You bodyclock / waking up / going to bed

What time do you get up in the morning? What time do you go to bed at night? What time do you start (and finish) work?

Thread inspired by catching 10 minutes of Supernanny USA the other day when the dad went out to work at 6am and so got up at 5:30am, which seems savage to me, and by talk on the Rolling Music Writers' Thread thread about when people write best, and people writing until 6am and so on and so forth.

Personally, my alarm is set for 6 minutes past 7 on weekdays, but I usually wake up between 30 and 60 minutes before then, and check Twitter, Facebook, ILX and The Guardian on my phone.

I get to work for between 8:30 and 9am and leave between 4:30 and 5:30pm (normally take just 20 minutes for lunch, but might take up to an hour or more and stay later if I need to do something; also play football pretty much straight after work three days a week).

I go to bed just after 10pm most days; by the time teeth are cleaned and so on and so forth it's probably 10:30 or 11pm when I fall alseep, so I get a good 7-8 hours a night.

At weekends I pretty much never lie-in; I like to get up early and go cycling. I seldom if ever drink to 'excess' these days, cos I don't like dealing with hangovers in the morning.

i've spent the last three decades pish-pishing at the notion that i wasn't master of my own bedtimes and have endured long periods of hellish insomnia, mental and physical sluggishness, all that jazz as a result. I'd habitually have struggled to make work at ten am.

Since i've moved i've been trying to use it as an opportunity to shake various things up- routine, diet, yadda. Getting up regularly at seven, trying to eat breakfast, make work early, hope sleep patterns normalise as a result. A month in and it's working a charm so far, i'm mildly disgusted by the tweasiness of it all tbh.

wake at seven, out door by half-past, be it bus, drive or cycle. Work by eight if it's the latter two, by nine if the former. Lunch half hour, leave at four, home by half-past with the same provisos, football twice a week otherwise i'm either cooking, cleaning or doing a pleasant amount of nothing much.

I may, god help me, take up a hobby.

I've learned to trust my natural sleepclock. Being woken unexpectedly by an alarm is what makes one groggy, so for a while I used an iphone app that detects when you start shifting around in the morning and slowly wakes you with soft music. I've just moved to a new house where I deliberately picked the east-facing bedroom, and I leave the curtains open a crack so the morning sun blares in at about 6.30 am. It works! I wake up with no need for an alarm by 7, get up, idle about readying myself for an hour, head off to work to start at 9, work til 5ish, eat dinner way too late when I get home (sometimes at 10pm) then crash into bed at 10-11.

In a healthy phase: 3-4am to 10-11am
Currently: 5-6am to 11am-1pm
In my worst phase: 8-9am to 4-5pm

Yeah, me and sleep are not good friends.

Alarm at 6.10am, straight out of bed and into shower etc then out of the house 6.30am. Bus to city centre and then about a mile's walk to my workplace and in work for about 7.20am, straight into the office kitchen to make breakfast. Grab some lunch about midday, often at desk and rarely for a full hour. Try to finish about 4pm, but will work til 5pm a couple of nights a week. Reverse commute, and home for about 5ish usually. Evening meal with Mrs A about 6.30pm. Quality time etc, and then bed too late most of the time (rarely before midnight, but I don't often feel tired before then). Not quite Thatcher, but I get by on probably 6 hrs sleep most nights.

Up at 6.10, out of the house at 7:00. Walk to work, getting there around 8:20. Work until 16:30 and then walk home. Bed at midnight. It's not really enough sleep but i still get up around that time at the weekends. I just have too much stuff i want to do.

Since being unemployed I sleep til whenever then can't get to sleep at night. However - I still have this absolutely unfightable urge to fall asleep after lunch if I'm sitting still and reading. I used to get this at work and put it down to not getting enough sleep but now I'm getting all the sleep I want and it STILL happens. It's a form of narcolepsy, surely?

my body believes I should sleep from 4am to noon and work/go to school from 2-10
society appears to disagree

Been getting up at 6.30 every week day since early March to allow me to get out the front door a little over an hour later. Have to catch a bus at ten to 8 to get me into the course on time.

6.30 has me going to bed pretty early too then reading for a while but frequently falling sleep pretty soon after.

Think I was getting up at 9ish before that, probably after reading for a while.

Ideally I go to bed between 10:30 and 11:00 pm, but I've had insomnia lately.

I get up a few times during the night to use the bathroom. (lol old)

Without an alarm, my body will generally wake up around 6:30-7:00 am. But I have an alarm set for 5:30. This morning, I was up at 5:30, out the door on my bike by 5:57, at the commuter bike facility downtown by 6:30, showered there, and was at my desk at work by 7:15am.

Several years ago when I was trying to lose a shit-ton of weight, I used to get up at 4:30 am, go to the gym and work out until 6:00am, then get ready and go to work from there.

what do ye be doin in the house for an hour in the morning, out of interest

Having something to eat, getting my clothes and lunch together, etc.

nah yr at 27 mins which sounds ok to me tbh

These days I go to bed around 2am and get up around 10am. Every so often I resolve to get up earlier and sometimes it even holds for a while but then some big work deadline comes along and I'm working until 4-5am. I've never had success at working productively in the morning, even when I was at school I would regularly sleep in class.

i generally go to bed at 1am and wake up at 7am.

I envy people who can regularly sleep <8 hours.

I slept for 9 hours last night and I woke up feeling like I deserved an award. That's how little I sleep on a regular basis. I wanted a prize for having completed 9 consecutive hours of sleeping. Normally it's ~6-7 hrs a night on average. That's not really working out very well for me tbh.

Usually go to bed around 10-11pm, play games on iPad or read in bed till usually around 10:30 or 11:30pm. Wake up at 6am every morning.

1-2 to 8:20, then pay off the sleep credit card on weekends

Usually sleep 11 pm to 7 am, with an additional 30-60 minute nap in the evening.

i spent the guts of probably a decade on <6 hrs a night, you can get used to functioning ime

functioning yes; looking good, not so much

granted!

It really varies, person to person. Some people seem to function just fine on 4 hours a night. I envy them.

I get in bed between 11-11:30, catch up on WWF games, read a little bit, then lights out. Asleep within 1-2 minutes without fail. No alarm, body clock generally says "get up" 7 hours later. Been lethargic and sleepy lately so I take a short power nap in the afternoon. Sometimes my bladder gets me up in the middle of the night -- the trick is to get back to sleep without my brain getting revved up, otherwise I lay in bed and think miserable thoughts for 30-40 minutes before falling back asleep.

the trick is to get back to sleep without my brain getting revved up

Avoiding putting on a light, if you can, helps with this btw

Am I the only one who has Olivia Newton-John stuck in his head now from the thread title?

"Let me hear your body clock, your body clock . . ."

NO BUT I WILL NOW THANKS A LOT PHIL >:|

I HATE THAT SONG SO MUCH

Avoiding putting on a light, if you can, helps with this btw

― fix it with like some music glue (Trayce), Thursday, April 19, 2012 6:34 PM

Definitely, I always make that trip in the dark.

I try to get to bed no later than 11, with varying success. Sometimes I fall asleep quickly but more often it takes a while, sometimes a long while. Typically I wake up a few times but get back to sleep easily enough.

During the week, the alarm goes off around 6:30-45 and I drag myself out of bed by 7:00. On weekends, our cats ensure that I am up by 8 unless my wife feeds them first.

I envy people who go to sleep easily or who don't need much sleep. I keep telling myself that I can learn better sleep habits in the same way I've learned better food habits, but it hasn't happened yet.

up around 6 to 6:15, at work by 7. usually in bed by 10:30, asleep by 11 and sometimes earlier.

In a healthy phase: 3-4am to 10-11am
Currently: 5-6am to 11am-1pm
In my worst phase: 8-9am to 4-5pm

Yeah, me and sleep are not good friends.

― emil.y, Thursday, 19 April 2012 20:27 (Yesterday)

gah this is horribly familiar. Except I think I tend to sleep a bit longer, 8-10 hours. Last week I went a run of five days or so in that horrendous 8am-5pm pattern, which was a new low for me. I've been forcefully pulled out of that by the end of the university easter break, but going in twice a week, once for an evening class and once for an afternoon class, doesn't encourage much in the way of normal-person-hours stability either. O, self-directed PhD student life.

The displaced hours thing isn't necessarily always so bad, but what really frustrates me is how much I sleep - I know from experience that I can easily go a week on four or five hours of sleep a night and function as well as I would on double that, but still, my body so often inexplicably refuses to obey alarms despite the various techniques I try for myself, and so often scuppers well-intentioned schedules for the next day. I could have so much more time!

Tonight I got to sleep at a reasonable time, 1:30am or so. Then I woke after a couple of hours, tossed and turned for an hour, then gave up on sleeping again and here I am. This is one of my big problems - almost always, whenever I fall asleep at a reasonable hour, I find myself waking after only a couple of hours, unable to sleep again, steadfastly refusing the threat of normal sleeping times.

i've spent the last three decades pish-pishing at the notion that i wasn't master of my own bedtimes and have endured long periods of hellish insomnia, mental and physical sluggishness, all that jazz as a result. I'd habitually have struggled to make work at ten am.

Since i've moved i've been trying to use it as an opportunity to shake various things up- routine, diet, yadda. Getting up regularly at seven, trying to eat breakfast, make work early, hope sleep patterns normalise as a result. A month in and it's working a charm so far, i'm mildly disgusted by the tweasiness of it all tbh.

― diafiyhm (darraghmac)

OTM. i used moving to the US as an opportunity to totally revamp my sleep schedule - i think the jet lag really helped, and i look back fondly on that first month of living here, when i would fall asleep within moments of getting into bed. but i'm still mostly pretty good; aim for getting into bed by 10-10.30, lights out by 11-11.30. on a good night, i'm asleep by 12. up again at 6.45am, at work by 7.30-8am, leave work 5.30-6pm.

if i am awake, i have a tendency to stay awake
if i am asleep, i will not wake up without an alarm. well, maybe after like 16 hours or something -- maybe

Related to this topic is this interesting app I stumbled on, as I was reading an article about running one's life without artificial light (which results in much imrpoved sleep)

http://stereopsis.com/flux/

a lot of short sleepers here! I cannot function without 8 hours of sleep. Generally in bed by 11, read til midnight and up by 7:30-8

Yeah, I can't function without at least 8 hours, either.

My experience is that the whole "sleep bank/credit card" thing is only fooling myself. I don't get the time back, it screws me up for days.

So I'm a complete sleep nazi. Almost always in bed between 11-12 and up about 8am. And nothing messes with that. It sucked when I started having to leave social events early, miss out on gigs, not do things on school nights that will require me being out of the house after 11. But being ruthless about it was the only thing that got my insomnia and sleep-drift under control.

I also have north-facing windows, without curtains (I have frosted glass and a screen for privacy, but it lets all the light through) and that has really helped with getting a steady pattern. I wake up when the sun creeps round the corner and hits my window. (Whether I pull my pillow over my head and go back to sleep is another story.) Alarm clock is p much backup, in fact I try to avoid it because I swear the sound of the thing makes me tired.

Because for me, not getting enough sleep is my number one "psychological problems will be in the post." It's not just that I get snappy, cranky, bad-tempered or easily distracted. I get ~nuts~. It is the single greatest thing that is a trigger for mental illness, depression, anxiety, uncontrollable paranoia. If I stop sleeping properly, my mental health just goes, almost frighteningly quickly. So it's like, faced with that choice - do you want to do ::fun thing that happens at midnight:: or do you want your mind in one piece? No choice, for me.

Get up at 12.40 am, start work at 01.30am, no breaks, finish at 08.40am. Go to bed somewhere between 4.30pm-6pm.

uuuuugh man, been there done that- may well have been a major factor in my fucked sleep patterns for the next ten years

Didn't manage to get the holiday time in June to coincide with the Euro Championship Football and want to watch the games live instead of recorded the next morning (which is what I usually do for evening kick offs atm) so will experiment with sleeping in 2 shifts 11am-4.30pm and then 10pm-12.40am for the duration of the tournament. Not too sure how this is gonna work out, not well probably.

I'm a night owl - left to my own devices my pattern is something like 3AM - 11AM. But I'm finding I need a bit less sleep as I progress through my thirties, naturally waking up after seven hours rather than eight (generally).

I can still occasionally pull off a teenage-like 10-12 hour sleep.

On weeknights I usually go to bed around 11 and get up between 6 and 6:30. Weekends vary. 9 hours would be optimal for me but I rarely get that. I nap a lot on the weekends.

So last night I actually fell asleep around 11-ish. I had my alarm set for 5:30, and woke up at 5:19 and just got up. Finished by bike commute into the city by 6:25 am.

i am completely incapable of napping and i really hate it - even if i'm absolutely exhausted, if i try to have eg a disco nap i'll lie down and suddenly feel REALLY REALLY AWAKE.

i don't have a set bedtime/wake-up time (hurrah freelancing) so i pretty much go to bed when i start falling asleep (this varies, usually somewhere between 10pm-1am) and wake up whenever i wake up (between 6.30-8.30am). midnight til 7am is par for the course right now.

as i've got older i've learned that if i push through the time my body wants to sleep i just won't sleep properly and will feel like shit the next day - several times i've pulled an all-nighter writing, gone to bed at around 5am, and then even though i don't need to be awake the next day my body clock has still woken me up at 7am like the absolute stubborn cunt it is. and once i'm awake i can't get back to sleep ever.

this happens if i go out as well, if i come home drunk at 3am i'll almost certainly be up and about at 7am :(

^^^
Really don't envy people like this, with a skinful in me I sleep like a baby for as long as is necessary.

xp

haha yeah - funnily enough, it's usually torture to wake up at 7:30 during the week with the alarm clock, and yet there's no problem for my body to spontaneously wake up during the week-end at that same precise hour.

Yeah I wake up around seven thirty on the weekends. Unless u have had a really late or hard night.

I feel sad for people who can't nap.

I can nap very easily under certain cirumstances. Weekend afternoon, my chair, cat on my lap, and I'm away.

Yeah, weekend naps are THE BEST.

Sometimes they're necessary, but I always feel very confused after a nap for about half an hour.

Napping is another thing I have to be in the habit for. I can't just lie down and have a snooze. But if I force myself to lie down at the same time every day for a week, hey presto, I can nap.