Started a new job back in July. Currently, the only shifts available to me start at 6:30AM. I’m 39 and for the past 25 years I’ve worked afternoons or nights. So I’m very used to not going to bed earlier than 2AM and now my days consist of:
Wake up at 4AM to make it to work by 6:30AM(morning constitutional and shower and breakfast)
Work til 2:14-3:30 depending.
Come home and nap til 7-7:30.
Wake up and cook dinner and wait for The Wife to get home.
Eat dinner and spend time with The Wife and engage in hobbies.
Go to sleep at midnight.
Repeat til day off.
Almost feels like I’m a Dreadnought.from WH40K. Being woken up to serve and then consigned to waiting slumber.
Or, you know. Whatever IP you like better. Point is I’m tired, and I’m going to go nap.
I think there’s two major things you can do to help. Try to reduce that 2 hour long morning constitutional to like 5 or 10 minutes with extra fiber in your diet. Get that morning routine down and sleep longer.
Don’t nap. It’s a trap and you’re probably get little to no REM cycles with two 3-4 hour rest periods. Even a six hour sleep would improve your life dramatically. Obviously 7+ would be ideal. Two shitty naps will never replace a continuous rest.
He is definitely entering REM sleep in that amount of time, even more so because it’s routine. Your body can enter rem almost instantly when adapted to polyphasic sleep schedules for instance.
We enter rem sleep multiple times in a nights sleep, it’s a cycle and it can kind of be messed with.
Benefits of napping but mostly only if it’s long enough to enter rem. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jsr.14177
Extreme polyphasic sleep and how rem isn’t reduced significantly. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.06.20.542775v1.full
Polyphasic sleep to that level (3 hours of sleep a day through 20 minute naps) is a bit extreme and has other complications. Splitting your sleep schedule in two seems fine, although I don’t know of any long term studies.
There’s a reason there’s not many long term studies. And based on the subjective experience of OP’s rested self, he’s not getting the correct balance of sleep.
Most people who preach polyphasic sleeping are grind set workaholics. There’s very little research that supports it and a whole lot discouraging it in most cases.
I touched on how a 3 hour per day uberman polyphasic sleep schedule isn’t good for you. It does show how rem is more complicated then 7+ hours of straight sleep or nothing. But it’s not what OP is doing. He is getting the full amount of sleep, just in two segments which doesn’t impact much since sleep is cyclical (much closer to the first nap study).
In either case, it’s clear OP is entering rem sleep imo.
I guess OP can chime in and tell us if he feels unusually tired. Depending on how long his routine has been going, it would answer the question.
Honestly depends on the day. Some days I feel rested enough. Others, like yesterday, not so much. I will say more often than not, I do feel tired.
That 2 hours is me using the bathroom, making my lunch, packing it, eating breakfast, cleaning up after myself, taking a shower, and then getting ready for work.
It still feels like a lot of time for all that, but the core of my advice is still the same. You need REM or you’ll be a zombie. Figured that one out the hard way with a similar schedule to yours.
I do realize you weren’t asking for help or anything but I just wanted to share in the off chance it might help you.
No problem.
