[TommiH]

I feel that, at least in my case, the easiest way to stop worrying about sleep would be to stop worrying about it altogether. Go to bed when sleepy, regardless of time of day, and wake up whenever my body wants to wake up. If you end up with 8 hours between 6AM and 2PM, fine. If you end up with a 20-minute nap, also fine. This should eliminate the “deadline” set by my morning alarm, which causes at least some anguish no matter how much I try to think it’s OK to have a short night’s sleep. This goes, of course, against CBT-I but why is it a bad idea? What terrible fate awaits me if I give it a try? 🙂

The answer probably has something to do with disrupting circadian rhythms, but it’s not very clear to me why disrupting them is bad, especially if they’re already disrupted to begin with. (Perhaps this will be covered in one of the later posts on Martin’s very nice email course.) If it makes sleeping harder at night, why should I be worried about that? I’m already fine with staying up all night anyway, so I’d rather be rested when I do so. And certainly, once I’ve hopefully gotten rid of my sleep related anxiety, the circadian cycle would settle down somewhere, perhaps even close to my natural ideal. After all, days and nights are still going to be there even if I sometimes sleep at weird times.

[TommiH]

For context: I have very few outside constraints on my life scheduling, working as a freelance programmer. So I wonder if some of this accepted wisdom about good sleep timing is meant for people that need to go to work by a certain time every morning.

[Martin Reed]

If going to bed at 6:00 AM, sleeping through until 2:00 PM, and napping whenever you please works for you, is something you are happy with, and allows you to live life according to your values, then nobody has the right to tell you that this is wrong or needs to change.

You are the expert on you, Tommi!

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