This is one of the weirder things I have heard of:
What he found a good idea to obey is his disorder, called non-24-hour sleep-wake syndrome, or hypernychthemeral. He tried to fight it as a child and young adult, but not now. He goes with it.
“It’s never easy,” Dawes says. “There is always that sense (that) if only I had a regular schedule, I could get so much more done. But I couldn’t be as creative. When I let myself go free — going to sleep when I want — then creativity surges through me.”
He says he sleeps a solid eight hours and is awake for about 17 hours — just not the same hours as everyone else. His waking changes about 20 minutes a day he adds. In other words, someone could sleep from 1 a.m. to 9 a.m. during Week 1, then by Week 4 sleep from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Whole story is interesting. Just imagine what it would be like with no set “morning” or “bedtime.”
BethanyAnne
Weird. I never knew that had a name. I naturally live on a 26 hour cycle. If I sleep for 8 hours, I’m awake for 18. So, I try to never get more than 7 hours of sleep – frequently I aim for 6. Sleep deprivation is the only way I’ve found to be tired enough to sleep again on a regular schedule. It’s sort of lame, but, eh, that’s my life.
BethanyAnne
and I maintain that morning is the first 6 hours after you wake up :-)
Throwin Stones
Interesting. Wish I could give it a try except for having to show up at relatively the same time M-F at the borg.
OT – why is the dick whisperer on my radio?
stinkwrinkle
Yeah, this doesn’t sound too unusual to me, either. With sleeping aids, lots of caffeine for the wake-up, and a very regular life schedule, I can kinda shoehorn my life into normal hours. If I let any of those things slide, off I go into schedule-less bliss. It’s not so bad, really, unless a really long (like 36 hours) period of wakefulness is followed by a work shift where I need to be alert. That’s rare, though.
PeakVT
I have the same problem, though my natural schedule would be something like 8+2 nap+8+8 sleep. And I rarely feel rested when I wake up after 8 hours. I probably should have a sleep study done.
Added: Wikipedia article.
inkadu
Our “biological day” uncued by sunlight, is about 25-26 hours. But the sun and alarm clock wacks us into the 16-8 cycle.
I’m a big fan of the siesta option, which mostly does not exist in the US. Sleeping is strangely frowned upon at work, even if you’re going to make it up by staying later.
Comrade Darkness
This sounds JUST like me. Isn’t all of humanity on a 25 hour circadian rhythm or something?
Maybe I should try giving in too. Trouble is the household would disrupt it. Maybe I should live alone. Maybe this is WHY I always prefer living alone…
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
Been there, done that. It’s called “shift work,” especially if one of your jobs has hours that switch from week to week.
It would suck to have to live that way forever, though. At least I eventually got a better job.
SpotWeld
I seem to remember trials of sub crews with “days” that were broken up into three shifts that added up to something other than a 24 day.
Punchy
Things could be worse.
The most amazing part of the story is that it took TWO HOURS for this to get resolved. God damn.
SGEW
It’s called “freelance film and theater work,” and I did it for about nine years. (Fairly typical example: Weds-Thurs: 11 a.m. – 10 p.m.; Fri-Sat: 3 p.m. – 4 a.m.; Sun: 10 a.m. – 12 a.m.)
Hypernychthemeral would have been a blessing, instead of relying on booze and coffee.
inkadu
Does coffee really do anything for ya? I’ve never picked up the habit, but my understanding is that it gives you a lift for about 20 minutes and then leads to a crash.
And I make sure never to let anyone making a left turn out of a Dunkin Donuts during my morning commute.
I am not a nice person.
ed
Sounds like a variant of manic-depressive condition.
Dennis-SGMM
I worked nights for more than twenty years. It seemed very natural to me at the time. Now I’m lucky to be awake at ten PM. And I wake up at six AM, no matter what. I hate that.
David Weman
Don’t have to imagine it, since I lived that way from 2003-2008. Still set my own schedule, it just went away for some reason.
It wasn’t exactly voluntary, but I don’t know if I’d call it a syndrome. Maybe.
cleek
this is my last week at my current job.
since i learned that layoffs were coming (though not if i’d be one of them, which i was) i’ve been looking forward to letting my sleep schedule slip like that. the last time i was laid-off, i let it slide all the way to to a 4am-12pm sleep schedule before i got another job and had to go back to normal. it happens on long vacations, too (like the 2 week Xmas breaks i can sometimes manage to get, if the weekends line up correctly).
the way it works is simple: i never run out of things i want to do (code to write, music to play, games to play, books to finish, etc), and i find myself staying up later and later, after Mrs C goes to bed, to do them. so, yes my creativity goes through the roof but really it’s just because i have the time to indulge myself. nothing else to do and all the time in the world to do it.
David Weman
“His waking changes about 20 minutes a day he adds.”
This is what I did, but I don’t know if it’s that different in kind from other irregular sleeping patterns, which seems common among my colleagues, freelancers who work from home.
spavis
personally, i’d love an 18 hour day, 7-8 of which i’m asleep for. that’d be my perfect schedule.
jake 4 that 1
Just imagine what it would be like if this guy were PotUS.
Oh wait …
Earl
I cannot find it, but there’s a xkcd comic describing this, basically.
harlana pepper
@cleek: I’m very sorry to hear about your job loss. As a fellow unemployed, I must say the freedom of schedule has been the best part. Also, living alone, I have no problem with enjoying my own company, although it does get boring and lonely at times. My sleep schedule changes from time to time but I typically go to bed early and wake up early. I have periods, however, when I stay up until 11 or 12 or 1:00 (which is late for me) – like a little kid, just because i can! best wishes
Punchy
@cleek: Are you sweating getting a new gig, or do you have one lined up? You seem more upbeat about a job loss than most peeps I know, seeing how bad the job market is nowadays….
inkadu
@harlana pepper:
It’s not quite the same without Friday Night Videos or Saturday Night Live, though, is it?
harlana pepper
@Scruffy McSnufflepuss: My dad did this a lot when I was growing up and he was one pissed-off individual 98% of the time — it really fucks with your body & mind b/c your sleep cycle gets so screwed up, you end up losing sleep of course with makes you feel like shit
cleek
@harlana pepper:
thanks.
no and no. i’m gonna chill for a while. they gave me a bunch of severance and my wife still has a good job. and as long as i do the housework while i’m unemployed, she’s cool with me taking my time. :)
and frankly, i’m not excited about getting another programming job. it seems inevitable to me that, in ten or fifteen years, the only programmers in the US will be academics and hobbyists – all professional programming will be done in Asia and SE Europe. i need a new career.
harlana pepper
@inkadu: Being the nerd that I am, I typically end up watching late KO and Rachel Maddow, but that’s been a while. However, I always have to check my piss-o-meter first.
harlana pepper
@cleek: Sux, don’t it. H1-B visas, also
flukebucket
@inkadu:
Coffee has never done shit for me. 6-hour powers at $3.00 a pop are a disgrace to the nation. Red Bulls aren’t any better. The only thing that ever used to keep me up were little black pills with 18.875 stamped on the side of them. FDA approved. Prescription only. Do they still even make those things?
harlana pepper
wow, I imagine Sotomayor is getting really tired of explaining Law 101 to repube senators with JD’s – i know they are not this stupid, they’re just trying to make a point, but hol-ee jeebus, so fucking tedious and tiring — she’s holding up well ((sigh))
A Mom Anon
Sounds like life with a kid who never slept more than an hour at a time til he was nearly 4. God that was horrendous. I’m STILL recovering from that and the kid is 15 now. Nothing is worse than not being able to sleep. I love my son fiercely,but those first few years were not a joy much of the time.
A Mom Anon
@harlana pepper:
I know,jesus,could they actually ask the woman about oh,I don’t know,her legal experience? Conryn is now asking her about a WaPoo article from yesterday. Sigh. What a bunch of asses.
anonevent
OT: xkcd is hilarious. Make sure you check the image text.
harlana pepper
@A Mom Anon: I’m going to have to stop watching lest I try to jump through the screen and throttle Cornyn with my bare hands; he just admitted he was a former judge. Considering the substance of his questions (e.g., accusations), I’d be embarrassed to admit that.
CynDee
So that’s what I am — in tune with the universe, and the whole a.m. – workday – p.m. is out of whack. That’s what it always seemed like to me. I’ve always been on a 25-hour schedule.
In my younger days, I was always at my best when free to work and create as long as the stream was flowing, and just go to sleep whenever no more was happening. I’ve been much healthier when I can do things that way. All my best work has been produced in the middle of the night.
Sitting in an office chair by 8 a.m. has been about the worst thing for my health.
It really made me feel horrible when I had the commitments of a working Mom. I have seldom produced anything worthwhile before 10 a.m. Sometimes I’ve actually explained this to employers and a few allowed me to work 9:30-6:30. So much better.
When I’m unemployed, which has been five of the last nine years, I go by the sun, not a clock, unless I have to go somewhere. I never set an alarm. I am just ill all day if I wake up like that. I don’t get up until there is light in the sky and some birdsong. Sometimes a woodpecker starts jackhammering the gable, but never before sunrise. I’m certain that the ancestors never left the cave before daybreak, even when worried sick that they might not be able to find a mammoth that day.
Lately, when the light fades in the evening, we start settling down, and it is not uncommon for us to get our water and just crawl into the back of the cave, so to speak, and settle in and be quiet before falling asleep.
My greatest fear would be to die inside an office building, a doomed American corporate serf. With luck, I’ll drop down happily in my own yard or garden.
random asshole
I thought that was called “college.”
Simp
I have a friend that has purposely done this for more than 20 years. He sleeps a solid 8, and is up for about 18 to 19 hours. I always have to send him email to ask
what time he is getting up this week if we want yo do something. As a contract software developer, it has worked extremely well for him.
Halteclere
I worked at a pizza joint for a couple years when I was in college. One summer I took some afternoon courses while continuing my pizza job.
During the week days I wouldn’t get home until 2 of 3 AM, and on the weekends it would be 4 or 5 AM (pizza joints that serve the college campus are open way late into the night). But it was a wonderful schedule because I woke up when I was rested, not when an alarm clock told me to wake up. I didn’t sleep much more than normal during that summer, but I was so much more rested and energetic.
Michael
Undoubtedly, the minions of “the best and the brightest” among our Titans of Finance were holding out for the $15 overdraft fee per the dictates of the Holy Operations Manual®, and had to go many steps up the food chain to find somebody with
a) the desk authority
and
b) the inclination
to do anything about it.
The profitmaking center that is the overdraft department operates under the rule that if you make it difficult, complaining customers will just give up and you can keep their money. It becomes a twofer, because you don’t have to actually do anything in order to profit by your own mistake.
Anarch
Didn’t know it had another name; my doctors diagnosed me as having “delayed phase disorder”. In my case, though, the cycle varies from 30-36 hours. Crippled me for about 10 years until it was diagnosed and, to some degree, treated.
Of course, the downside of the medications I’m on is that sometimes the meds don’t flush from my system properly, which is why I’m still at home in my boxers as opposed to in my cube at work. I’m extremely lucky to have an employer who understands and is to some degree tolerant of these lapses; I think I’d otherwise be unemployable, despite a raft of qualifications and a decent work ethic.
Legalize
I worked in the film biz for about 7 years and my schedule would vary wildly from week to week. I was always fine working a night schedule; it was getting off nights and back on to days that killed me. It’s a wonder that I never (more) seriously electrocuted myself simply from being on a fucked up sleep schedule. Caffine was worthless. I stayed awake on cigarettes, V8 and water. Not very healthy.
Cyrus
A friend of a friend of mine basically lived like this in college. Don’t know if he still does, though. Slept 10-12 hours, was awake the following 24.
R-Jud
I’m another freelancer and I’m also like this. Just getting back to my normal 8 asleep/18 awake schedule now that the baby’s sleeping through the nights.
patrick
I’ve always lived on that rhythm. Found out it had an official “syndrome” a few years ago.
After I found out that it was an actual something that people have, and I wasn’t just some class of freak, I embraced it.
It’s also helped my wife, who is as regular and normal as a person can be, from thinking I’m just plain weird.
Nylund
Last week I was sleeping from 7pm – 3am. That I can deal with. In fact its one of my more favorite schedules. Its when my body wants to sleep from 8am – 4pm that I get really messed up because that and work just can’t happen. I end up basically not sleeping. Earlier in the year I went 8 weeks without ever sleeping more than 2-4 hours a day and all too often it was zero.
but the last two days I’ve slept midnight to 8am. I’m happy about that and so are the people in my life.
I also love that its summer. There is enough daylight in the day that no matter when I sleep I usually get enough of it. Winter can be a never-ending night depending on when my body wants to sleep. Either way, I feel like I see a lot more sunrises than most folks and I consider this a good thing. They’re pretty.
I held a 9 – 5 job for my first 5 years after college, but I had to give that up. It didn’t work. I got mis-diagnosed as a narcoleptic and/or insomniac during those years as my body did weird things as I tried to force a normal schedule on it.
My present work is extremely flexible and I’m not the only weird sleeper employed there. My co-worker comes to the office at 4am and generally leaves around noon, so there is usually about one week a month where we are on the same schedule. 8am – 12 pm are usually the hours that actually involve meetings and face time. There are a couple guys there who have normal schedules but do it so that they can pick their kids up from school and spend the afternoon with them. Its not rare to run into quite a few people at the office in the middle of the night. Having meetings between 3am and 6am has happened. In general, scheduling any sort of meeting between noon and 4pm is a very bad idea.
We all know the nighttime cleaning crews really well. We have a 9-5 administration team that gives the office the semblance of normality and I think they quite like it since they often don’t have their “bosses” around during the day. They do a stand up job and their like-clockwork schedules provide just as much amusement to us as our weird ones do to them.
Life is fine for me, but my girlfriend always hates it when my schedule has me cooking my big dinner at 4 am. Too many pots and pans banging around in the middle of the night. She’s always trying to force my schedule via melatonin or caffeine or whatever and my odd hours are a source of contention in the relationship. She deals well now, but complains of not seeing me much and its particularly a problem on vacations, which is about the only time that she insists on rigidly forcing me to have consistently normal hours so that we can obey all the normal tour and museum times. Because of this, vacations make me really tired. I don’t find them restful in the slightest. It means a week or two of being forced to live “normal” hours against the will of my body. Well, sometimes is me up at 4am pushing her to wake up and get the day started, but then, by night time I’m exhausted and I’m absolutely no fun for a late night on the town.
Needless to say our relationship involves quite a bit of one person trying to force the other to wake up and the other screaming about their need to sleep. Even though we trade off on those roles, the resulting fight is always considered to be my fault. But from what I hear from friends with normal sleeping schedules, fights are always the guy’s fault anyway so maybe that isn’t weird after all. But, the good news is that is about all we ever fight about.
MaximusNYC
The Martian day is 24 hours, 37 minutes. Perhaps we were made to live on Mars.
MikeN
Im calling bullshit. When work is at 8am and your mortgage needs to be paid…you are at work at 8am. Learning to deal with that, tired or not, and eventually adjust to it has a name too. “Adulthood”
scarshapedstar
Not particularly far-fetched. When I went to boarding school we’d routinely stay up until 8 in the morning playing LAN games on Friday and Saturday night, wake up at 4 or 6 in the afternoon, and then start waking up in the morning come Monday. Hell, if you looked into the login times of the WoW playerbase, you’d probably find a shockingly high rate of this “disorder”, especially back in the days of 40-man raids.
The trick, basically, is to just stay up until 12 hours before you need to wake up at a normal human time, and then crash.
different church lady
I remember reading in National Geographic (years and years ago) that if people live in environments where they cannot see natural sunlight (caves, etc), they will naturally adopt a 30-hour day.
different church lady
@MikeN:
Dear Mike,
Believe it or not, there are plenty of employers in the world who are a bit more enlightened about it all than that, and don’t insist that everyone conform for the sake of conformity.
ppcli
One summer during graduate school I was a research assistant/proof checker/ashtray emptier for a guy who lived like this. He had a research job at a research institute, so he could live this way without consequences. Things would get weird when I would be getting ready to pack it in and go home to bed just as he was arriving to start work, but otherwise it was fine. He clearly chose one of the few careers he could negotiate.
Yep. That explains this guy perfectly.
RedKitten
I definitely have night owl tendencies — if I have more than three days off in a row, I find myself staying up until 2, 3am or later, and getting up around 10 – 11am. So I’m not getting any more or less sleep than “morning people”, and yet, for some odd reason, being a morning person is seen as something very virtuous in our society. Whereas being a night owl is seen as a sign of immaturity. Weird.
And shift work is awful. Back when I worked for a banking call centre, we got this new program in to schedule the shifts. It forgot to account for the fact that actual human beings were working these shifts. So as an example, I’d work 4 days on 7:30am to 3:30pm, then I’d have to come back in for a 6:30pm to 2:30 am shift, then have a day off, then two days at 6:30pm-2:30am, another day off, and then I’d be on noon – 8pm for awhile, and so on and so forth. People were coming in to work in tears because their sleep cycles were so royally fucked up.
Catsy
I did this for a while when I was unemployed once: decided to use my 100 days as a vacation, and dived deep into an online game I was playing. I would play (with food/hygiene breaks, of course) for about 15-20 hours until I needed to sleep. Then I’d sleep until I woke up. I had this fucked-up schedule for the better part of a month or two, I think, and I lost all sense of time.
inkadu
@Michael: On the quadrillion-dollar box of cigarettes: Wouldn’t it have been great if the custom service rep had asked, “Are you sure you only bought one box of cigarettes, sir?”
inkadu
@harlana pepper: If you listen to Rachel Maddow on the late-night repeats, you can’t call in!
@flukebucket: Have you tried getting enough sleep?
Nothing But the Ruth
I’m another one with delayed phase disorder. Left to myself, my normal sleep time seems to be around 4:00 a.m. I wasn’t able to hold down a full-time job until a sleep specialist put me on Ambien, and also have a tolerant supervisor who’s willing to work on a slightly shifted schedule. I tried all those “behavioral” recommendations for insomnia and they didn’t do a thing. My father was like that and a couple of my siblings. I still feel like I spend half my life trying to fall asleep and the other half trying to wake up. It feels like a lot of waste.
Interrobang
When work is at 8am and your mortgage needs to be paid…you are at work at 8am. Learning to deal with that, tired or not, and eventually adjust to it has a name too. “Adulthood”
Must be nice to be neurotypical. Some of us have been trying to adjust to everybody else’s schedule for 30 years or more. At what point in your view does it stop being immature childishness and start being an organic disorder?
Granted, I don’t have an irregular sleep cycle; I’m just what chronobiologists call an “extreme owl.” We make up about 30% of the population (another 30% are high-test morning people, aka “extreme larks”). Sleeping cycles are also tightly correlated with peak body temperature — if your body temperature doesn’t peak at a regular time, you won’t have a circadian rhythm to speak of, and the later your body temperature peaks, the more likely you are to be a night owl (and the converse).
inkadu
@Nothing But the Ruth: I tried all those “behavioral” recommendations for insomnia and they didn’t do a thing.
Ha! I keep reading those — do some light stretching, don’t eat 3 hours before bedtime, etc. It just doesn’t work. And I can’t imagine it working for anyone else, either. I’m sure it’s not based on any kind of research.
Still, it would be nice if some attractive woman gave me some milk and sang nonnynony to me while rubbing my back.
Nemoudeis
Imagine it? That’s me!
Well, I’m not George Dawes Green, mind you; but I beyond a doubt know what he’s dealing with. If anything, I’m a more extreme case than his; if I didn’t force myself to go to sleep “only” an hour or so later every day, I could (and would) easily maintain a 30-hour schedule: 20 hours on, 10 hours of sleep. I have often fantasized, in fact, on what it would be like to live on a world that had just such a 30-hour rotation schedule.
different church lady
@Nemoudeis and everyone else:
Whad I tell ya?
https://balloon-juice.com/?p=24114#comment-1300245
Anne Laurie
I suspect the purported “less than 2%” of non-typical sleep-rhythm-ers is a LOT higher among the blogging population. (Also sf fans, gamers, and IT professionals. What are the odds, she said in wonder.) In my experience, there’s a considerable genetic component, which gets reinforced by growing up “wired wrong” (by ‘normal’ standards) in a family full of “fellow weirdos”. One has a certain immediate sympathy for the out-of-the-mainstream when all one’s natural instincts are greeted by the neurotypicals with a mixture of confusion, disdain, and pitying superiority.
When I was young and strong, I coped with the rigors of a “normal” work schedule by crashing for a 3 or 4 hour “nap”, getting up & enjoying My Real Day for the next 4 to 6 hours, and then trying to get at least 4 more hours’ sleep before the job-alarm went off. Took me years before I realized that my dad had spent most of his working life doing the exact same thing. Since most of my friends & housemates had the same natural-night-owl patterns, we made fun of the rare larks among us (hi, Ken J!) who dutifully tried to resist their bodies’ inbuilt urges to stay on a sunlit cycle.
asiangrrlMN
I have a flexible part time job and do freelance editing on the side. I can do my job from home, too, so this schedule is not at all weird to me. Actually, for me, it’s five or six hours of sleep, five or six hours awake, two to three hours asleep, eight to twelve hours awake, etc. My preferred time to be awake is from 2 p.m. to 6 a.m. If I were to get a full-time job, I would try to get the overnight shift. I just function much better at night.
racrecir
Sleep your sleep
I’m awake and alive
I keep late hours
You’re nine to five
So I would like you to know that
I need the quiet hours
To create in this world of mine
I’d like you to know
At four in the morning
Things are coming to mind
All I’ve seen all I’ve done
And those I hope to find
I’d like to remind you at four in the morning
My world is very still
The air is fresh under diamond skies
Makes me glad to be alive
– Bachman Turner Overdrive. “Blue Collar”
MNPundit
I work on a 28-30 hour cycle myself. If I sleep 8 hours I can stay up for 22-25 no problem. With 7 it’s about 20-22. In fact I hardly ever can go to sleep, I just crash. When I was a kid and had to go to bed at 10pm I would just lay awake in bed for hours until I got tired enough to crash.
ED: I guess I don’t have what he has because to compensate I just sleep 4-6 hours most nights. That was I can stay awake for 20 hours or whatever and then just wake up tired all the time. But that STILL doesn’t make me go to sleep much earlier. Frankly I feel like there is something wrong with me if I am awake only 16-17 hours. So I can function just fine, but ask my fiance. I wake up at 10am (since it’s summer) but I stay up till 4-5 am most nights. Luckily I do quiet stuff so she doesn’t stay awake. During the year I usually went to bed about 2-3 and woke up at about 8-9.
So in the summer when I had nothing to do my sleep schedule would gradually over lap like the guy says though usually faster than him. I could go through a cycle in about 2 weeks.
Mike D.
When I’m unemployed, such as right now, this is what I do. And to be perfectly honest, I’m a lot happier when I’m unemployed, or at least, not required to be somewhere specific for eight or more hours — the same hours — daily. That’s even including the fact that I have no money. Battling the snooze button, frenzied preparation and commutes, and a boss’ angry glances when I’m having trouble getting in on time is one of the greatest destructors of my general happiness I have ever encountered.
Mike D.
@MikeN: If someone can make it work, what’s the problem? No one’s saying there’s anything wrong if 8-4 works for you. Some people find another way.