I'll try living with a 28 hour day

Communities Blog
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@ Trooper_ish wanted me to leave a report so I’ll make a thread for this.

My plan is to change my weeks from 7 days of 24 hours to 6 days of 28 hours.

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S is for lovely lovely sleep

You probably shouldn’t try this at home but I’m special/broken. I’ll be 50 in a month and since I was like 13 I’ve had problem with sleep. I have what I call “tsunami of thoughts” when I go to bed so it might take me 1-3 hours to fall asleep. Then I sleep for X hours and are dead tired for long parts of the day. This was true even when I was 13, were out during the day, got sunlight, jumped and ran around, had P.E. at school, didn’t drink coffee. I mention this because these are usually things you’re told to do/not do to be able to sleep as a grown up.

A couple of years ago I realised I need 10 hours of sleep to be able to be up for the rest of the day. If I sleep the normal 6-8 hours it will take me hours to wake up, and I will get like narcoleptic episodes during the day when I have to use all my willpower to stay awake, or sleep for 2-4 hours.

I’m also a bit special, I don’t need it to be dark to sleep. I sleep as well during the day as the night, and I have never had a problem with the long dark winters. I do find it kind of boring when you go to work in darkness and goes home again in darkness, but I don’t get a “winter depression” as some people do.

Oh yeah, also, I’m unemployed right now, have no partner, no children, friends and family know I’m kind of hopeless so there’s no one who will be surprised if I say “Monday 16:00? No sorry, I’ll be sleeping then.”

Anyhow, here’s some rules and guidelines for myself.

  • I will rely heavily on the alarm on my mobile phone as a reminder to when to sleep, wake up, eat, and so on.
  • I will at least to begin with rely on melatonin to go to sleep. It helps with the “tsunami of thoughts” so I don’t end up reliving 3rd grade or something.
  • I’ll eat “alright”. 1-2 cooked meals X hours after I wake up, 1-2 meals of wholegrain bread and yoghurt.
  • I’ll workout daily. 30 minutes on a stationary bike. No set goal, just “get my blood pumping”.
  • I’ll hate me for this, but hopefully it might get easier in time. 30 minutes of walk outside in sunshine every day. (Except Saturday and Sunday during those months when the sun is down the hours I’m awake.)
  • I’m gonna decide on a system for those times when I can’t sleep the scheduled hours, I’m thinking of trying to sleep 6 hours before and 4 hours after. If I have attend a dinner or doctors appointment or something.

In the end I’ll be sleeping 60 hours a week instead of the normal 42-56 and I hope that I’ll spend less hours struggling to sleep/stay awake. I have something to attend tomorrow Saturday but I’ll try to start Sunday/Monday.

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I like the idea, and am interested in how you get on…

Please obviously stop if health / concentration / whatever reduces…

Personally, I choose to add hours in the day, by robbing them from designated sleep cycle.
your way sounds a different, better way to rob from Peter, to pay Paul…

stay safe, and keep us updated!

even if your body just does not adjust to regular 10 hour sleeps, with 28 hour wake sessions

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Tracking…

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You’re not broken. Everyone’s on a spectrum of sleep patterns that gravitate towards the diurnal cycle thanks to sunlight resetting internal clocks. Some folks are less affected by sunlight, so the ‘snap to’ effect isn’t as effective on them.

I went through the whole process in the 1990s. Spent about a decade living my natural cycle of 30 hours (20 awake, 10 asleep). Incredibly productive. Took a bit of environmental tweaking to make work (suppressing light and noise) but that ended up being relatively straight-forward. Easy to do when you are single and working for yourself (or not working at all).

Had to give it up when work changed and then marriage happened. Now tired most of the time… again.

The process I went through was simple: Eliminate sunlight from the equation long enough for my natural wake/sleep pattern to emerge. Then re-introduce sunlight at the start of my wake cycle (when possible) to stabilise and reinforce the pattern. That’s all there was to it.

Good luck!

PS: In my case, the ratio of wake:sleep ended up being 20:10 (so 2:1). This is the same as an average person’s 16:8 so I didn’t quantitatively gain anything in that regard. My gains were all qualitative. Being able to get to sleep and wake up — almost instantly — day-after-day was an amazing experience. Being mentally alert for the entire wake cycle — just wow. Wish I could have kept doing it forever.

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When I was deployed on an aircraft carrier I did about 3 months or so of 4hrs sleep / 8hrs work / 4hrs sleep / 8hrs work. Honestly worked really well for me. No daylight to “set” my internal clock so it was much easier to maintain odd sleep cycles

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I am a bad sleeper, 4-6 max. If for some reason i try to force myself to sleep even 8 hours i get migraines. I am middle age now and i can still go a night with out sleep and be unfazed. I also take 1+ hours to fall asleep. I hate having to sleep at all, if i could fully break the habbit i would.

About 5 days awake and the monsters come out.

Anyway, good luck to you.

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Realised it would’ve been really funny to never log in again after posting my plans.

Day 1 - Monday
Woke up about 21 on Sunday, started dinner at 7, went to lecture 8:30 just to realise it didn’t start until 10. Got home, around 13, made dinner. Went to sleep two hours late at 17.

I was a bit tired during the day but I experience worse during a normal day. I might’ve smoked a bit more than usual.

Day 2 - Tuesday
Woke up at 3 after sleeping about 10 hours. Were still sleepy so I went to bed again around 5 and slept to 7:30. (Never underestimate the hours I can sleep.) Around 10 I ate lunch. At 18 I will eat dinner (should really had diner at 12-ish) and then I’m going to bed. The goal is to sleep 19-4.

I’ve been a little tired today but not bad. Might’ve to do with me sleeping 12h30m :stuck_out_tongue:

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This is where I am, I’m also far more active in the evening hours when there’s less things to bug me/consume my attention.

I’d love to get back to the same 20:10 split, but the whole family and work thing makes that something I can’t do at this point. I’m sure my family would be okay with it, but it’s the rigid work schedule that gets in the way.

I’ve also attempted to try the two 4-hour sleep cycles and it just didn’t work well for me. I’d either sleep far too much or be unable to sleep at all.

Right now I’m running 19:5, and I can tell I can’t last through the days sometimes without an hour nap or so. Sleep quality has been rather poor in recent years, so even if I were to find the time to get the sleep I feel I need, it still wouldn’t be quality, restful sleep.

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You all need a sleep study, this is terrible! Without light scheduling our bodies, we will be either a little bit short of 24 hours around 23.75 or jush a bit longer around 24.25. Outside of that is a sleep issue, and short sleeping is linked to alhiemer’z / dementia. A great podcast to learn about just how incredible important and not understood nor at all appreciated is:

JRE Joe Rogan Experience #1109 Mathew Walker. I have it downloaded multiple times on two devices so I always have a backup of it.

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I had a sleep study done about a decade ago, and they couldn’t determine anything. :man_shrugging:

It was done at a local hospital on an Air Force base.

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Will keep tabs on this post. I’m sort of the same with sleep. I know that anything between 1-10 hours is not enough for me and I also like longer days. Problem is I have to keep to everyday obligations, so it’s harder to manage. Godspeed!

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Day 3 - Wednesday
First I was awake for maybe an hour in the middle of the night, and then slept until 6:45. (I think I need some kind of sleep app to keep track of how much I sleep.) Tried to give a good explanation to what I’m doing to my mom, and then went to bed at 22:45.

I was a tiny bit tired during the day but not as I usually am.

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Highly recommend some form of sleep tracking, as invasive as it can seem. There are ways to do it locally and privately. I woke up tired for weeks until looking at my sleep tracking and the noise notifications it turns out my cat liked to sit Behind my head on the headboard and scratch the wall every night at 3am. Never woke up fully and caught him but routinely left deeper sleep. The headboard now smells of oranges and I sleep better.

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If you need a more reliable sleep tracker, may have to dig into watches that support “variable sleep tracking” that aren’t hard coded to only track sleep after 10pm.

I’ve found if I hide from my cat, the interruptions are less often.

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@MattiP @Trooper_ish @alwaysFlOoReD @level1 @ucav117 @Zedicus @PentaxEnthusiast @Katie @Jojo314 @PaintChips

Just so everyone gets notified, go download the joe rogan episode #1109 Mathew Walker. It is a two hour long conversation packed to the max with information about sleep. Light can be a very strong cue, and it’s one we probably don’t get enough of during daylight, if we stay indoors. Sunlight directly on a clear day is way up at 120,000 lux. A overcast sky is between 10,000 and 15,000 lux. A ceiling indoors tops out at around 100-125 lux, and light sources like fluorescent at chair measurements are usually around 200 lux. If it is a very well lit building with hundreds of fluorescent lights, it can be up to 550 lux.

Still a LOT less than being outside. Timing matters too. If you don’t see sunlight early in the morning, your body will not be clued into the ever shifting changes in the days beginning. Also, seeing dimming evening light transition to darkness is something we’ve avoided for the last 50 years. It’s gotten hundreds of times worse with 5000-6500K LED and fluorescent lighting at night.

Warm white leds are good, 2700K or lower recommended. If you cannot change your ligtts, for literally $10, a company called UVEX has safety eyewear called SCT Orange which blocks an incredibly amount of almost all green light, and all strong blue light. It will make bright white light look yellowish-green because of the small amount of green light that gets through.

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I try to get outside far more often these days, especially since jumping back into photography it’s given me a reason to get up earlier and such, but some days I just end up being cooped up in my office at work that has zero windows. I’m in a literal closet.

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Day 4 - Thursday
Woke up around 10. Built a computer and got stuck with proxmox so I didn’t go to bed until 4 which was two hours late. Thursday nights is now the only night I have to go to bed on time to be able to sleep the hours I need.

Wasn’t really that tired, and with an engaging project I could’ve kept on.

Day 5 - Friday
Fell asleep around 4 and hade to wake up at 12. I could attend to a lecture but at 18 I was so tired I had to take a nap to get the total of 11 hours of sleep. Now I shouldn’t have a problem to stay up until 6.

Tir-ed! But it was my own fault and not the schedule.

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You can purchase useh Trisonic 33w daylight cfl bulbs. Why old cfls? Why these specicsfically? They are very broad “full” spectrum with a large amount of both aqua and strong wide bands of red light. High quality light that would require $40+ SORAA LED bulbs to match the color spectrum fullness. Or, in the winter, you can use high wattage halogen bulbs, like 500 watt work lights for high output 11,000 lumens full spectrum light. This would augment a space heater if one is required so wouldn’t be as wasteful in energy use.

Philips T2 Twister 6500K CFL bulbs have very high aqua and blue light, aqua light is actually stronger than blue to shift and maintain your circadian rhythm, but it has a spike of both red and green, but from green all the way to violet (past blue), it is very smooth and consistent with no dropouts. Far more broad spectrum and way more aqua than most led belbs, so CFLs are usually the better pick when needing bright light. As stated, the trisonic are basically the LED equivelant of a full specrum 40-50$ bulb.

To learn more about color spectrum, (no affiliation) fluxometer.com is a great resource.

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Seems like a sensible thing, honestly, but I think the solution to even much of my sleep issues is to dump this toxic job.

I’m working on that as we speak, and I think moving on to something else or having a prospect of doing so will drastically cut down on the things that make me want to stay up late rather than tossing and turning in bed where time flies faster and I’m back at that place.

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I was listening to a lecture the other day about how to handle stress and find different ways to relax. I was scoffing a bit in my head since they never once mentioned how a job can be the major source of stress and maybe it’s better to change that instead of applying band-aid to it.

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