Am I Really Weird?

[adonnellyr]

So lately I've been trying something new--an experiment, if you will. It started accidentally, but I've decided to embrace it and see where it takes me. Some of you may have noticed a recent thread of mine talking about staying up all night to finish a paper and looking forward to the shave at the end. Well, the couple nights leading up to that I had immense amounts of research to do and pulled one all-nighter as well. As a result, over the course of 4 days my sleep pattern was:

Stay Up All Night
Sleep 8 Hours
Stay Up All Night
Sleep 8 Hours

So, I continued the trend. It's been 4 such revolutions of this pattern now, and I'm pretty tired by the second night when it's time to sleep, but not THAT bad. I think I might just keep doing it to see if perhaps my body runs perfectly well on this sort of sleeping pattern.

My question to you all is, do you think this is REALLY bad for me? I'm sure there are reasons why sleeping daily is good, but I partially feel like nightly sleep is just a human invention that arose before good lighting was possible and it made sense to sleep when it was dark and get stuff done during the daylight. I kind of think my body works fine sleeping every second night...

I mean, the bonus is that if I sleep, on average 8 hours a night, and I start cutting one of those nights out, I would increase the amount of awake time I have 6% So, thanks to my knowledge of simple mathematics, of which I have just enough to get by, this would mean that if I were to live another 50 years (I'm 26), I would spend 26280 more conscious hours--or 1095 more days!!!--in this beautiful world. You have to admit, it's an interesting idea, despite the medical danger...

 

[Singapura]

I don't do anything else. When you're sleeping it's night here anyway and when you're awake I'm at work.

 

[highball]

If you cant sleep, your not tired

 

[Colphax]

Being a night shift worker, I'm pretty familiar with irregular sleep patterns. I can tell you this much: You may not feel it, but you are building up a "sleep debt" that eventually will take it's toll. Sleep debt is literally an hour of missed sleep that must be made up with another hour of sleep. With a sleep debt "balance", you'll feel fine, even well-rested, but your performance is actually worse. As your sleep debt grows, that performance hit increases. Do that sleep pattern long enough, and you will disrupt your circadian rhythms enough so that you may develop insomnia.

My advice would be to pick a time to go to sleep and stick to it as much as possible. Keep the all-nighters and late-nights to a rare occurrence so that you can more easily make up the sleep debt by sleeping in a couple hours when you can (typically weekends for most folks).

 

[nikkuchan]

Sounds fine to me. A lot of people have similar patterns. As long as you're getting enough sleep to operate I don't think it matters.

 

[Roman414]

For over fifteen years I worked rotating shifts...usually eight hours on, eight hours off (with the eight off frequently interrupted) followed by 32 hours off, then start over again. Sometimes it would be six hours on, six off, for a week or ten days at a stretch. The sleep deprivation is cumulative...even when you don't feel tired your mental processes are dulled, you find it harder to concentrate, even simple tasks become harder.
I have read of experiments in which they isolate people from the outside world so they don't even know if it is day or night and let them sleep or wake as they choose. The subjects develop a pattern of taking frequent, short naps. They end up sleeping about eight hours out of 24, but not all in one stretlch. Kind of hard to do that if you have a conventional job, though.

 

[ambrose]

I have a super crazy sleep pattern, ive been this way since I was 12.

 

[adonnellyr]

I have a super crazy sleep pattern, ive been this way since I was 12.

Elaborate?

 

[Joshua Da Silva]

I have a super crazy sleep pattern, ive been this way since I was 12.

Do tell.



As to the OP, as others have said, this isn't a good idea, and it WILL catch up to you.

 

[slcsteve]

I think that you'd find any articles/studies regarding Circadian Rhythm quite interesting.

That said, I think that i'll take a short nap now.

 

[ambrose]

Well I seem to rotate slowly in time, I will sleep and wake 1 or 2 hrs later and later every day. I will rotate all the way around the clock, from waking up at 5-6 pm to waking at 2 am. Sleeping at 2 pm, 6 pm etc. I go round and round, I do however usually get a full 8hrs or so of sleep.

 

[crankymoose]

I work all night work for the past few years so my sleep is constantly messed up and prior to that I did shift work with lots of 16 hour shifts and also drove cross country tractor trailer for about 7 years where I almost never got enough sleep and my hours of sleep changed from day to day and even going some days without any

I don't think it will do you any long term harm but as others said eventually it catches up with you mentally at first then physically until you do get a good sleep and recharge. You can get used to broken sleep or irregular sleep patterns it isn't the best for you but your body can get used to it but sooner or later your body is going to get the sleep it needs one way or another.

 

[porterhaus]

So lately I've been trying something new--an experiment, if you will. It started accidentally, but I've decided to embrace it and see where it takes me. Some of you may have noticed a recent thread of mine talking about staying up all night to finish a paper and looking forward to the shave at the end. Well, the couple nights leading up to that I had immense amounts of research to do and pulled one all-nighter as well. As a result, over the course of 4 days my sleep pattern was:

Stay Up All Night
Sleep 8 Hours
Stay Up All Night
Sleep 8 Hours

So, I continued the trend. It's been 4 such revolutions of this pattern now, and I'm pretty tired by the second night when it's time to sleep, but not THAT bad. I think I might just keep doing it to see if perhaps my body runs perfectly well on this sort of sleeping pattern.

My question to you all is, do you think this is REALLY bad for me? I'm sure there are reasons why sleeping daily is good, but I partially feel like nightly sleep is just a human invention that arose before good lighting was possible and it made sense to sleep when it was dark and get stuff done during the daylight. I kind of think my body works fine sleeping every second night...

I mean, the bonus is that if I sleep, on average 8 hours a night, and I start cutting one of those nights out, I would increase the amount of awake time I have 6% So, thanks to my knowledge of simple mathematics, of which I have just enough to get by, this would mean that if I were to live another 50 years (I'm 26), I would spend 26280 more conscious hours--or 1095 more days!!!--in this beautiful world. You have to admit, it's an interesting idea, despite the medical danger...

Everything I have read, and my own experience says, getting regular quality sleep is critical to good health. I can understand the desire to be conscious and experience life as much as possible. However, good sleep is not only critical to resting one's body. It is critical for development of the brain. Sleep is when the learning process actually becomes more permanent in the brain cells. After you get a good night's sleep, the next day you feel better and are more alert. You are capable of performing better, enjoying, and making the most out of your waking hours. Therefore I suggest that the quality of your waking hours is more important than the quantity.

 

[Obsessed]

Sorry, I'm just too tired to focus on this right now. . .

 

[Prince]

 

[blantyre]

I tried the experiment a few years ago in the following way: Get up in Chicago, fly to Tokyo, sleep for a few hours. Get up and go to an all day meetings starting at at 9am local time (11 pm CST), then go drinking. Sleep for a few hours, repeat for 5 days then fly home. I don't recommend doing this.

As a practical matter working at night can be OK if you don't need to overlap with other people too much. I have had employees who want to work at night, the problem is they are not there when every one else is, so it doesn't really work very well for team efforts.

 

[_JP_]

You'll eventually pay the price for trying to stay awake every other night. As the saying goes, you have to "get your sleep out," and it will catch up with you. Being awake longer doesn't count for much when your mind is in a zombie state.

 

[DustBow]

Didn't Kramer attempt something like this on Seinfeld? Didn't turn out too well...

 

[Crazy Dave]

I think you will be OK as long as you compensate by drinking heavily.

Dave

 

[Evbo]

I'm one of those people who's a night owl. My preference would be to go to sleep anywhere between 2 & 4 & wake up anywhere between 10 & noon. Unfortunately this schedule doesn't quite fit with my life right now.

When I was younger (20s-30s) I was much better able to deal with being sleep-deprived. I could get maybe 2-4 hours' sleep & be able to "ride the wave" thru the next day without much of a problem. But now that I'm older (49) I have much more of a problem with sleep deprivation. My body -- and especially my mind -- feels the lack of sleep way more intensely. In particular, my ability to concentrate & be productive drops off severely. The other thing I've noticed is that it now takes me a couple of days (or more) to recover, as opposed to being able to feel refreshed from just 1 night's sleep after having little to no sleep the night before. So yeah, to echo others' comments, it will catch up with you. Most definitely.