In Progress: Sleep Cycle Adjustment

File this in the "Stupid Stuff I Have to Do for a Race" folder.

Given my recent work issues I've essentially found my sleep schedule wrecked. For about three weeks I've been taking two or three naps of a few hours at random times of the day or night. I have the curtains drawn in my office and I don't believe my body knows day from night any more. The automatic backup processes I have running on my machines at 2am, normally invisible as I sleep, have annoyed me most every day for a while now.

I don't mind the current sleep cycle. In fact, it's very productive. When I rouse myself from a slumber I find that I'm able to output a lot of work for a few hours before I fade. Then I nap again. Unlike a normal day where I get one such hyper-productive period, with my current non-cycle I get two or three. Good when you have a million things to do.

But the race next Saturday begins in the early morning. Having to commute from Destin to Panama City Beach on race day I generally get up at around 3:30am. The problem is that with my current sleep cycle it's fairly likely that I'll be wide awake all night and will just be considering a nap around 3:30am. Not good for an all day event.

So I need to get my sleep cycle back on track. Two ways to do this. I could gently shape my cycle, creating a schedule of graduated bedtimes and wake times. Or I could have one catastrophic low-sleep day and then try to stick to a schedule.

I went with option b. Occam's razor.

I went to bed last night at 10pm, barely tired but medicated (a random Ambien Terp had from a hospital stay a couple years ago). My plan was to sleep until 4am, get up, have a tired day and go to bed again at 8pm.

I slept for a few hours but was awake, alert and restless by 1:30am (I only took 1/2 of the med (5mg), against Terp's orders, because I'm usually oversensitive to drugs). It's now 3:45am. I've been working for a little over two hours. Good news is that I got some good stuff done. Bad news is that I have to stay up until 8pm tonight... I'm gonna be exhausted. But hopefully I'll get on track with the sleep thing.

I figure this is a much better plan than trying to do it a couple days before the race.