Sometimes I wind up on a sleep schedule that I dislike -- say, waking in the late afternoon and going to bed in the mid-morning.
Those times, I'll often "force normalize" my sleep -- meaning, I'll stay awake for many hours in a row, and then sleep a lot. So if I've been waking at 1PM and sleeping at 5AM and want my schedule to be earlier quickly, I'll sometimes just skip a night of sleep.
5AM will roll around, I'll have been awake 16 hours, and then I'll stay up another 12 hours -- to 5PM -- and go to bed.
I'll usually wake up the next day sometime between 4AM and 7AM, and then -- good.
If you've been skimming and reading fast, the basic idea is that if my sleep schedule is screwed up, I'll sometimes stay away sometime like 24 to 30 hours, and then sleep 11 to 14 hours, and then be back to normal.
I did that last week, but something odd happened -- I woke up at 2AM, solidly ready to go.
This is unusual. If you stay awake a full day, usually your body (at least, my body) is going to want to 10+ hours, oftentimes 14 hours of sleep in that situation. But no, I went to bed in the early evening, and woke up a short sleep later at 2AM.
This happens from time to time -- rarely. Maybe once or twice per year.
And every time it does, I absolutely love it.
The 4AM schedule is marvelous, but the day still comes at you relatively quickly.
2AM wakeup... it's just in an entirely different category. If you've got a 7AM, 8AM, or 9AM appointment, you've got a full 5-7 hours of pleasant quiet solitude to work.
Lately I've had appointments at 9AM or 10AM Istanbul-time each day, so with these 2AM wakings, I've gotten a full 7 or 8 hours of writing, operations-building, going through my papers, doing morning routine and fitness, cooking a couple meals... I basically live a full workday before getting started on normal people's time.
I love it so much.
Of course, then your mind starts to run out of gas at 2PM, and is entirely cooked by 6PM. At least, that's me.
But I don't mind. I actually like the fact that my lowest cognition / diminished judgment time links up with the hottest-part-of-the-day that humans aren't so usually good at working anyways.
It means I never have to deal with my least favorite part of the day, 5PM to 9PM, when the lines are full everywhere, and there's crazy traffic, and it's all generally unpleasant. I can go do some shopping in the early or mid morning when things are relatively quiet, and I'm asleep when everything is max-full and max-priced.
It's a social life disruptor, it means you're likely to max out on a couple hours of socializing per day. But I don't mind that either -- I work on creative projects and nonprofit projects with people I really like, and I like all my consulting clients tremendously, so I'm regularly interacting with people I like a lot.
I've never been able to sustain this sleep schedule for long, but it always gives insane short-term gains when I'm on it. And it feels genuinely good and enjoyable and healthy.
I'll probably wind up in a more normal and legibly understandable 5AM wakeup time soon, but it'll be to my detriment -- this shifts 3 hours of my day from 2AM to 5AM, which are always amazing, to 4PM to 7PM, which are very "meh."
No grand vows or proclamations here. I've tried and failed to stay on this schedule before, and have no clue how I'd go about installing it more permanently. Likewise, no recommended action items for trying to get on it -- it's hard to do, and I can't do it consistently. But it's worth thinking about and musing over.
I will say this -- I think getting on an out-of-mainstream-sync sleep schedule is one of the biggest possible productive gains; I'd never recommend pure nocturnal, but even that I find better than the dreaded 8AM to 10PM schedule, which shifts one's discretionary hours into the least productive area of the day.
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