28h Days: year 1 update

Decades ago I did a free-running sleep schedule for a few months while working a fairly intensive software project that required almost no interaction with others. I didn’t have a schedule, I just slept when I felt like it, and did resistance training throughout the day when I felt like it (I had a bunch of gym equipment in the same room as computers). Empirically, this turned into 26 hour days, so my hours came into phase with “normal” hours roughly every two weeks. It was a pretty comfortable lifestyle, felt pretty healthy, and I put on some muscle.

The main challenges were two-fold. First, there is a significant part of the time where it doesn’t line up with store and restaurant hours that well, which is inconvenient. Second, there are few days every couple weeks where your schedule is completely out-of-phase with normal people which makes socializing nigh impossible on those days e.g. waking up at 8pm and going to bed at 2pm. However, since those days were predictable, I’d simply not schedule anything on those days.

I don’t think this really works for a global business though. Many people around the world are really fussy about rigid schedules, and you will only overlap those a third of the time.

All that said, I think for >24 hour days to be practical, it would be best in a synthetic environment where everyone is on the same clock with limited access to natural sunlight. I could totally imagine it being viable for something like a submarine.

I assumed this is satire and ... its not?

Yet lines like this just seem really tongue-in-cheek:

> In fact, I avoid talking about the schedule at all with others.

> The internal benefits more than make up for the slightly trickier external interactions.

> I don’t keep track of this in any scientific way, only mental notes that I make along the way

> There might be some longer-term changes, mostly associated with my health, but if these exist, they’ll likely start showing up in the next few years. We’ll see what the future holds.

> I once changed my schedule for a month to sleeping 4 hours, waking for 4, sleeping 4, and then waking for 12.

That's pretty common for crew on yachts. I'd do that when racing or cruising ocean going sailboats. The crew gets split into 3rds, and everybody gets to do a 4 hour night watch. (For racing for me, that'd usually be only for a few days or a week tops. I twice spent ~6weeks on that schedule cruising the Great Barrier Reef.)

Please familiarize yourself with the community of https://www.reddit.com/r/N24

No one is selling anything. There are many of us who benefit remarkably from what you're calling an "alternative sleep schedule" (I'm not specifically talking about 28-hour day entrainment like the blog author, but whatever works for each individual based on their own idiosyncratic circadian rhythm)

Many of us have periods where we have to go back to 24-hour schedules due to external factors, and sleep quality and duration suffer as a result. For myself, in the winter when my schedule is a little >27 hours, when I enforced waking up at 8 AM Monday-Friday for a 9-5, my schedule might go something like this:

> Sunday night: Sleep 7-8 hours starting at midnight.

> Monday night: Sleep 5 hours starting ~3 AM Tuesday.

> Tuesday night: Sleep 2-3 hours starting at ~5 AM Wednesday. Sometimes with exhaustion I may then be able to fall asleep at 5-6 PM (Wednesday) but often would stay up til closer to midnight-2AM. Regardless, when I fall asleep I likely will wake up in 1 or 2 hours and be unable to go back to sleep, as my body doesn't believe it's in the sleep phase.

> "Wednesday night?": There isn't really a Wednesday night except on the occasion where I managed to sleep more than 2 hours. Sometimes I'm up all night with no nap; more than half the time I can't sleep more than 3 hours. Occasionally I'm actually able to stay asleep during what my body thinks is a nap to pay off sleep debt.

> "Thursday night?": Exhausted from having slept no more than 9 hours in the last 48 hours, and usually closer to 3-4 hours, I'll collapse around 5-7 PM from exhaustion and sleep until midnight-5AM.

> "Friday night?": Often I'm ready for sleep by 5-8 PM and will sleep 8-9 hours. But I'll also occasionally try to sleep less and push myself to go out at 9-10 PM if there's an event happening. After being more active and if I slept less than 4 hours I can usually pick up another 1-3.5 hours of sleep after 4 or 5 AM.

> Saturday night: If I got a full night's sleep, or went out Friday but slept a little bit after, I may be more energized, so this is the more consistent day for weekend plans. If sleep was poor I'll try to sleep an hour or two early in the evening before going out and then sleep 3 AM to 9 AM or so. If I didn't have Saturday plans I may go to sleep at 8 PM and sleep til 5 AM.

> Sunday night: Usually fall asleep somewhere around midnight but who knows? I could be up til 3 AM depending on how the weekend went.

All told I would probably get an average of ~5.5 to 6 hour of sleep per 24-hour day, but with significant periods running on very little sleep.

Now that I work from home and have few meetings, my schedule may look more like the following:

> Sunday night: Sleep from midnight to 7 or 8 AM

> Monday night: Sleep from 3 AM (Tuesday) to 10 AM (in time for my 10 AM Tuesday meeting).

> "...": Sleep Wednesday from 6 AM to 1 or 2 PM (Wednesday)

> "...": Sleep Thursday from 9 AM to 4 or 5 PM. Stay awake for my 10 AM meeting Friday.

> "...": Friday I have a meeting from 10-11, then often coordinate with coworkers til noon, but as late as 2 PM (rarely later). So I sleep after and wake up any time friday from 7 PM to 9 PM, go out feeling relatively well-rested.

> "...": Saturday if I have plans I take a nap then go out and fall asleep around 3 AM until 10 AM.

Sunday I probably won't be able to sleep at midnight. Tuesday my 10 AM meeting this week will probably interrupt my sleep phase, but I can usually go right back to sleep after.

All in all on this schedule I get longer periods of uninterrupted sleep, get an average closer to 6.5 hours of sleep per 24-hour period, and never have periods of 48 hours where I only sleep 2 hours, so my overall energy and focus over the week is much better.

This sounds suspiciously like “I tend to stay up later and later every night unless I force myself to go to bed on time” — which I suspect is pretty common, it certainly is for me. I’ll start staying up till 3, 4, 5, or later if I’m not on a schedule. Having kids helps.