to, and I make sure I get one or two 8-hour periods (essentially inserting one extra cycle) a week to keep the debt from climbing.
Lately I’ve lengthened the ‘night’ to more like 5.5 hours, which seems to work well, as successive REM cycles tend to be shorter, but still generally running on less sleep than most people. YMMV, of course; the flexibility afforded by a short ‘night’ has always been worth the slight energy hit for me, with the trick being to avoid losing mental clarity as well. (Hence where figuring out what shortened cycle is best for you comes in.)
I have the same general proclivities that you describe. I’ve got some flexibility in my schedule (grad school is kinda awesome), but realistically speaking it’s not reasonable to go with a full schedule inversion—while sleeping during the day is not difficult for me, my lab and occasional classes make it necessary to be up in the morning sometimes.
I have tried two extremes in how I handle sleep, and liked neither of them: forcing myself to a slightly abbreviated ‘normal’ schedule of 7 continuous hours of sleep from ~12-1 to 7 or 8 AM, and burning the candle at both ends and just existing on 3-4 hours a night, and ‘catching up’ for a 12 hour binge on Saturdays.
The first, as you might expect, annoyed me because I feel like my evening’s only just starting by 10 or 11 PM; the second doesn’t work well because it brings down my baseline functionality during the week. I’ve considered trying out one of the popular polyphasic schedules, but my work is variable enough as to make that difficult or infeasible to implement.
The best solution I’ve found is this: Starting from the basic knowledge that human sleep ‘cycles’ (in which you go into and then back out of REM) are considerably shorter than the ~8-9 hours that’s considered a ‘full night’s sleep,’ I experimented with different shortened sleep amounts (or, more accurately, in undergrad when I was often getting only 3-4 hours/night anyway, I kept track of the exact times I slept and how I felt the next day). I found that, for me, I feel like absolute crap if I wake up after 3 hours, or after 4.5, but somewhere between 3.5 and 4 there’s a sweet spot where I can wake up fully and have high functionality through most of the day afterward.
Since that ‘high functionality’ doesn’t last all day, it works best if I grab a half hour (in my case) nap in the late afternoon/early evening.
Staying slightly sleep-deprived (this is fairly slight for me; I just never have slept a lot when left to my own devices) allows me to shift the schedule essentially as needed (whether for work or to account for social activities), since I can always fall asleep when I want to, and I make sure I get one or two 8-hour periods (essentially inserting one extra cycle) a week to keep the debt from climbing.
Lately I’ve lengthened the ‘night’ to more like 5.5 hours, which seems to work well, as successive REM cycles tend to be shorter, but still generally running on less sleep than most people. YMMV, of course; the flexibility afforded by a short ‘night’ has always been worth the slight energy hit for me, with the trick being to avoid losing mental clarity as well. (Hence where figuring out what shortened cycle is best for you comes in.)