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Comment by matthewrhoden1 | Hacker News Reader

When I was single I was really into fitness and as a result also made sure I got plenty of sleep. I would go to be really early to ensure I got the full 8hrs. Once I caught up on my sleep something funny started to happen. I would only sleep about 4 hours, then wake up for 2 hrs in the middle of the night. Then go back to sleep for a few more. Net result being only about 6 hrs of sleep.

Anymore, I'm of the opinion that your body knows how much sleep you need. That being on a schedule is almost more important than the specific hourly amount.

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> Once I caught up on my sleep something funny started to happen. I would only sleep about 4 hours, then wake up for 2 hrs in the middle of the night

Some are convinced that this was our sleep pattern before electric lighting was a thing:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segmented_sleep

There's also http://aeon.co/magazine/psychology/why-broken-sleep-is-a-gol... which was posted a while back on HN and which I found quite interesting.

>I would only sleep about 4 hours, then wake up for 2 hrs in the middle of the night.

This happens to me 100% of the time when I "go to bed early" and it ruins my day unless I seriously force myself to fall back asleep. I understand this is a "natural" pattern from years past, but it's incredible disruptive. I'm back to setting an alarm and jolting myself awake, which doesn't sound like the best way to do things, but oh well.

I have a lot of trouble falling back asleep after something like that when I know an alarm is set. The result is that I have to stay up later than I'd like to make sure I'm so tired that I am very unlikely to wake up at all before the alarm goes off, getting 6-7 hours most nights, when I'd love 8-9 but can't risk waking up at 2:00 (because I wasn't falling-over tired when I went to bed) and not being able to fall back asleep due to alarm-anxiety.

My wife and I each take a separate sleep-in day on the weekends (someone has to get up with the kids) to make up for stuff like this. I'd rather not have one since it cuts heavily in to nice daylight hours, but as it is it's do the 12-hour-sleep make-up thing on the weekend or risk having a 3-hours-of-sleep night on a Tuesday because I woke up and couldn't go back to sleep.

The only solution I can come up with is "get rich enough not to have an alarm". :-/

"Going to bed early" as in, substantially earlier than the day before?

There are a lot of cues that change when you get tired, but the body's internal rhythms should be expected to work on roughly a 24h cycle, and resist attempts to disrupt any cycle that's been followed for the last few days. It seems to work towards sufficiency of sleep about as strongly as it works towards regularity.

And we've engineered a week in which we're expected to 'sleep in', two days out of seven.

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