[JohnMakin]

What wasn't entirely clear to me was the why - I'm by no means against alternative sleep schedules, but this seems far more bother than it is worth. I've struggled with termination insomnia most of my life, waking up extremely early and not being able to go back to sleep - and in recent years have managed to make that work for my full schedule by basically sleeping ~4 hours, awake for 8, sleeping 4, awake 8, etc.

So a typical schedule could look like:

10pm-2am - sleep

2am-10am - awake

10am-2pm - sleep

2pm-10pm - awake

I've experimented with this a lot - for whatever reason, I don't know why, this split schedule allows me to feel much more alert and attentive during my waking hours, and isn't as stressful as trying to sleep a full 7-8 per night which a lot of times feels impossible for me.

Sometimes I'll do 5-6 hours sleep on 1 cycle instead of 4, so it can shift around, but otherwise stays pretty consistent. Technically I am getting just as many sleep cycles as a "normal" schedule (One part of this was a sleep study to figure out what my natural full rem cycle is, for me, it's about 2 hours long).

I've been doing this for about 2 years and wouldn't do anything else, and it's really not difficult to fit it into a "normal" routine. My close friends have remarked that it makes it seem like I never sleep (due to being available at hours all around the clock), that's about all that anyone has remarked about it.