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MarsColony_in10years comments on Open thread, Feb. 9 - Feb. 15, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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I have a problem. I refuse to sleep.
I don't mean I can't sleep. I've done experiments where I go to bed with some audio playing that I know, from say a movie, and the next morning I do not remember anything past 5-10 minutes into it. I mean that I just don't sleep. If I have nothing going on in the morning I will stay up until the wee hours of the morning shortly before sunrise regardless of how much sleep I have gotten lately or when I woke up. The only thing that drives me to go to bed is the knowledge that I simply cannot function and feel horrible on less than three hours of sleep. I can also tell after the fact that I am quite foggy on less than 7 hours, but at the time it doesn't feel terribly odd.
I've been tracking my sleep with a tablet under my pillow for over a year now and I average between just under and just over 5 hours a night, depending on the particular month, but the standard deviation is at least two hours and it varies from 2 to 9 hours a night chaotically with no apparent pattern. Worse, in the last six months I think my age (25) is catching up to me - my productivity on low-sleep days has dropped precipitously, and nights that I used to go with 3 or 4 hours of sleep I have a tendency to oversleep through six alarms and wind up with just under 8. I think my body simply can't get by on as little sleep as I used to give it. This leads to me getting into work late (as a grad student done with class-style instruction and just doing my research and talking with faculty my schedule is quite flexible as long as I put in my time) and staying quite late, phase shifting my schedule and screwing up social aspects of my life and encouraging me to go to bed far too late and repeat the cycle.
Again the problem is not with sleeping itself, the problem is with letting myself stop doing things and actually go to bed. There is always something else I want to be doing, be it more research in the lab or reading or internetisms or talking to people 3 time zones west in California. I used to get by but now it is affecting my work and social life.
Any ideas on how to help fix this? I tried going to my university's counseling services but all they did was make sure I wasn't psychotic and suggest ritalin at which point I cancelled the followup appointment.
I've been lurking for a while and wasn't going to join the discussions until I'd finished the sequences, but it doesn't look like anyone has mentioned the possibility of just switching to a 28 hour sleep cycle. I've wanted to try one for years, but college or work always conflicted.
Basically, you go to sleep 4 hours later each night. Your first bedtime is midnight, then 4AM, then 8AM, etcetera. By the 6^th sleep cycle, you will have slipped back a total of 24 hours. Because of this, the crossover point occurs after 7 days. This means it is possible to maintain a relatively normal schedule, so long as you can leave work early on Mondays, and get to work late on Fridays due to sleep.
Xkcd has a rather nice graphical illustration, and the comic explanation is a bit more thorough than I was.
And this schedule will also drive you stark raving mad.
Shift work, especially work where you have to be up at night sometimes but not always, is associated with heart attacks, weight gain and several different psychiatric conditions that involve being miserable and unproductive etc.
If you want to change your sleep schedule without getting jet lagged you should shift your wake up time by no more than 10 minutes per day. So shifting one hour should take almost a week, four hours the better part of a month.
This isn't traditional shift work; in shift work you shift by 8 hours all at once, and then it takes ~5 days for bodily hormones to adjust. Shifting by 2 hours a day has less of an obvious problem. Do you have a source for that 10 minutes claim? IIRC the body's natural cycle in the absence of external cues tends to be ~25 hours, so I would expect the "no jetlag shift" to be asymmetric.
See also c2's 28 hour day and 36 hour day
I agree with tut that this doesn't work as any kind of regular schedule. Possibly temporary when you are young and have enough extra power to burn.