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by fastball 524 days ago
I'm not the OP, but I've considered doing this (have personally tried tri-phasic sleep in the past as an alternative) so I'm assuming the motivation might be the same: I just don't have a 24hr circadian rhythm. I'd guess mine is more like 26hr, not 28hr, but same idea applies. If I wake up after getting 8 hours of sleep, after 16 hours I am just... not sleepy. I can go to bed and not use screens and take melatonin and whatever else but I'm just not tired. So I end up staying later and getting less than 8 hours of sleep. Since many studies seem to show that getting a solid amount of sleep is good, my actual patterns seem bad. Much better then (maybe) to switch your cycle to be however many hours you need to get a solid night (~8hr) of sleep and feel tired at the end of the day, like the author is doing.

EDIT: just read the original post[1] from the author and indeed this is the reason. He maybe explains it better than me so give a read.

[1] https://sidhion.com/blog/28h_days/

2 comments

From the linked post:

>Some time ago, I found myself with zero obligations to follow the usual daily routine: wake up in the morning and go to sleep at night (the “normal people schedule”). During my time awake, I was either working on side-projects or playing with my hobbies, and I’d go to sleep whenever I felt sleepy, wake up naturally (no alarms), and repeat. This led me to observe that without sticking to a daily routine, my sleep schedule would drift every day compared to the previous one. I also noticed that on most days I’d sleep a bit longer than 8h, sometimes 9h or even 10h.

>An example of the sleep schedule drift: if on day X I went to sleep at 10:00 and woke up at 18:00, on day X+1 I’d go to bed at a time later than 10:00, and wake up later than 18:00. I almost never went to sleep at the same time on two consecutive days.

>I realised that this was happening because it took me longer to feel tired than the “normal people schedule” assumed. If I followed it, sleeping would tend towards napping until the tiredness built up, at which point I’d need to sleep more. In fact, for most of my adult life (especially when I had a full-time job), I’d always have to force myself to go to bed during weekdays, and naturally this drift would occur, and then I’d “reset” during the weekend (often 10h+ of sleep), thus going back to forcing myself to sleep on weekdays to stick to the routine.

>Since many studies seem to show that getting a solid amount of sleep is good,

This one of the bigger myths around. There's not really scientific evidence that people sleep eight hours, or need that much[1]. It's one of those strange pop culture food pyramid like statements that just doesn't really have any evidence for it. It's much more likely that you simply need less sleep than that you have some circadian rhythm problem.

[1]https://www.penguin.co.uk/articles/2020/09/daniel-lieberman-...