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Your sleep patterns: what are they like?
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| MrJiveBoJingles |
I have been reading about the influence of industrialization and man-made lighting on sleep patterns. Pretty much everyone on earth lacked affordable artificial light before the 19th century or so, which meant that sleep patterns were a lot different than in our time, since people had no other option but to spend a lot of time in the dark. A common sleeping pattern in medieval Europe was to sleep for a few hours, have a substantial waking period, then sleep until it was light out or nearly so. The two segments of rest were called "first sleep" and "second sleep" in English, and other European languages have analogous phrases.
In modern times, of course, we are able to choose our sleep and wake times with reference to when other people will be up, or when we have to be at work, rather than in accord with sunrise and sunset. In this book the author notes how in many modern countries eight straight hours of sleep is considered the norm, perhaps even the biologically "appropriate" thing to do, something that people ought to be treated for if they fail to achieve it, when in fact it is much more common historically and perhaps even a bit more natural to wake up during the night. Our current sleep pattern is just a concession to the modern drive for efficiency: we sleep all in one stretch, or perhaps in one large stretch with a small nap in the afternoon, because it lets us enlarge our portion of waking productive time. And there are even efforts to figure out how people can do with even less sleep for the sake of being able to fit more in a day, as with drugs like modafinil.
Warren also writes about an experiment in which people volunteered to use no artificial light at night for a month. They basically returned to the "ancestral" sleep pattern after a few weeks. Apparently during this period they reported feeling more awake and "vivid" during the day than they ever had before.
So, now that I've written all that babble: what are your sleep patterns like? How many hours in a normal day? When do you go to bed, get to sleep, and wake? Do you do it in one long stretch, or segments? |
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| KilldaDJ |
| sleep by 1030pm without fail and awake by 610am or else i dont get paid. |
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| tubularbills |
| i have 2-3 alarms that are about 4-7 mins apart from each other. i hit snooze on occasion; but overall about 15 mins i'm up and moving around. regardless of how much sleep i've gotten the night prior. |
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| MrJiveBoJingles |
| Oh, and to answer my own question, I generally go to bed around 1:00 to 3:00 in the morning and wake up around 6:30 to 8:00 AM. I seem to wake up fairly early almost regardless of how late I go to sleep. |
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| SYSTEM-J |
| Depends if I'm working or not. My natural sleeping pattern seems to be a 3am - 1pm stretch: I can easily sleep for long stretches. |
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| Halcyon+On+On |
Well it's almost 7am and I have been up since 1pm yesterday. I am going to go home and hopefully sleep at least 6 hours at some point today before being up all night and day tomorrow, possibly going to sleep around 2,3,4pm on Sunday and sleeping until probably 11p-12a, Monday, staying up until 3,4a and hopefully getting a bit more sleep on my weekly re-alignment before staying up until midnight Monday, sleeping until 6am Tuesday, staying up until 11pm, then waking up again on Wednesday morning at 6 again. I have a few days "off" at that point which I typically squander by going to sleep at about 9-10pm and waking up at 8am the next day if I am lucky, before waking up late Friday morning and repeating the whole thing over again.
I would love nothing more than to experiment with my sleep as you mentioned - living in utter, natural darkness when the sun is down, sleeping, then waking with the sun and being up only when it is light outside. I guess you can call it industrialization, but it's swing shift to me and I can't afford regularity just yet. |
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| Lira |
| I usually sleep from 3~4 AM to 10~11 AM. I'm an owl, and my friends know that: no one calls me before noon, but they don't refrain from calling me really late at night because they know I'm awake :p |
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| pkcRAISTLIN |
| house. i feel perpetually tired. still at work by 8.35am everyday tho, but im not happy about it. |
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| kadomony |
ideally, 10-12 hours gives me enough rest.
when i wasnt working, my sleep schedule would be all over the place, some times sleep 10am to 6pm, 5am til about 1pm, and occasionally 8pm to 4am when i tried to reset it.
past week ive been workin 12 hour days so that's about 6am wake, 10pm sleep. |
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| Lomeli |
| Slept from 11pm - 3:30 am this morning. Been awake since. Most nights are like this. Gonna try to get in about 2 more hours of sleep, then hit the gym and head to work. After work I'll probably take a nap for an hour and then head to LA for some all-night debauchery. |
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| Chris Crossland |
| I wake up around 8-8:30 and go to sleep between midnight and 1. |
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| jupiterone |
usually i don't go to sleep before 3-4am and i wake up around 10-11am :(
awww Lira and i are bros! |
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