june gloom on 26/4/2012 at 11:34
Seriously what is going on with my sleep pattern?
My usual bedtime for about a year has been around 6am -- side effect of working second shift, basically. This has held pretty well, I'm usually up by noon at the earliest which is about what I'd sleep to anyway. But lately I've found myself waking as late as 6pm EVEN IF i go to bed at my usual time or even earlier. And then I'm stuck for the next 20-24 hours as I am physically completely incapable of sleep until I finally crash sometime in the early afternoon, only to wake up about 4 hours later. And then the cycle begins anew.
Help me before I go mad.
faetal on 26/4/2012 at 12:20
How long had your ordinary sleep patten been that way before the change?
demagogue on 26/4/2012 at 16:09
Learn to alarm clock?
Human behavior cares about what it has to do. So if you scheduled something at like 1:30 to do and set it up so you can't be late or you miss it, your body is going to naturally wake itself up thinking about it. Edit: I just mean that's the failsafe way if you really want it to work.
Yakoob on 26/4/2012 at 20:19
Aye, two ways to reset, either do it gradually (wake up half hour earlier each day) or alarm-clock-crash-course it with a generous aid of caffeine; usually it takes me 2-3 days to reset this way.
speaking of that, it's funny how deadly accurate and habitual the internal body clock. On many occasions I have literally woken up literally five minutes before my alarm clock would go off.
faetal on 26/4/2012 at 20:35
That's not body clock accuracy, that's just cognitive bias. We wake when we wake and we tend to ignore the times when it is by our alarm and amplify the significance of when it is coincidentally right before. Natural variation dictates that x times out of 100, it will happen - our brain does the rest. It's exactly the same as the "I was just thinking about you and you called!" thing. We forget the times we think about people and they don't call.
demagogue on 26/4/2012 at 20:38
Well the body clock is quite accurate too. These are not mutually exclusive things.
faetal on 26/4/2012 at 21:33
It's not especially. Even if you time going to bed with the anticipation of x amount of REM cycles lasting on average about 90 minutes each, you won't be able to get it down an error margin within 30 minutes either side of your alarm, as sleep cycles just aren't that precise. If they were, people wouldn't use alarms. One of the more likely reasons to wake regularly at a set time is some kind of external stimulus like the sun coming up, a particular train passing near your house at a certain time of day, other people in your household waking up, birds singing etc, but nothing internal.
Kolya on 26/4/2012 at 22:42
There was an episode where Data turned off his internal clock. But only after he had disproved the saying that a kettle never boils while being watched. The moral of the story is: You are not a sad robot!
glslvrfan on 27/4/2012 at 02:58
Has work slowed down, or are you not as socially and/or physically active as you have been?
Last year at the end of August we started some massive OT at work. 12 hour days and at least 8 on sat for 4 months straight. I was awake before my alarm went off damn near every day during that 4 months no matter how late I went to bed. Now that we are back to 40 and 50 hours I've been sleeping till the alarm goes off normally.
I took my daughter out of her high school in January and enrolled in an online home schooling program. Before she was up by 6 every day with no troubles at all, now she will sleep till 9 or 10 and later and get up and do her work.
Tocky on 27/4/2012 at 04:03
Poppies. Poppies will make you sleeeeeeep.
Your body is trying to reset to it's original pattern maybe? You must confuse it by going to strip clubs in the early morning.
Yeah I got nothin.
