28 hour days - doable?

[Dale Dough]

I came up with this myself as a solution for wanting to go to bed later everyday, pull the occasional long marathon session live, but still spend time with my girlfriend during the weekend days.

Then I googled '28 hour day' and found this. This guy wants to switch to 9 hours of sleep and 19 hours of awake time every 'day'. I was thinking more along the lines of 10.5 hours sleep, so that I end up with the equivalent of 7 9-hour periods.

Anyway, apparently our circadian rhythms don't like getting messed with. Harvard students did a study and found that subjects' bodies went through approximately 24-hour cycles anyway. Then I read some random stories on the Net about people who did it and were OK, and people who did it and became depressed.

All in all that doesn't look too good, but then again I'm sleeping pretty irregularly now, and that isn't good either. It's pretty hard to juggle the occasional all-nighter at the casino, staying up late doing pointless [censored] every day, having to run office-hour errands every once in a while, and still be awake during weekends to spend time with the girlfriend.

So, I'm going to try it out for a while. If anyone is interested, I'll give updates on my sanity here. I have set my schedule to waking up at 10 on Saturday, and 2 on Sunday. This is fairly close to what my girl and I are doing already.

Because I was recovering from said all-nighter in the casino, I already went to bed early the other day, and woke up at 3:45 (AM) (It's 4:45 now, Moscow time). I'll ease into it over the next few days. Here's the times I plan to be sleeping:

Monday 7:30 - 18:00
Tuesday 11:30 - 22:00
Wednesday 15:30 - Thu 2:00
Thursday 19:30 - Fri 6:00
Friday 23:30 - Sat 10:00
Sunday 3:30 - 14:00

I figure 17.5 hour days shouldn't be too hard, unless my 24-hour cycle has me consistently waking up early. My hope is that I'll also have more dreams, due to increased amount of REM sleep with each cycle etc.

Any input is appreciated, since I'm not that knowledgeable on the subject of sleep!

[wtfsvi]

I would be really interested to hear how this goes.

[jstnrgrs]

I think 28 is kind of extreme. I would try 26.

I have no basis for thinking this.

[vhawk01]

Just do polyphasic, man.

[van_exel_fan]

I don't think this will work. It always comes back to the clock. Even people who have no purpose but to drink and smoke pot and play video games all night (not even poker!!!) revolve around the same general 24-hour schedule.

The body has a natural clock...So what happens when you wake up "in the middle of the night" and can't get back to sleep or fall back asleep for too long. You'll have to check your schedule to find out when you are supposed to sleep until just to stick to your 28-hour day????

Good Luck

[Metric]

Yeah, I'm curious about how this works out -- I tend to sleep longer, and stay awake longer, which tends to randomize my sleep schedule with respect to the rest of the world. I'm a grad student doing research pretty independently, so there are relatively few constraints on how this goes -- it can get pretty crazy.

[Dale Dough]

I put in a session right after I wrote the first message, until my gf got up. When she left around 8:30 I felt ridiculously tired (even though I had slept from 8PM-4AM). Probably because I got used to going to sleep when the sun rises, perhaps my body has adjusted to that. Now I feel fine.

Re: polyphasic: No way. I tried that like 2 years ago, lasted a week and a half. I didn't do the hardcore plan, I did 3 periods of 2 hours. That was horrible even when I got to the point where I got used to the times and didn't cheat. In addition to that, I found it just too hard to plan - it really sucks never to have more than 6 hours available.

Re: clock: Yes, I'm aware that I'm screwing with my internal clock here. I was doing that anyway, though. I tried 4 AM to 12 PM, but always shifted the times forward because I had too little obligations in the morning. I can see how you automatically shift back if you have to go to work, but it was just too easy for me to sleep in. Also, once I play till like 1 PM in the casino once, it ends up costing me that day plus the next two until I stop feeling too tired to play online.

One of the reasons I don't want to do 26 or 25 hours (close to what I was doing anyway) is that then I'll have a whole stretch of days where I'm asleep during a big part the day AND when my girlfriend gets home from work. Which means my whole day all I can do is play poker, 2+2/Wikipedia/random net crap or watch movies by myself - I can't even take care of office hour errands. Now it's more spread out and I won't have a block of almost a week where I can't make any appointments, or hang out during the evening, etc etc.

I'm pretty confident in my ability to pull this off short-term - I think it's a helluva lot easier than this uberman crap. When I was in Vegas I had even longer days - I think I ended up having like nine or ten 'days' in two weeks, and one crazy stretch in the middle where I slept 10 hours, woke up, then after 3 or 4 hours I suddenly wanted to crash and slept another 10.

The way I plan to adhere to this is simple: I'm going to go to sleep when I'm supposed to, and see how long I last. If I wake up and can't get back to sleep, I'll suck it up until the next 'night'. Since I'm adding four hours every 'day', I'm pretty confident that oversleeping isn't going to be an issue. The extra hours should make me tired enough that I won't have to worry about sleeplessness, but not THAT tired that I sleep more than 10.5 hours. If I find myself consistently waking up early - oh well. If I can handle 6x9, great - more time, and if I can't, I should want to make up for it next time around. Only if I miraculously can't fall asleep on time will I use an alarm clock, to make sure I don't sleep outside the allotted period.

I planned to write this all in the original post but figured it was long enough already. I don't plan to turn this thread into a blog, and I'm too lazy to keep constant tabs on how I feel every few hours anyway. But I'll keep you guys posted if you're interested.

PS technically I haven't started yet until I go to bed on Friday night, which will be the conclusion of my first real 28 hour day. Tonight I'll actually hit the sack only 23.5 hours after last night, but that's because I had mon-wed all [censored] up due to a casino visit on Sunday or Monday. I can't even [censored] remember, that should tell you enough. Which triggered me to think of all this in the first place.

[AlexM]

[ QUOTE ]
I don't think this will work. It always comes back to the clock. Even people who have no purpose but to drink and smoke pot and play video games all night (not even poker!!!) revolve around the same general 24-hour schedule.

The body has a natural clock...So what happens when you wake up "in the middle of the night" and can't get back to sleep or fall back asleep for too long. You'll have to check your schedule to find out when you are supposed to sleep until just to stick to your 28-hour day????

Good Luck

[/ QUOTE ]

I wish my body had a natural clock. If it does, it's broken.

[Matt Flynn]

i took a seminar on this in college and spent a year working to isolate circadian rhythm genes in med school.

internal clock runs at around 25 hours if you're in a cave with no time cues.

clock trains to 24 hours with time cues. of those most effective is bright light >2500 lumens, which means natural sunlight.

shifting continuously like your proposed 28-hour day is a bad idea. google circadian rhythms and shift work. it's especially bad if you tend towards bipolar disease.

[Valentyno]

But sleep cycles slip, at a much faster pace than a standard solar day.

It probably has a lot to do with the fact individual humans are moving at faster relative speeds (although not much) to the rotation periods of Terra/Sol.

And, yes, if you don't keep to a standard, healthy routine, it messes with your head. And remodulating the flows is insanely difficult. Creative bleed-offs are necessary.

Considering this in my situation, there are times I move at several factors of c so I find it useful to reset my circadian rhythms once or twice every couple weeks. That means a lot of night as opposed to day. Especially in summer, because sunlight is really something you shouldn't need in full strength all year.

As it is, it may be that some people are more comfortable with more hours in nocturnal periods than daylight periods. If you're Norwegian, for example, you'd certainly not feel comfortable in the Caribbean, and there's an adjustment period.

And so on. It may be individual sleep/wake cycles are emerging as unique as DNA. If you jack a copy of your DNA into cyberspace and accelerate it with a good set of references and you know what you're looking for, and you get some pings/matches, maybe there shouldn't be a set criteria for time spent sleeping/waking.

As the Tao saying goes, sleep when you're tired, eat when you're hungry, piss when you need to. And if you want to push yourself to extremes (refer to Sufi experiments) always make sure you have backup and are in supervised situations. Psychotic breaks do happen.