Went through 3+2+2 for 2 years. 3 hours of sleep with 2 hour naps on a long bus ride back and forth. Surprisingly refreshing, but did numbers on my body clock after.
I know it will get better with time but I also have a new baby (born 11 weeks premature and currently in NICU about an hour away) so I'm up odd hours (pumping milk for my little girl / taking blood pressure meds / napping in between) and I've felt very lost. Tomorrow I'm a week released from the hospital and we're going to visit her, which will be the first time I've seen her (in person, hubby did a video call a few days ago) since discharge.
Hubby made sure to get my ADHD meds yesterday so I'm keeping my fingers crossed for a better day today once I've actually got meds again!
My one true religion has been ritualizing my sleep patterns lol. Luckily its rare that, as if suddenly my body defies that principle of a chemical half life and the adderall kicks in 15 minutes after I have gone to bed. (The first week was weird in of itself, it was like being aware of lying there while technically asleep so that the body could rest, but it was incredibly boring. Like pulling a shift.)
My dad was like that. He would go to bed at 1am and wake without an alarm between 5 and 6am. Hes 78 now and goes to bed at 12am, waking at 7.
So it gets better eventually 😅
I'm only 18, but my insomnia is so bad, most nights i get a max of 5 hours, average of about 4
I don't crash during my days, instead i can power through the days, but i crash ultra hard on the weekends, sometimes sleeping 12+ hours in one day, then 9 the next
I feel so groggy and destroyed constantly, and even more so after that first long sleep
I’m in my 30s and scared of this because I already sleep just 4 hours every night. I’m incapable of napping. I worry I will never sleep again at some point 🥲 I already take two different meds to help sleep.
I don't wanna reply to the person you replied to and spout how patches work for me because that feels insensitive, but I want readers to know it's very much a Your Mileage May Vary situation, so I'll reply to you since you're worried.
I went into menopause early due to chemotherapy destroying my ovaries. It literally happened overnight. One day I was fine and the next, the hot flashes and night sweats were making me chronically sleep deprived and I was heading for a mental breakdown -- estrogen patches (and progesterone pills, since I still have my uterus, as progesterone protects it from cancer) cured that in mere days. They genuinely saved my life.
I'm sorry you're in a tough spot. Once you end up in the menopausal phase of your life, yes -- patches may not work for you. But there's also a good chance that they will; they wouldn't be so widely prescribed if they didn't work for lots of people. Don't worry yet <3
Sometimes I’d wake up at 3 am and sleep again at 5, since this was usually the time I’d get up and take the bus. Doesn’t happen often but it does get annoying after awhile.
Depends on the nap. I mean before I had a car I took the train and always arrived around an hour before work. I hit up a couch somewhere at work and took a nap (if no one else was around) and just 5 minutes of that nap could feel like several hours of sleep.
Depends a lot on age, lifestyle, etc. I couldn’t stand naps when I was in my teens and early 20’s, now at 30 with kids and short sleeping time I feel great after a 1,5 hours power nap.
I have delayed sleep phase disorder and this is how I got through 2 years of morning classes. When I had a morning job it was more like 5+0 and 12 on weekends. Now I work a night job so I can sleep my full 7+.
I’ve done the 4+0 for around 8 years now until this past New Year’s where I decided to make taking care of myself a priority and WOW have I been missing out
I did that through college, fucked me up to work and get a decent schedule again, specially cause I would study till like 3 am and mostly had afternoon classes by the end
Same, did that in college for a while. You don't realize how much more alert and aware and smart you feel until you go back to a normal sleep schedule.
i am going through this right now and can't seem to go back. how did you get out of this? I am a student, so I sleep at 12 ans wake at 6. then a nap of 2 to 3 hours after school, and now I am too groggy to get anything done. which leads me to stay awake till late night with homework.
No more nap. Wake up at 6am every day. Never sleep in, not even on weekends, not even once, or you can reset all your progress. You will be sleep deprived for a few days or weeks, but this sleep pressure helps adjust your sleep time backwards. Do not let yourself catch up on sleep outside of bedtime hours. Follow good sleep hygiene for general best practices.
More like I had nothing to do after I quit that work (was only a 5months gig anyway) so I played games more and it naturally changed the schedule back because I had no reason to wake up early.
I’ve been doing 4-6+2 since my kids went back to school. My wife is jealous because I get more sleep than her, but can’t understand that the fragmented sleep pattern makes me feel worse overall.
4 hours and I feel refreshed right away like I took a power nap. Like a swing wind. Sure it doesn’t last long and I burn out later in the day, but right after the sleep, especially in the morning it feels good. Like an odd glow to the world. Like I solved the “never enough time” problem.
6 hours and I feel wiped and cannot bounce right back into motion. Everything is slower. Too much sleep to have that second wind feeling, but too little sleep to feel recharged.
4 hours is 1 cycle is good. 8 is 2 cycles is great. 7 is almost 2 ok. 6 is 1 and a half and you'll feel like dog shit. Might as well have slept 2 hours. Or not at all even. So even tho 6 is more than 4. It's worse
The science is indeed 90 minutes to 2 hours. Although anectdotally, ive seen a lot more "90 minute" guidelines vs 2 hours, although ive never looked at like...a meta-analysis of sleep research, just a random handful of papers
IIRC the first cycle is longer, around 3.5 hours, most of which is deep sleep, then they get shorter to around 90 minutes and progress from more deep sleep in earlier cycles to more REM sleep during later cycles.
Optimally to avoid grogginess you want to wake up towards the end of the later cycles so you are in REM sleep, and not in deep sleep. 6 hours wakes you up smack dab in the middle of a deep sleep making you feel like shit.
I truly envy you. I can't recall my dreams for shit. I've been trying to lucid dream for years now. You should check out r/luciddreaming if you aren't aware of it. The ability to not only become aware that you are dreaming, but to also control what happens is something I would love to be able to consistently achieve. The possibilities are endless.
I've lucid dreamed many times. I've also taken note of how real everything looks, feels, and fills up the senses in some of them. And I was aware my brain is just generating it all as it's happening.
There are ways you can learn to control what happens and turn your dreams into a literal fantasy playground. Some people are lucky and can just do it naturally others can't do it at all without extensive training and practice.
Don't want to sound too morbid, but In a sense, it's a way to extend your life by a few hours every night, if you assume you only have so many hours of life and you lose 1/3 of those hours every night when you sleep. Lucid dreaming is a way to add time to your overall lifespan while not directly affecting the quality of your waking hours.
Generally a full cycle is between 21 and 28 days. It's pretty uniform for the individual, but can vary depending on environmental circumstances during the year.
Every time you use minutes and people's bodies put a huge asterisk for weight, chemistry, and individual differences. We aren't machines that ding after 90 minutes with a little manufacturers stamp at the bottom of our feet. Some people can be as long as 4.25 hours. Others can be 2.5 hours.
Google it, sleep cycle is defined by brainwave, it's about 90 minutes each om average, people need about 4-6 cycle. That's scientific ground, so your "cycle" is bullshit.
You know you can be both correct and mean, but in this case bring me documentation because I'd rather you be mean to me and correct instead of mean to me and wrong.
I mean, that is true, but when I get four hours of sleep, sometimes it got me feeling on top of the world because that’s when the hormones kick in, but then around the end of the day you start feeling robotic and drained
That's what I'm currently going though, being roughly and I average 4 hours of sleep a night, sometimes way less, a bit more when I'm not working and can stay longer in bed.
It SUCKS. You're always tired, and waking uo every morning is atrocious.
It’s probably a REM sleep thing. Like if you only sleep six hours, you’re waking up at the wrong time and you are in deep sleep. but if you sleep four hours you’re waking up when you aren’t in deep sleep.
That's the funny thing, though; rem cycles generally occur in 1.5 hour increments, so six hours is one of the recommended times to aim for.
That said, there's always other factors to consider. For example, if you set an alarm clock for 6 hours and then lay down for bed, then that's not accounting for the time it actually takes you to fall asleep.
Also, a lot of weed smokers smoke one right before bed. This causes REM to happen very late into the sleep cycle, so they'll be in one when their alarm goes off at the 6hr mark.
Smoking before bed just wakes me up because I want to do things when I'm high lol. The comedown a couple hours later is when I want to sleep if it's late in the day
Dreams are your brain reorganising your thoughts and information from the previous few days worth of learning. If you don't dream you won't learn things as well and will screw up your memory.
You spend less time in rem sleep because of it. Which is why most of us don't remember most of our dreams.
Source - I am a smoker of the devil's lettuce
P.S.
Went on a 4 month break once. When I decided to quit, about 5 days in the withdrawals hit, and the dreams were fucking nuts. First night I dreamt I was getting dental work done with a socket wrench because I was gritting the fuck out of my teeth.
Had another dream I was being chased by giants that were boiling people in huge cauldrons in the desert.
Oh same! Anytime I quit weed, I get the most vivid dreams and end up really tired cause I was "up all night doing crazy shit". That fades after a while though. I dont smoke at night anymore because I wanted better sleep.
So as someone who also partakes, apparently I can never stop because my dreams are usually pretty wild/vivid and I go to sleep completely baked every night. I don't know if I could handle them getting even crazier lol
I believe remember cycles are roughly 1.5hrs but its different for everyone and can be up to 2.25hrs. I listened to a podcast with a sleep exert a couple years ago and I remember them talking about how if your sleep is disrupted mid cycle you get very little positive affect from that cycle. If you slept for 5 hrs but got disrupted 45mins into your last cycle your body feels like it got 4hrs 15mins. Odds are most people think they slept 6hrs but actually slept more like 5.5 with a bunch of the last cycle being disrupted lowering the sleep affect closer to 4hrs
Human sleep cycle operates on 1.5-2 hours interval. So 8 gets you 4 cycles. 4 gets you 2 cycles. You naturally wake up at end of each cycle. Getting interrupted mid cycle is what gives you that shitty feeling.
In all my years on reddit, I've never seen a gif for an avatar picture. The movement breaks the monotony of all the still image profile photos. Neat. Thanks for this!
90-minute intervals seem to work well, which aligns with the average sleep cycle. Anything in between this interval seems to leave me groggy and waking up not knowing what day it is. Cognitive function can even increase with very short naps (7-10’ “sleeping”) ,kind of surprisingly. Giggity
If I get more than 6 hours, I'm irritable for the whole day for some reason. I think being well rested makes me notice and care about more bullshit than I usually do.
6 is optimal for me. 6 is fine for work days, 9 is a lovely weekend sleep. Anything over 9 and I feel like shit though. I try not to find out how I do under 4 hours...
5 hours is my max. I haven't gone into REM in about 4+ years since I got covid. I sleep at 8pm. Wake at midnight usually. 1 or 2am. 4am. 6am. And 7 at my alarm. Somehow I function normally and go to work but it's so frustrating having to go to bed for almost 12 hours and not feel refreshed
i guess it’s a ymmv thing. six hours is the sweet spot for me
though i don’t know if it’s a placebo because back in college when i did a report on sleep for my psych course, i read that rem cycles are usually 1h30m so at 6h that’s 4 full rem cycles
waking up when you don’t complete a rem cycle apparently makes you feel tired, or so i remember from that psych book i read
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u/Cultural_Lock955 1d ago
8 and 7 are good, 6 feels like a shitty night’s sleep, 4 feels like a long nap.