Can I stay up late? I am a creature of the night.

I am like this too, minus the kids. Most of the day is spent thinking about how nice it would be to crawl into bed. Then again I just had a sleep study done and I have severe sleep apnea, so you might want to think about that. Maybe it's the quality of your sleep rather than your daily activities.

Can I stay up late?

No, not at all. Nine o'clock rolls around, I start yawning. By ten, I'm out like the proverbial light.

Just ask essexjan.

I'm a middling stay-upper. Most nights it's 11 and then the alarm goes off at 6. I get out of bed at about 6:30 (3 snoozes). On weekends I might vary that by an hour or so.

When I was teaching high school, though, I got up at 5 a.m. I was asleep by 9 every night. This was by choice/necessity; I'd be so tired after teaching that I was unable to get any work done after classes. Which left me unprepared for the following day, so I'd get up early and plan plan plan.

11:00PM for me usually. We've been getting up at 6:00 to hit the gym three days a week which has make falling asleep early pretty easy.

I'm definitely a nighttime machine, with optional caffeine-powered turbo booster.

Because I sometimes have quite early classes, and because The Fella's work often keeps him out until midnight, I've carefully trained myself to fall asleep at a sensible bedtime when necessary, and to stay asleep (or at least groggily hovering in a near-sleep state) even when there's bustle or noise or light in the room.

It requires me to concentrate powerfully on not concentrating. I wipe my brain clean of daily buzz and business, and run my brain through meaningless calisthenics: anagrams, or mathematical progressions, or word associations.

I call it The Countdown, and if it gets interrupted, I wake up completely and have to start over with a fresh set of abstract problems. The Fella is learning that once I roll over and start The Countdown, I'm going to sleep for real and shouldn't be engaged in conversation.

Wow. I might be kind of a freak.

I used to loooove staying up laaaaaate. Working on a track in the studio, or watching a movie, or knocking around and bar hopping with friends. Having a child changed all that. I still stay up later than I should, with some frequency, which makes the early-morning rise (get the day going, get the young'un off to school) all the more difficult. But, I can't help it. I still rage against the (daily) dying of the light.

I take pills to help regulate my sleep schedule because otherwise I will do several days with only a few hours but then I will be a zombie for another couple of days and sleep a ridiculous amount and not do anything.

My normal schedule during the work week (for me it is Saturday night-Wednesday night) is to take pills at 9-930pm, tuck into bed at 10, write in journal by cell phone light (tv stays on all night because the quiet freaks me out), and am usually out by 1030 and sleep solid until 730am.

Thursday and Friday night: I'll stay up until the wee hours of something like 6am, take my pills then, and usually sleep until around noon.

I am up after midnight on a work night for the first time in about a year. I was traditionally a night person, but having a baby changed all that. I have to leave for work before 7, and she still wakes up overnight, so I'm usually making moves towards bed around 10ish nowadays.

I think my biorhythm is about 20 hours of wake time then 10 hours of sleep. I can get upside-down pretty easily.

I used to be a night person, until I got a real job, and had to wake up, then I became someone who was good at neither. Then, I got a job where my shift was a 12 hour graveyard shift. I became adept at staying up all night. Then I got a job where I changed from days to graveyard every two weeks, and that sucked since my body never knew what to do. Now I'm on straight day shift, but I have no problem staying up all night if needed. I know what it's like to be permanently tired and grumpy, and I have no idea what it all means.

If given the choice and about four days/nights to get my internal clock neutralized I tend to stay up until four thirty or so and get up at noon.

However, not exactly practical. So most days, even now, I'm out of bed by ten and on the computer looking at job postings.

My boyfriend gets up at like six or seven and is dead tired by ten at night. I get up that early and I'm barely functional by eight PM. It seems like, the earlier I go to bed, the more sleep I need. If I go to bed super late I can get by on six hours or so without being a mess. If I go to bed early and get up early I feel like I'm moving underwater all day.

Kellydamnit, my natural sleep patterns are EXACTLY like yours. It's kind of a problem for me.

Oh hai, I'm awake at 4:45am.

UGH.

The days I'm tired during the day and would like a nap are the days I wake up at 4:30. Thankfully those days are rare. I can especially go all day without a yawn when I exercise. Exercising sure does work for the energy levels. I don't know why I don't do it every single day for that reason alone.

I am always surprised that the night shift people can go grocery shopping or stay up for hours doing whatever after their shift was over. I worked some nights before I had kids and I would literally strip my scrubs off on the way to my bed. I never could acclimate. I was so impressed when when of the night nurses came over to shower in our building last week. She was going to go play softball after working all night.

Ugh, sleep has so much baggage for me.

My natural sleep cycle seems to be somewhere around 6am-2pm. At least, I've had tonnes of sleep problems going as far back as at least grade one. I remember being up reading late at night. At least my parents were understanding about it. I've always been a night person, an insomniac, a terrible person to try to wake up. I never wake up feeling refreshed. Ever.

I strongly prefer day shifts because it forces me into a semi-normal routine. When my cycle is broken and backwards, I feel so out of sync with the rest of society. I fall into a hole of sorts, where I have no idea what's going on in the world, I'm not eating well, I'm not pooping regularly... it can be like depression, and I suspect if unchecked, it works as a trigger.

The last couple of months, since I've been unemployed, I've been doing better than expected. I think as I age I manage it better, though it remains a constant struggle. The biggest help by FAR has been taking stimulants for ADD. I set my alarm for 8:00 and take them then, right in bed. This usually prevents me from sleeping all day. I can go back to sleep at that point but usually won't sleep more than an hour and a half once I've taken the Adderall. But once I've taken it, it's SO MUCH EASIER for me to get out of bed. I have to make sure they're right by the bed, though, or I'll go back to sleep before I'll bother to get up and go to the kitchen. I really need to take it by 9am or 10am at the latest, 99% of the time, to benefit the most from that effect. If I manage to sleep in past, say, 1pm, I won't take it lest I make bedtime worse than it's already going to be. But then the rest of the day I feel like I put my brain in backwards.

Success is a cycle. If my sleep isn't strictly enforced by a work schedule, like now, I will do really well for a week or two, and then just drift into backwardness, and have to recover, and on and on and on. It's always WORK.

Right now I'm recovering from a backslide. I woke up this morning at 5:30, I think. I made it through the day yesterday after getting up at 7:30 (I think). No naps. (This is a challenge when I'm unemployed. I get bored.)

I've worked night shifts and I'm much like you, Lori -- I expect to go home and sleep. It was never easy for me, though. I remember lots of times laying in bed in total daylight just frustrated. I really wanted to have my evenings free, so I could feel like I at least shared SOMETHING with the rest of the world, and because my boyfriend worked days like a normal human, and I wanted to see him.

It was really not a fun time. Despite my relative ease in staying up late, I feel far less resilient than others when it comes to sleep, and it's something I can't do without considerable stress. I really hated being flipped upside-down, and I have avoided shift work ever since.

My sleeping (and eating) patterns have been fucked up since my mom died. For the month I was down in Maryland, I stayed up super-late so as to have an hour or so to myself each day, after spending every minute I could with my dad, talking and listening mostly. But then I'd get up around seven in the morning because the house was so quiet and I was sleeping unusually lightly. I usually fall asleep quickly and sleep deeply and well. Since I returned to New York last week, I've spent just lots of time thinking about my mom, puzzling over what to do with myself, trying to remember and write down everything I can about her and my family and me, and realizing around dinnertime that I didn't eat lunch, or realizing around three in the morning that I need to go to bed. Being unemployed helps a little; I can make up for lost sleep and I don't have to be a sleep-deprived crazy person around coworkers. I know this will pass and I'm still capable of having a good time, and every increasingly frequent moment of levity is a welcome break from melancholy, but damn, I'm sad, and losing sleep over it.

Oh, Hugh.

I remember being in a state like this after Dad died. I was floating, unconnected, trying to remember whether I'd eaten that day, whether I had class in the morning, whether I was sleeping at home or at Mom's that night.

I'm so sorry, and my heart goes out to you. I can only offer two things:
- good thoughts that I'm sending your way, and the hope that you'll keep checking in here;
- the assurance, which you already know, that it does get easier. It does get easier. It does get easier.

I'm going to be away from my desk for a few hours, but if you feel like talking, I'll be around later. And my email's in my profile; drop a line if you want.

Hugh, what Elsa said.

I'm up & down with the sun, basically. Once in awhile on a Friday we'll be up until midnightish. I could never hang with all you nocturnal weirdos.

I'm kind of half-and-half early and late. Sundays to Wednesdays I go to bed early, as I have to be up for the office, so I try to be in bed by 10, lights off by 10.30, for a 5.30 wake-up. Maybe a little later on Tuesdays as I work from home on Wednesdays, but I do my best not to get out of the pattern.

Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays are usually late nights for me - I work at home on Fridays so I can have a later start than normal.

I usually sleep well, dreamless mostly, maybe waking up once or twice in a night to look at the clock and go back to sleep. I hate those nights - rare fortunately - where I wake up at 3am, go for a pee and then can't get back to sleep.

And I really love those nights where I wake from a deep sleep, thinking 'ah no, I'll have to get up for work in a minute' and then I look at the clock and see it's only 12.45 and I have another 5 hours of sleep to go.

I love the early morning. For me it really is the best time of the day.

I'm a nightowl, have been since I bought my first computer. I'd rather be going to bed around 4 or 5 a.m. and up at 1 or 2 p.m., but that wouldn't leave me much time together with the mister. So, I usually get to bed sometime between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m. The other problem is that at least two of the prescriptions I'm on make me sleepy, so I usually have a 2 to 3 hour nap every day. Altogether I sleep about 12-14 hours per day. I like sleep, but I hate that it makes my awake time so short.

I was always an early bird. I was the first one up on my days off, up during workdays at 5am. Generally tired by nine; exhausted by ten, unless there was a party. Since Mr. V moved out, I have had a hard time with sleep. I used to wake up at 2am, unable to turn my mind off and go back to sleep. I started taking a Tylenol PM (two the night before my days off) to get good sleep. Then I started to sleep for 10 hours (with or without the Tylenol). I've never slept that long before! But the last couple of days I've been waking at 4:30am, don't know what that's about..