Experimenting With Sleep
Every once in a while, I will inevitably have to work in shifts. Instead of the usual 8 to 5 every Monday to Friday, I would have to work 6 to 6 (either 6am to 6pm or vice versa, depending on which shift I'm in) six days a week, for who-knows-how-many-weeks.
Last week, I just finished about 6 weeks' worth of night shift and had transitioned back to the usual 8 to 5 this week. And due to the way I transitioned this time around, I ended up resetting my body clock such that I'm able to wake up super early in the morning, and the way I did it is by not sleeping.
Usually, I would finish my last night shift, sleep for a bit in the morning, wake up in the afternoon, and sleep again in the evening so I can transition my sleep back to normal the next day. But this time around, I couldn't sleep for some reason and ended up stayed awake the whole day. By late afternoon, I was feeling extremely sleepy and crashed. For some reason, I only crashed for a few hours, woke up in the evening, had dinner, and slept again at night until 4am.
Ever since that day, I've been able to wake up rather early at the expense of feeling very sleepy late afternoon. Really sleepy to the point of having to take a nap, wake up, and sleeping again at night. So far, my sleep pattern has stayed like this for a few days now and showed little to no signs of changing. I see this as a good thing as I'm finally able to wake up early but we'll see how long it lasts.
My issue with sleep is that I can never seem to sleep or wake up when I want to. It's as if my body, not my mind, is in full control of when I sleep and when I wake up. So if I want to change my sleeping patterns, I need to find a way to not sleep and let my body reset itself. I'll know when my body has hit reset whenever I feel a strong and uncontrollable urge to sleep. Of course, this is usually only possible whenever I'm changing my work schedule. Someday, I would really love to experiment with how I sleep.