..i'm going to experiment with my sleep. since i am retired i have nothing to loose and i must admit at least 50% of my sleeps don't make it through the whole night.
The forgotten medieval habit of 'two sleeps'
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220107-the-lost-medieval-habit-of-b...
For millennia, people slept in two shifts – once in the evening, and once in the morning. But why? And how did the habit disappear?
My sleep has always been all over the map. My preference would be to sleep through much of the day, and spend most of my waking hours at night. But it's hard to maintain that schedule when one also has to interact with an outside world that's structured around more conventional 'office hours' and 'shopping hours'.
But when I do manage to establish a consistent sleep pattern, I've found that biphasic sleeping has worked the best for me - especially if I need to stay awake and alert throughout most of the day. My energy and attention inevitably start to wane mid-day after a standard 8-hour sleep. But after a biphasic sleep, I can usually make it through to the end of the day without experiencing those same lags.
..quite a few years ago i wanted to quit smoking. i must have quit a 1,000 times before then but it never stuck. so i decided to go on what i called then a spiritual journey.
..i had a volkswagen van so spent a month in the mountains and desserts of arizona and new mexico. i hated american cigarettes so i thought this was the best place i could go if i became compelled by my addiction.
..from the very start of the trip i decided to find my "natural" sleep pattern. and ended up with up around 5am and in bed before 9pm. this seemed to satisfy my needs at the time.
..and i quit smoking to boot.
Interesting. I used to be a super sound sleeper but I always had the tendency of not getting to bed any earlier than 11 pm or midnight since the age of 12. That resulted in me being perpetually running late for school. I think it's a bad habit that haunted me for decades with short-changing hours slept to make it to work for 8 or 9 am.
In recent years, first with menopause and later a major injury, sleeping soundly for a 6-8 hour stretch has become elusive. It's a bit beter lately, especially if I head to bed before 11 pm, but I also benefit from taking a late afternoon nap now that we are all working from home.
In recent years, first with menopause and later a major injury, sleeping soundly for a 6-8 hour stretch has become elusive. It's a bit beter lately, especially if I head to bed before 11 pm, but I also benefit from taking a late afternoon nap now that we are all working from home.
I've never slept well and menopause ruined what little I did get. I was going on 2-3 hours of crappy sleep per night, if I was lucky. I'm on medication now, which helps enormously, but my body seems to want to be in bed between 9 and 10 at night, wake up for a couple of hours around 1 or 2am, then go back to sleep until 7 or 8am. The pattern started after we had a middle of the night home invasion and I thought the waking up was a reaction to that. But the pattern has persisted most nights long after the fear and anxiety have abated, and I've become accustomed to it. When I read the "two sleeps" article a few days ago it kind of made sense to me. Maybe the home invasion pushed me back to this previously common circadian rhythm, but it seems to work. I feel more awake in the mornings and can get through the day without any slumps. So I'm adjusting my expectations to what a "normal" sleep pattern looks like to include the two sleeps.
When I worked for a living I always got up at 5:45 but I used to sleep through the night from 10:30 or so. Its been years since I got 6.5 to 7 hours regular sleep which was my norm for decades.
My current sleep pattern is to go to bed between 10 and 10:30 and sleep until somewhere between 1:30 and 4:00 and then get up and go to the bathroom. Then I try to go back to sleep until 5:30 or so when I get up and clean my kitchen. I may try doing that chore in the middle of the night and then going back to bed to see if that second sleep can be extended so I don't feel tired in the afternoon.
It's amazing how fragile sleep patterns can become. Back in the summer of 2018, I spent a week at a cabin on a very remote northern Manitoba lake (it was for work). I had no watch and there were no clocks in the place, and everyone was taking turns to share the only adaptor to charge phones (mostly for taking photos or playing games/music). I had saved some podcasts to listen to since I was afraid of being overwhelmed by the change in atmosphere and not able to sleep. There was so little to do at night (a few card games) that I was probably settled for sleep as soon as it was dark (probably 10-11 pm). I don't think I ever managed to hear a whole podcast episode. And I slept solid and only woke up after I could hear others puttering about making coffee or starting on breakfast. That was super SOLID sleep.
