0320: "28-Hour Day"

[Xeio]

I've tried various sleeping patterns in the past but all I've found is that the more out of sync you get with a 24 hour pattern the more sleeping problems you have.

Thats more or less dependent on the person though, and supposedly you can 'train' yourself to work better off less sleep.

I'd love a longer day, but scheduling would always be a problem for this 28 hour day thing (though, I'd prefer a 30-32 hour day with an extra hour-2 of sleeping).

[Zak McKracken]

When I was doing my diploma thesis, I had roughly a 26-hour-day, and it worked quite well. Slept when I was tired, ate when I was hungry and worked most of the rest of the time.
Actually, I think I was very efficient during that time, and since I could work whenever I wanted, that worked just great for me.

... except that eventually the work grew over my head and I spend the last three days before hand-in not sleeping and only working (that is: 2 hours of sleep during the last night, and I had to be forced out of bed). That's an experience you really don't need to make.

This latter part I don't reccommend to anyone. Was close to delirium during my final presentation. But 26-hour-days work just fine for me!

Now, 24-hour-days are a constant challenge. can't find sleep in the evening, can't get up in the morning.

My preference: Let's all start spinning and robbing the earth of just enough angular momentum to have like 25.5-hour days, now that'd be fine with me.


Zak

[Tilps]

Just had to mention that I used the 36 hour day in college for weeks at a time, 24 hours up 12 hours down. I found it worked pretty well. I did loose track of which real day it was a few times, one paticular case I was half way through a 36 hour day cycle when it suddenly occured to me that it was only 5 hours till an exam.

These days I still like 12 hours sleep, but I work on a 24 hour day...

[Destructocron5]

I made this account just to say this:
I've been keeping this sleep cycle for the past 3 months. everyone once in a while I break it, like right now, but I fix it in a day or two.

this sleep cycle has not been messing with me at all, infact I feel fantastic.

[arachnophilia]

QFT. Not the 32 hour one. That's pretty hardcore.

it's actually not that a big a deal, if that's what your body is accustomed to it, and you can get away with it job/school-wise. i find 24 hour days a little bizarre. lately, i've been running some longer schedule, but minus the extra sleep, which really, really messes you up.

it's like taking that schedule, and lopping it off so it resets every 24hrs. i'm ending up with about 6 hrs sleep, 18 hrs awake. the awake portion closely approximating my 32 hr schedules. which means my body's constantly trying to catch up to that schedule, but never getting enough sleep. it's not fun.

however, i know someone who typically goes several days at a shot without sleep. i don't know how he does it.

didn't your mom ever teach you to start in the introduction thread?

No, but your mom did.
Last night.
In bed.

oh? is that why she got in at 6am this morning. i was wondering about that.

fine, you can have her. your loss. in fact, can you take her out again tomorrow?

Edit: Either way, I went and did the intro thing. Go ahead and laugh at the silly newblette.

dude, i was just trying to get a good "your mom" in there somewhere. no hard feelings?

I could probably handle the schedule if it weren't for sunlight. My sleep already gets all out of whack when summer sets in and I can't help but get flushed with the stuff.

you know to tell when you're really messed up? when sunrises put you to sleep. oh, and i'd imagine this schedule would get a lot easier if you lived above the arctic circle, in the portion of the year with totally arbitrary day-lengths.

[sunami]

This here perfectly describes my summer. Not quite feasible when you have class during the day as during the fall/spring semesters, but fits perfectly if you're doing absolutely nothing!

[BrewBaby]

Kinda fancy that.









































Your mom, not the sleep thing. That'd be stoopid.

[TomBot]

Consider the following: I got up at noon yesterday. It's now 5:30 am Monday morning, I have class at 9:30 am, and all my classes this week fit that schedule. Think I should go for it? I think I will. Sleep would feel so good right now, but being interrupted sucks, as does waking up at a pre-determined time. What you hear are the ravings of a sleep deprived mind, rationalizing, but still...

I also am a fan of your mom jokes. It really does become a reflex. Probably not healthy, though.

[Lazyboy0172]

Am I really the only one that thought of Seinfeld when reading this?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Friars_Club

Kramer tried this sleeping pattern once, and it was going real well for him, till he ended up going mad(madder?) and when he finally falls deeply asleep in his girlfriend's arms, she thinks he is dead, puts him in a sack and dumps him in the Hudson River.

[julesh]

alt: small print: this schedule will eventually drive one stark raving mad.

i have to disagree. the 48-hour day schedule will (quite quickly) drive one stark raving mad. you get the strange sensation of missing time, like alien abductions or something.

Interestingly enough, many accounts of alien abductions start with the - err - victim having missed sleep the night before the event, and then staying up late the next night. The classic example is Betty & Barney Hill.

[Toeofdoom]

This is totally what I wanted to try, except I didnt have a way to make it work exactly.

The disadvantage is suddenly you only have 6 days in a week though...

[jtin]

I will note that this was making the rounds several years ago...[/url]

[zenten]

This is totally what I wanted to try, except I didnt have a way to make it work exactly.

The disadvantage is suddenly you only have 6 days in a week though...

Yes, but still two weekend days.

[carlodrum]

You should be sleeping for 9 1/3 hours a day, not 8 or 9!

24/8 = 3
28/x= 3
x = 9 1/3!!


Otherwise you're constantly losing sleep.

I don't get it. What's the 24/8=3 for? Are you saying 8 hours of sleep (the recommended) is a third of a day, so if you want a third of a 28-hour day you should sleep 9 1/3? That'd be O.K., except the recommendation is 8 hours, not 1/3 of a day. They just happen to synch. Nine hours is more than enough.

[Aperfectring]

Most people, once they are used to it, can deal with less sleep than usual. I generally end up with 6-7 hours of sleep on the typical weekday, and 4-5 on the weekend day (yes you heard me right). If I start off a work week with less than 6-7 hours, my ability to work for the week quickly degrades, however, if I get past Mon and Tues with normal sleep, I can pull 4-5 hour nights until Sun night, when I have to pull an 8 hour one to be ready for the next week.

The main thing to keep in mind with sleep schedules is to keep them regular. You body will adjust to the rhythm after a couple weeks. Keep that in mind you engineering students when you start doing senior design projects. If you go for two weeks of not sleeping every other night, you will get into that rhythm and quickly run into a psychotic episode. Luckily when I hit mine after my senior design project, it was winter break, so I had time to recover.

[Maurog]

Wait, so your sig is lying?

[Unforgiven]

You should be sleeping for 9 1/3 hours a day, not 8 or 9!

24/8 = 3
28/x= 3
x = 9 1/3!!


Otherwise you're constantly losing sleep.

I don't get it. What's the 24/8=3 for? Are you saying 8 hours of sleep (the recommended) is a third of a day, so if you want a third of a 28-hour day you should sleep 9 1/3? That'd be O.K., except the recommendation is 8 hours, not 1/3 of a day. They just happen to synch. Nine hours is more than enough.

The recommendation is 8 hours per 24 hour day. This means that you'll be sleeping 56 hours per week. If you use 28 hour days and only sleep 9 hours per day, you end up sleeping 54 hours, two hours less than what is generally considered to be a healthy amount of sleep.

[entropomorphic]

A few summers back, when I was still in school, I went without a summer job and just worked on personal projects (and computer games) all summer. It was then I discovered that I naturally gravitate toward a 36-hour schedule; awake for 24 hours, sleep for 12. I've never felt better since.

Here's another link about the Uberman's Sleep Schedule, with some first-hand accounts and instructions. I read about it a few years ago... wish I had the time to experiment!

[Steve the Pocket]

If I were in a career that involves working from home, and not in school, I would SO try this. I stay up ridiculously late anyway.

[Aperfectring]

Wait, so your sig is lying?

Well, if I am actually writing code for 16 hours of the day, then yes, I do need the full 8 hours of sleep. However, if I am doing other things, like driving to and from work, watching TV, etc, then I can use much less.

Also, it's a script which represents how I generally operated while I was still in school, and is amusing in that all of the commands will actually work, assuming there is a user on the Linux system named "code".

[wileycount]

...Or we could just move to Denmark!

<sigh>...where we would have 24/7 access to your mom....[headdesk]

[Arancaytar]

this schedule will eventually drive one stark raving mad.

No kidding. I did something like this in November '05 and November '06 to write my NaNoWriMo. By the first week, my blood's caffeine level went up. By the third week, my coffee's haemoglobin level was going down.

This year will be the first where I'm not full-time employed in November, so I'm kind of looking forward to it.

[elminster]

O damn, i was thinking it would be ideal if the day was 25hrs rather than 24. My sleep pattern regularly shifts upto 1 hour, but eventually i have to miss a night and reset it back (or wake up very very late and have extra long day).

If i happened to take over the world, im slowing down the rotation of the globe a bit... although effects would probably be pretty bad. Like gravity increasing near the equator, some people/animals unable to adjust, etc

Or, ideally, somehow accellerate the effects that regular sleep has on our body. There was an arcticle a while ago about using magnetic stimulation to do this. I'd love extra hours per day to do things.

[Sprocket]

SO actually, for people with certain kinds of depression, it's perscribed that once every couple of weeks they stay up for 24 hours and then get a full night of sleep.

Also for insomniacs, another odd and perscribed thing is to sleep with your socks on. I personally often have trouble sleeping without socks. So, for any insomniacs out there, maybe you do too.

[6453893]

The best part of freelance work is I can use whatever sleep pattern I want. Often, during off-work times, I'll shift very rapidly between different day lengths, sleeping four times one week, seventeen times the next, and spend the entire next week in a semi-lucid trance-like state. When I have deadlines and things to do, I tend to fall back into a 30 or 34 hour day schedule.

Also for insomniacs, another odd and perscribed thing is to sleep with your socks on. I personally often have trouble sleeping without socks. So, for any insomniacs out there, maybe you do too.

People sleep without socks? I go straight from wearing socks to the shower to putting on another pair of socks, it never occurred to me that people might not wear socks in bed.

And your sig, for some random reason, made me lose twenty dollars and my self respect.

[madjo]

If i happened to take over the world, im slowing down the rotation of the globe a bit... although effects would probably be pretty bad. Like gravity increasing near the equator, some people/animals unable to adjust, etc

But at least you'd have a perfect excuse if/when you gain some weight... no, it's not me.. gravity is changing.

And your sig, for some random reason, made me lose twenty dollars and my self respect.

What game would that be?

[itesser]

I gravitate towards 28 hours myself, but never timed it exactly. But I'm pretty sure my circadian is a bit longer than 24 hours and 11 minutes when I'm healthy.

Here's my favorite link of a guy who did polyphasic.
http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/1 ... sic-sleep/

[jsnipe]

can someone show me how this equals a full 9 hours sleep per night?

[andydrewy]

Amazingly, I don't think anyone's posted this link yet:

http://www.dbeat.com/28/

I came across this a while ago. It does sound like an interesting idea, but it'd be confusing as hell having to do calculations to figure out when to go to bed (and to do so at odd hours of the day).

[enk]

Last semester at the university, for the C programming exam, I wrote a program, that could input go-to-bed and get-up times and store them in a file, then load them and do statistics caluculations on them.

And then I included a record of my sleep the last whole month, just so you could try it out-of-the-box. I guess the examiners got a few laughs out of that

[enk]

Amazingly, I don't think anyone's posted this link yet:

http://www.dbeat.com/28/

Is it amazing that it wasn't posted (which it was, by jtin), or that you thought it wasn't?

Sorry, didn't mean to be that rude, I just don't post in a thread before having read the whole thing, so I expect others to do the same. If it's not too long, anyways

[ThatGuyCalledPete]

Hmm - I think I like the idea of polyphasic sleep...I might give it a try next time I'm between contracts and I can afford to be completely useless for up to a week.

Many moons wgo when I was at university my sleep patterns were all over the place, I'd often be awake for very long periods of time, then just sleep as long as my body felt it needed to. The most extreme was one period of 56 hours without sleep - I decided to go home and have a nap when my face crashed down onto the keyboard in the library. I got home, hit the sack, and when I woke up I didn't know what time of the day it was until I found a clock - then didn't know whether it was morning or evening (stupid 12-hour clock), and had to go and buy a newspaper to know what day of the week it was (I didn't have a computer of my own back then). Freaky stuff.

I do tend to do naps very well though, and I can pretty much sleep at will; typically if I'm on a short-haul flight, I will fall asleep just as the plane accelerates down the runway, then wake just as they're serving the meal. Then sleep again, only to be woken by the wheels hitting the tarmac at my destination. This ease of napping also helps me to pretty much ignore jet-lag.

One issue I do generally find with my sleeping patterns is that I REALLY need an early afternoon nap, which can be quite awkward at work. Maybe I just need more than the 5 hours a night I generally get though.

Cheers,

-- Pete.

[carlodrum]

can someone show me how this equals a full 9 hours sleep per night?

24 hours / day / 7 day week = 168 hours

168 hours / 6 day week = 28 hours / day

9 hours asleep, 19 hours awake / day

[TheSquirrel]

At one point, working for a retailer who didn't understand how to schedule people for night work, I ended up on a very effective 15 hour day (10 awake, 5 asleep), + an extra 3 hours of sleep to round out the week.

What happened was the employer didn't schedule night shifts together, so I'd be working something like Mon, Wed, Fri for 8 hours overnights (or something like that) ... I should find that old schedule.

[Silicon]

As a long-time sufferer of Hypernychthemeral Syndrome, I would have to point out that any kind of non-24 hour sleep-wake phase is hazardous to almost any kind of regular work life you might find yourself in. If you do try the proposed 28-hour cycle, I would suggest not letting your body grow overly used to it, as this can permanently disrupt your sleep schedule.

After about 4 months of a "normal" schedule (where I have set times I need to be awake at least 5 days a week [a normal "9-5" week]), my body basically fails and I go into a weirder schedule than my normal 32H days -- a 18H sleep/2H awake phase, which can last (in my experience) up to 3 months (my shortest was a month). As such, the only real work I can sustain for any long period of time involves telecommuting to companies for very short contracts (3-4 days max), and changing my targeted businesses based solely off of the timezone I'd be interacting with.

- Silicon

P.S. If anyone has any contacts with any globally-operated businesses (ones with offices in many different countries across the globe) that need a programmer that moves from site to site on a near weekly basis, drop me a PM. (I've found a couple contracts over time that this was what they really wanted, but that they didn't really advertise this need on Monster or whatever)

[genewitch]

strange facts about sleeping that i have discovered after years of research as a nocturnal being:

1) staying up for 24 hours straight is hard.
2) 24-28 hours is really hard
3) 28-48 is relatively easy, compared to that 4-8 hour stretch in there
4) 1.5 hours of sleep every 10-12 hours can be maintained for days
5) REM Cycle alarms are very useful (i've written a few for VB.NET)
6) powernapping (davinci's method) is only useful if you're not active

As a main form of sleep, on #6.

i often need to stay awake for many hours on end, and until provigil (or an alternate form) becomes Over the counter, these have helped me to stay up. I've found that drinking coffee at the 16 to 18 hour mark (around a half a pot or 4-6 cups) makes it impossible to sleep at the 22-26 hour mark; even if you really want to. but it does make you very tired at 20-24 hours, which sucks.

i haven't been able to willfully stay awake longer than 52 hours straight, and i'm unwilling to use illegal or otherwise unscrupulously attained drugs to attempt longer periods - but provigil supposedly will be a boon to people like myself

They promise 8 hours of sleep for every 48 hours awake is all you need. Airline pilots are the biggest users of this from what i hear. The side effects are minor, and the 8 hours leaves you completely refreshed.

Eventually i hope to be able to just avoid sleep altogether, and instead use a series of staggered naps (like davinci but more like 90 minutes) permanently.

Any thoughts? how would exersize affect sleeping/napping schedules?

for the record i hate the word "powernapping"

Oh and about the REM cycle alarm:

It's set up for me (hardcoded but it wouldn't be hard to make it adjsutable) of 15 minutes downtime before arming, and then you input how many REM cycles you want to get OR what time you HAVE to be up by. it has 2 buttons, a reset timer, and a "shut off alarm". it also plays MP3s, which was the reason i wrote it to begin with.

So it's 4 am, you have to be up by 11 AM at the latest, you set it to 11, hit "start", tuck in to bed, and 15 minutes later it arms, going off at 10:15, after you've had 4 full REM cycles. This system is amazing for maximizing the amount of sleep you get proportional to how tired you feel.

I want to patent a version that has breathing monitoring as part of the system, and also as a stand alone unit. it could do it based on motion in the bed, because at least Myself and everyone i've ever slept with shakes quasi-violently right before they're fully asleep. I'd say arm it then with a 5 minute countdown (just in case) and then start the 90 minute cycles. Breathing would be harder to implement, but also harder to copy, as the software to do it would be fairly complex.

[Infornographer]

I attempted polyphasic sleep (Uberman, specifically) for a period of about three weeks. Three weeks into it, I collapsed on a weekend, slept for some 7-odd hours, and it sort of "reset" me. I didn't have the time or patience to try and correct it.

I'll give it another go come January.

[ThatGuyCalledPete]

1) staying up for 24 hours straight is hard.
2) 24-28 hours is really hard
3) 28-48 is relatively easy, compared to that 4-8 hour stretch in there

<SNIP>

i often need to stay awake for many hours on end, and until provigil (or an alternate form) becomes Over the counter, these have helped me to stay up. I've found that drinking coffee at the 16 to 18 hour mark (around a half a pot or 4-6 cups) makes it impossible to sleep at the 22-26 hour mark; even if you really want to. but it does make you very tired at 20-24 hours, which sucks.

i haven't been able to willfully stay awake longer than 52 hours straight, and i'm unwilling to use illegal or otherwise unscrupulously attained drugs to attempt longer periods - but provigil supposedly will be a boon to people like myself

*nods* My 56 hour session was done without caffine, alchohol, tobacco, or any other substances to encourage me to stay awake, legal or otherwise.

No idea how I managed it, but sure as hell don't plan to do it again, and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone!

-- Pete.

[genewitch]

Stuff

*nods* My 56 hour session was done without caffine, alchohol, tobacco, or any other substances to encourage me to stay awake, legal or otherwise.

No idea how I managed it, but sure as hell don't plan to do it again, and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone!

-- Pete.

Yah, my regular is 40-48 hours. the 52 was because i had to appear in court 2 times one day, and again the next day. My friend was working graveyard and it was his days off, and after he went to sleep i hung out with people that had regular sleep schedules.

I often catch a lot of flak for my sleeping pattern which has finally coalesced into a simple pattern that rarely varies:
Awake: noon to 6AM (bedtime at 5:30)

I've been doing this fairly consistently since i was about 20, which makes it almost 7 years now. On occasion i sleep shorter periods of time, or longer, and sometimes my cycle rotates around the clock so i'm awake at 5 AM after going to bed at 11. In these circumstances i just stay up 24 hours, and wake up at noon the following day (if that makes sense).

I would try polyphasic sleep if i lived alone, i would even try 28 hour days, but 18/6 seems to be working for me right now, and i get to talk to everyone throughout their day, and i still have plenty of time alone and with my best friend in the wee hours of the morning. I couldn't do polyphasic because i couldn't guarantee uninterrupted naps right now. maybe a set of earbud noise cancelling headphones that the alarm was fed into - but nothing else. hmm i might give it a shot, although i can see 20 minute naps every 4 hours as being sorta... cramping my style. i prefer 1 hour every 6 (as i stated before) or even 90 minutes every 7 - 8 hours.

[Xachariah]

I attempted polyphasic sleep (Uberman, specifically) for a period of about three weeks. Three weeks into it, I collapsed on a weekend, slept for some 7-odd hours, and it sort of "reset" me. I didn't have the time or patience to try and correct it.

I'll give it another go come January.

I tried it during one summer and had it down for two months. (I did 24 minute naps, every 4 hours) Then one night on the dreaded 2AM - 6AM stretch, I went to bed and didn't wake up for half a day.

*nods* My 56 hour session was done without caffine, alchohol, tobacco, or any other substances to encourage me to stay awake, legal or otherwise.

On the release of The Burning Crusade, a World of Warcraft expansion, I stayed up for seventy two hours. The most terrifying thing is that I was the fourth person to hit level 70 on my server. The other three people literally did not go offline for the entire week.