I just discovered that sleeping 4 hours a day six days a week and then making up for lack of sleep by sleeping all day long on Saturday is not the most brilliant idea I’ve ever had. It turns out that this regimen (that I’ve maintained for thirteen years, by the way) is not good for my health. Not only can generating a “sleep debt” cause anxiety and weight gain, it also can compromise one’s immunity, exacerbate psychological problems, and give one very tiresome, detailed and complicated dreams. I now understand why I’ve been tortured by such dreams all these years.
So I’m thinking I should reconsider this system. Which has made me wonder what people normally do about sleep. I don’t mean the parents of small children who have to take the few opportunities they get to sleep whenever they can. I want to ask those of my readers who actually do have a choice of when to sleep the following questions:
– when do you normally go to sleep?
– do you go to sleep at about the same time every day? Does the time vary based on whether it’s a work day or a weekend?
– how many hours do you normally sleep each night?
Clarissa's Blog 
I go to sleep between 9 and 11 every night (usually between 9:30 and 10:30) and I get up between 5:30 and 6:30 on week days and around 7-8:30 on weekends. I try to maintain the same bedtime every day. And I sleep 7-9 hours/night. I’m a morning person though – my best and most efficient work happens when I first get out of bed (provided I can convince myself to wake up).
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“I’m a morning person though – my best and most efficient work happens when I first get out of bed (provided I can convince myself to wake up”
– I also manage to be a lot more efficient on those rare days when I actually do get up early. Hmm. . .
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I go to bed between ten and one every night. So I’ll say somewhere around 11:30, plus or minus an hour and a half.
I try to go to sleep at about the same time every day, because it makes it easier to get up in the morning. Right now it does vary between work days and weekends, but I’m trying to change that for the semester (I like to do homework on Saturdays and I don’t particularly want to sleep in on Sundays).
Right now my normal amount of sleep is between seven and nine hours. It all depends on when I’ve gone to bed and whether I have work and whether I’ve decided to shower before I leave or during lunch.
Good luck if you decide to change your sleep habits. It was difficult getting myself out of a very similar cycle after my senior year of high school.
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Wow, 4 hours a day. My brain would’ve stopped functioning after 1st, max 2nd day like that. How haven’t you decided it was harmful before? I thought doctors asking RE blood pressure would ask about whether you’re tired / get enough sleep too. From wiki:
“Professor Francesco Cappuccio said, “Short sleep has been shown to be a risk factor for weight gain, hypertension, and Type 2 diabetes”
I go to sleep ~23-24 and wake up from 6:30 to 8. Depends on the day and when I should wake up. F.e. if I have to wake at 6:30, for optimal performance better not to go to sleep after 24:00.
If you google “army sleep regulation”, an organization where they want optimal performance AND demand a lot, you get:
“Shifts which allow each individual 6 to 8 hours of continuous sleep when feasible are preferred”
Wiki confirms 6 hour figure I heard before too:
“A University of California, San Diego psychiatry study of more than one million adults found that people who live the longest self-report sleeping for six to seven hours each night.”
In short, depends on day, but at least 6, if I want not to feel tired all next day. On weekends – longer, ~7-8.
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“How haven’t you decided it was harmful before?”
– Nobody told me. How was I supposed to find out?
” I thought doctors asking RE blood pressure would ask about whether you’re tired / get enough sleep too.”
– I don’t really visit doctors for this because I don’t want to be put on medication. The last one I visited was 4 years ago.
““Professor Francesco Cappuccio said, “Short sleep has been shown to be a risk factor for weight gain, hypertension, and Type 2 diabetes””
– OH MY GOD!!!!! I had no bloody idea! I go for 2 days and more without sleep on a regular basis, too. Probably not too smart either, eh?
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If you didn’t know RE sleep, what about doing a wide blood test before pregnancy and alcohol being especially harmful in the first 3 months? I discovered thyroid problems in an accidental blood test (was ill with virus). Never recognized any side effects. Asked doctor whether it’s OK to drink those pills during pregnancy too and got “otherwise, you’ll have a special ed child. Not entirely insane, but special ed.” Horrible.
Modern medicine is extremely helpful, and one should be aware of both extremes and neither drink 1001 pills for “fun” nor harm yourself as anti-vaxers do with “doctors are evil”.
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” what about doing a wide blood test ”
– Do you recommend something like that? My ob-gyn never suggested anything of the kind.
“and alcohol being especially harmful in the first 3 months”
– From what I understand, it is also especially harmful right before and during the conception.
“Asked doctor whether it’s OK to drink those pills during pregnancy too and got “otherwise, you’ll have a special ed child. Not entirely insane, but special ed.” ”
– A doctor actually said that?
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You said 1 good doctor told you about agression causing BP. I would go to a (that or another) good doctor in your place and tell him about your *entire* lifestyle since he can’t guess 4 hours a night himself. It’s very unusual. May be, you do other unusual things too and don’t know even of all effects. And then hear recommendations for lifestyle changes and *how* to do them. A good doctor is supposed to help with it and nobody can put you on medication against your will anyway. Would’ve gone, especially if I planned to become pregnant.
Besides, many side effects will show themselves in all “beauty” only down the road, when it’ll be too late. Like if you use a car badly and can’t change parts, than oiling it after doing XYZ won’t help much.
Once watched a very good film RE sleep on National Geographic. F.e. how dangerous (more cancer causing, etc) working at night is. Or that human brain needs deep sleep, which happens after several hours of being asleep (forgot exactly).
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//- Do you recommend something like that? My ob-gyn never suggested anything of the kind.
I am not a doctor, of course, but I would do it myself. I want to be sure my thyroid levels are OK. Besides, if you lack iron or any vitamins, better to take supplements during pregnancy. Know this old proverb about each child costing a mother a tooth? In many cases (not thyroid, unfortunately) a fetus is going to be OK, it’s woman’s body (teeth, etc.) that’s going to suffer.
I hope you don’t go that far that you say taking supplements, if you lack something, is Big Pharma. I am not for taking unnecessary drugs or 101 not needed vitamins, but sometimes, especially during pregnancy, eating well wouldn’t be enough (teeth, etc.)
//From what I understand, it is also especially harmful right before and during the conception.
Yes. I also heard that if a man drinks before the conception, it may cause harm too. Haven’t checked it in literature, but will take “better safe than sorry” approach.
//- A doctor actually said that?
Yes. It’s a well known medical fact, which I didn’t know prior to discovering I had the problem. Btw, it developed only in my late 20ies. Before everything was 100% all right. See here:
http://www.vivo.colostate.edu/hbooks/pathphys/endocrine/thyroid/thyroid_preg.html
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“Besides, if you lack iron or any vitamins, better to take supplements during pregnancy.”
– It’s crucial to take them BEFORE conception, actually. And both for men and women. It turns out that you need to be ON folic acid before you conceive for it work as well as it should. Especially for older people.
“Yes. I also heard that if a man drinks before the conception, it may cause harm too. Haven’t checked it in literature, but will take “better safe than sorry” approach.”
– N. is now into genetics and chromosomes (for work), and he says after what he read, he’d never touch alcohol around conception. It isn’t such a huge sacrifice either.
“I hope you don’t go that far that you say taking supplements, if you lack something, is Big Pharma. ”
– I wouldn’t make a choice to deprive another person of anything because of MY convictions.
“Yes. It’s a well known medical fact, which I didn’t know prior to discovering I had the problem. Btw, it developed only in my late 20ies. Before everything was 100% all right.”
– OK, I’m convinced. I will be calling a doctor first thing in the morning. Thank you!!
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//N. is now into genetics and chromosomes (for work), and he says after what he read, he’d never touch alcohol around conception. It isn’t such a huge sacrifice either.
I wonder whether he could write a guest post about it. It would’ve been fascinating & helped to fight horrible ignorance many people have (including me).
May be you’ll one day write what you discovered in general? As the saying goes, nothing costs as much as information.
In general, how harmful is alcohol during pregnancy? Just recently I saw a l-o-n-g discussion of Feministe, which had 1 point I could sympathize with of not wanting other people remark on visibly pregnant women drinking (a waiter looked surprised she ordered alcohol, etc), but other points… OMG.
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– there are too many restrictions during pregnancy, such as: not eating half-cooked meat, certain kinds of soft cheese (the ones made with unpasteurized milk), not drinking too much coffee, etc. I want to enjoy myself. Feeling stressed is worse for the child.
I am not for feeling stressed, of course. However, if there are real dangers, why do it? If there are made-up restrictions – to hell with them! But those sound real.
Wanted to ask (don’t intend to become pregnant now, but for future): if I hate drinking water and suspect better not to drink diet, without caffeine Coca-Cola in quantaties during pregnancy, is tea 100% OK or is it too caffeine? Caffeine is in my favorite bitter chocolite to, no? How much is too much?
– women drank alcohol in some amounts during history & did it all the time, when water wasn’t good, and children were OK.
After reading “slightly lower performance on IQ tests and difficulties with schoolwork”, I am not buying it.
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“In general, how harmful is alcohol during pregnancy? Just recently I saw a l-o-n-g discussion of Feministe, which had 1 point I could sympathize with of not wanting other people remark on visibly pregnant women drinking (a waiter looked surprised she ordered alcohol, etc), but other points…”
– I don’t want to judge anybody for what they do with their bodies but I personally would not risk any alcohol at any point.
“there are too many restrictions during pregnancy, such as: not eating half-cooked meat, certain kinds of soft cheese (the ones made with unpasteurized milk), not drinking too much coffee, etc. I want to enjoy myself. Feeling stressed is worse for the child. I am not for feeling stressed, of course. However, if there are real dangers, why do it? If there are made-up restrictions – to hell with them! But those sound real.”
– This is complicated because there are lists of what women should avoid eating both during pregnancy and while breastfeeding that are extremely long and include pretty much everything. Like tomatoes, for example. I’m sorry, but nobody will ever convince me that fresh tomatoes can damage anybody. I love my tomatoes and nobody would pry them out of my hands. I don’t mind sacrificing any food or beverage for a good cause :-), but this has to be reasonable. Sacrificing fresh produce and fresh fish does not sound reasonable.
The problem here is that there are so many weird rituals and obsessions surrounding pregnancy, breastfeeding and parenting, that I personally would not expect much help from anywhere. I’d go on my own sense of judgment.
” if I hate drinking water and suspect better not to drink diet, without caffeine Coca-Cola in quantaties during pregnancy, is tea 100% OK or is it too caffeine? Caffeine is in my favorite bitter chocolite to, no? How much is too much?”
– I researched caffeine because I love coffee. One cup a day is acceptable, according to every source. Even then, I’d probably limit its intake to very special occasions. Bitter chocolate will be good, I believe, because it lowers blood pressure. High blood pressure is one of main risks during pregnancy. And as for tea, roobois tea has no caffeine and it is absolutely delicious. I’d be careful about caffeine because it can raise blood pressure in bigger doses. And I’d avoid Cola altogether because nothing raises BP like it. Nobody needs a high BP while pregnant. You could always drink juices. Especially if you forget that list of supposedly “bad produce” that some people like so much.
“After reading “slightly lower performance on IQ tests and difficulties with schoolwork”, I am not buying it.”
– I honestly don’t see what’s so attractive about that glass of wine that one needs to take the risk. If it were a tomato, on the other hand. . . 🙂
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I’m supposed to get 8-10 hours of sleep a night, but being on night shift for the past 22 months has really fucked that up for me. I average 6-7, more on weekends if my nephew isn’t going buck wild in the spare room. I was aware of sleep debt, but not that it can cause vivid dreams. Huh. I’ve always had vivid dreams though, even when I was getting 10 hours a night.
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I find that 6 hours is not quite enough for me to feel good the next day. But I can function on that. Seven and half hours seems to be just the right amount for me.
I should go to bed at 10, since I wake up at 6, but I tend to get into bed only at 10:30 and then I just want to read a few pages and end up not going to sleep for another hour at least…
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Summer screws up my schedule, but during school year, I go to sleep around midnight and get up at 7 am the days I teach, 8:30-9:00 am the days I do not teach. I allow myself to sleep until whenever I want on Sundays.
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Where does the 4 hours per night / sleep all day Saturday thing come from? I was initially forced to it by my first academic job, which had a lot of busy work, but would never have chosen it as it is completely destructive to oneself and also to one´s work.
I usually sleep from 1AM-9AM but should shift this earlier, a couple of hours probably. I used to do it that way (11-7) and it was the best.
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It started when I was a student. I always worked plus had a huge course load, so I didn’t know how to do this any other way.
Nobody ever told me this might be problematic until now.
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It is supposed to be one of the health things taught by parents and in school. I know how overwork makes it tempting to cut way back on sleep — and if you have to be at work late, it is virtually impossible to go home and sleep right away, you have to unwind. But, 4 hours is incredibly bad for you. In this situation you have to push it up to 6 and then only sleep in until noon Saturday. You will still end up with about the same total number of waking hours per week, and you will feel better and thus get more out of these hours.
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I’m now wondering what other health skills I might be missing. I found out about this one completely by chance.
Now it’s becoming clear why I need so much coffee.
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I have always always wanted to be a morning person. It’s just not much in the cards for me for some reason. During the summer when I’m on my own clock, I sleep from about 3:00 AM- 11:00 AM. (Which is the schedule of a teenager I realize. I wish I was more adult!) I generally work from about 2:00 PM- 9:00 PM, have a later dinner with my partner around 10:00 PM, and then enjoy the late night hours. (Both my partner and I are sort of night owls– me more so though.) On days that I have something I want to do in the evenings (like go out to dinner with friends), I adjust my schedule so I can still see people who manage to get their work done during the day! And of course during the school year, I have a different schedule altogether. (During the school year, I sleep from about 11:00 PM- 7:00 AM.) Altogether, I strive for 7-9 hours of sleep. I sometimes struggle with sleeplessness though. As long as I have 5-6 hours, I can function pretty well but it catches up with me eventually. I can even function fairly well on very little sleep for short bursts. But then it really catches up with me and my face inevitably breaks out when I don’t sleep. So vanity forces me to make sure I do. 😉
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One requires 8 hours of sleep each night. if one does not maintain that schedule then one exposes oneself to stress related illnesses, including cancer, heart attack and stroke. The timing is less important. However, for many years i have maintained a sleep pattern of from 9pm to 5am, leaving me a few writing hours in the morning when my beloved family still sleeps on. I am now 73 years of age and fully fit. I am also happy and well-adjusted. You will never find from me a nasty personal blog of the kind that Clarissa periodically posts.
Of the many friends who reduced those hours or who slept irregularly, only one now remains alive above the age or 70.
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But who would read my blog if it didn’t have those “nasty posts”, eh? 🙂 🙂
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«Of the many friends who reduced those hours or who slept irregularly, only one now remains alive above the age or 70.»
OMG. I hope my periods of not sleeping enough will not have this effect, and that my having returned to good sleep habits will reverse this effect.
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Wow. If I sleep so little even only for one night, my concentration is gone and my mood is extremely, extremely bad. If I then sleep longer to compensate on the next day or the weekend, I always get terrible migraines. So sleeping 4 hours one night would ruin 2 days for me.
I found out sleeping 8 hours is ideal for my productivity. There is absolutely no point in me in sleeping less to work more.
How do you sleep when you are in holiday and have absolutely no constraints? This is probably what’s ideal for you…..
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Being on holiday doesn’t help much, to be honest. I get these bouts of insomnia where I can’t fall asleep until early hours in the morning for days.
I guess it will take a while to reestablish a healthy sleep pattern. If I ever had one at all. I’m thinking back now and I can’t remember a time when it wasn’t weird.
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Part of the insomnia could be your sleep pattern. When I was a senior in high school I got on average three to four hours of sleep a night, and slept until late at night on weekends. There were many days during that time in which I physically could not sleep, and that continued into the summer after graduation. I haven’t had that problem since revising my sleep schedule into something a bit more normal, and I’d never had that problem before.
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Yes, I think it has to be part of an unhealthy pattern. Now the question is how to break it.
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Since you say you sleep late on Saturdays, you might try starting there. Get yourself up early instead of sleeping in. This should make you feel tired earlier, but don’t go to bed before eight or nine, or else you’ll be likely to wake up in the middle of the night. Don’t sleep in on Sunday, no matter how tired you are from Saturday. Whatever happens, don’t go to bed earlier than eight or nap earlier in the day (unless you’re sick). It’ll be miserable at first, but after a while you might find yourself in at least a semi-regular pattern.
This worked for me, but I’m not sure it’ll work for everyone. It takes a lot of time and commitment to carry out, and potentially quite a bit of coffee.
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About how to change that pattern:
I used to have huge problems with my sleep too. I was panicking about not sleeping with the effect that I had terrible insomnia. I didn’t sleep at all from Sunday to Monday in every single week of one particularly horrible semester at University.
I tried sleeping pills, but they only made it worse. The thing that finally saved me was was meditation. It takes some discipline. You have to do it every day, and it takes a while before it has an effect but it was one of the most useful things in my life I ever found out. Going to meditation classes is good in order to get started. And meditation has a huge number of other beneficial side effects, so I can really recommend it! In particular mindfulness meditation is good. It sounds to me a bit like your mind might be on overdrive. 🙂 I have the same tendency, and meditation addresses exactly this.
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OK, thank you, I’ll totally try this! My mind is SO in overdrive, it’s scary.
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Vanity is a good motivator, though. I had a tendency to break out until I was 35 or so, and sleeping enough kept my skin clear so I would do it. As far as looks go you can kind of get away without sleeping enough from about 35 to 45 although anyone, at any age, looks unwell without enough sleep. After 45 I notice, by watching others as well as myself, the *enormous* difference in looks a decent night´s sleep makes.
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Yes, I notice the influence of sleeplessness on my appearance, too! I never look as good as on Saturdays.
And I need motivation because another thing I discovered is that my motivational mechanisms are completely broken down.
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I go to sleep between 10 and 10:30. I’d like to get up at 7, but in the summer my dog wakes me up at 6. It’s the same for workdays and weekends.
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And you never have problems falling asleep?
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In bed at 11:30 or 12:30 until 7. It might take me a while to get to sleep, or I could wake up at 5 and then go back to sleep.
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I try to go to bed around 11pm and my alarm goes off at 7.15am although that doesn’t mean to say it wakes me up. I had a period of waking around 4.30am but that seems to be less of a problem now.
I could never function on 4hrs of sleep, and I need Saturdays to do chores, ferry my boys around and read my Kindle.
I don’t seem to have problems falling asleep either but I don’t go from using the computer to going to bed. Just before bedtime I’ll either be reading, pottering about the house or watching something on tele.
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My ideal sleep schedule is: going to bed between 12:00-1 AM, waking up at 6 AM, then sleeping from 1 to 4 PM.
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I love siestas, too. But they put me in a crappy mood for some reason.
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They put me in a crappy mood during winter. Nothing is worse than waking up in the dark at 4PM. During summe they are lovely.
My ideal sleep schedule goes with when my brain is at its best: in the morning and in the evening. In the afternoon I am completely dumb.
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“In the afternoon I am completely dumb.”
– I’m this way, too, actually. Interesting why that happens. I never get anything useful done between 1 and 4 pm.
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I normally go to bed between 8 pm and 11 pm, and get up between 2 and 5 am, so I suppose I must average about 6 hours sleep a night.
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//he’d never touch alcohol around conception
How long “around conception” ideally is? A day before? A week?
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Since you can’t know for sure when conception would happen, this gets tricky.
Do you remember those “Monday children” we used to see a lot of back in our country? Those were kids whose parents would get drunk on Sunday, get careless and conceive them. My mother had an entire class full of them at her school. They all had a huge number of learning disabilities and all kinds of health issues.
I’d can alcohol altogether from the moment one starts trying to conceive. Drinking is not that crucial to me, so I don’t see a problem. But there was an article on Feministe where the author seems to say she can’t deal with stress without alcohol. I don’t want to judge anybody, God forbid. It’s their right to do what they see fit with their bodies. But if it were me, I’d first take care of this dependence on alcohol and then think about conception.
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//I’d can alcohol altogether from the moment one starts trying to conceive.
I meant – how long does it stay in the body? F.e. somebody drunk today for the last time, how long should one wait? 2 days? A week?
//Do you remember those “Monday children” we used to see a lot of back in our country?
Yes. My mother thought that after several generations of such the genes were damaged, but it’s wrong, right?
//My mother had an entire class full of them at her school.
Your mother – a schoolteacher too, like mine? Cool. 🙂
Just a question, out of curiosity. You’re a professor at uni. If you had to choose another place of work, would you love to be a schoolteacher too? Or try something different completely?
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“I meant – how long does it stay in the body? F.e. somebody drunk today for the last time, how long should one wait? 2 days? A week?”
– Yes, I hear that 48 hours is a safe period of time.
“Yes. My mother thought that after several generations of such the genes were damaged, but it’s wrong, right”
– N. says that even a very small amount of alcohol can be enough to mess up one’s chromosomes. This won’t be hereditary but the child conceived to non-sober parents will run a risk of all kinds of damage.
“Your mother – a schoolteacher too, like mine? Cool. ”
– Mother, aunt, grandmother, great-grandmother, great-great-grandmother. 🙂 🙂
“Just a question, out of curiosity. You’re a professor at uni. If you had to choose another place of work, would you love to be a schoolteacher too? Or try something different completely?”
– I was a translator before I turned to academia. I think I’d be a translator again if I couldn’t be a professor. School teaching requires too much human contact. I don’t need to be around people every day. 🙂
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I get all the sleep I need. Last night I had a dream that I was sleeping in my gran’s old house (an occasionally recurrent dream, whenever I get the sense that I’ve inherited her characteristics). This place was unfortunately also an old location for a cult (I watch too may TV programs), so the doors could not be locked to keep us safe. Instead music played all night to give any intruders the impression we were still awake.
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I know you are suspicious of medication, but I have had success with melatonin. Melatonin is a chemical that our bodies produce naturally, but most people in post-industrial societies do not produce enough. I take 1mg of melatonin before I go to sleep and it helps me feel more rested. It’s not a miracle-worker but it definitely helps.
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