Nocturnal or diurnal?

[Nordicvs]

Do you mostly sleep at night or during the day?

[Shahrazad]

I used to sleep only during the day, but now it's more like half and half.

[Nick]

When I'm able to sink into my natural sleep cycle I will usually fall asleep around 9-10am and sleep until 7-8pm. It feels much more natural to sleep those hours than it does to sleep at night and wake in the morning. I'm inclined to think this is the case with most people, which begs the question, how did society develop the "unatural sleep cycle" they currently base their lives around? Which is basically falling asleep at around 9-10pm and waking up at 6-7am.

[Shardrol]

Maybe our hunting gathering ancestors were more nocturnal? Predators are often out at night; maybe you don't want to be sleeping when they're on the prowl. Or maybe it's that vampire blood from Eastern Europe. . .

I would like to be a morning peprson, get up at sunrise, work all morning, have a 2-hour nap around 4pm, & go to bed sometime after midnight. In reality, I stay up till 3am almost every night & can't sleep much past 8am, so I'm habitually sleep-deprived.

But I can feel my mind somehow expanding into the dark, like radio waves from distant stations traveling further when the sun disappears. I feel more energized at night, but I like the feeling of being awake at 7am having already accomplished something & seeing the whole day stretching out in front of me.

For now, I make adjustments with timely infusions of coffee, the Path fo Awakening.
.

[Nordicvs]

When I'm able to sink into my natural sleep cycle I will usually fall asleep around 9-10am and sleep until 7-8pm. It feels much more natural to sleep those hours than it does to sleep at night and wake in the morning. I'm inclined to think this is the case with most people, which begs the question, how did society develop the "unatural sleep cycle" they currently base their lives around? Which is basically falling asleep at around 9-10pm and waking up at 6-7am.

I think Shardrol's right, we didn't get into regulated sleep cycles until agriculture, so around 9000 BC or so.

The megaliths erected to figure out constellations and work as sun dials and such were around before that, so a lot of people were staying up. Fire no doubt started that---then oils and candles.

I was just curious, I've always slipped back into being nocturnal. I've often wondered how consciousness is changed by being fully one or the other, or by continually rotating sleep periods and never settling into a habit.

[Philosophaster]

Humans are probably diurnal, I think. People who work night shifts get cancer and other illnesses at a significantly higher rate. It wouldn't really make sense for us to be nocturnal, since unlike some other predators our bodies cannot manufacture vitamin D without sunlight.

[MindExpansion]

I don't know(?)...Is it reasonable to believe that ones intelligence may increase due to sleep deprivation? Or, is it like thinking alchohol helps?

[Katy]

I'm also nocternal and always have been. But I kind of wonder which way the causation goes here...

1. I'm awake at night and everyone else is awake in the day. I thus have less social contact with people, and more time alone. Plus much of my time alone is at a time when the mall is closed, and there is nothing else to do. My answer to this was to read constantly. Given an interest in learning, it does offer a greater potential.

2. I avoid people by sleeping in the day because people are idiots, which I realize because I am outside of normal social life.

or, of course

3. They're unrelated.


I suspect sleep deprivation (literal sleep deprivation not this oh i only got 6 hours instead of 8 crap we have going now) has about the same effect as alcohol - you think you're bright and make sense, but you're just not. 6 hours instead of 8 probably has no effect whatsoever.

[Elizabeth Isabelle]

Apon seeing the sun rise and realizing that I forgot to go to bed last night, I'd have to say non-turnal...

Pre-working days, I slept best at night. I worked night shift for 15 years, and got to the point that seeing the sun rise made me sleepy. One time I had to go to an inservice at 1 p.m., and I couldn't keep my eyes open. Dayshift thought it was hilarious. My ex was diurnal, and seemingly thought it was funny to keep waking me up, or taking 2 week vacations and only sleeping while I was at work (whether I was doing a dayshift or a night shift), being loud while I was trying to sleep, and knocking on the door every time he wanted something. For about a year, I was taking 10 over the counter sleeping pills and a heavy dose prescription sleeping pill just to get 3-4 hours of sleep a day/night. After he was gone, I was able to get off the sleep medication (and my new doctor couldn't believe that the med I was taking was even still on the market because of how dangerous it was, and that I was taking that much OTC in addition, but that's what it took to even get me into a light sleep).

I feel healthier when I sleep at night (no sleep meds), but no matter how tired I am, I always have to consciously force myself to sleep.
.

[Nick]

Humans are probably diurnal, I think. People who work night shifts get cancer and other illnesses at a significantly higher rate. It wouldn't really make sense for us to be nocturnal, since unlike some other predators our bodies cannot manufacture vitamin D without sunlight.

I think the higher rates of cancer and illness might have more to do with the types of jobs that actually require people to work night shifts. I'm thinking along the lines of chemical plants and things like that which require round the clock maintenance and supervision.

[MindExpansion]

I regularly stay up for 24-30hrs.-sleep for 7-9 then repeat...I love the nights, also I love going outside for walks. I know a lot of the police who work nightshift...

[Nordicvs]

Humans are probably diurnal, I think. People who work night shifts get cancer and other illnesses at a significantly higher rate. It wouldn't really make sense for us to be nocturnal, since unlike some other predators our bodies cannot manufacture vitamin D without sunlight.

I think the higher rates of cancer and illness might have more to do with the types of jobs that actually require people to work night shifts. I'm thinking along the lines of chemical plants and things like that which require round the clock maintenance and supervision.

I was about to say that. People who sleep during the day don't exactly having pressingly greater health records---they're (a) wrapped in clothing, and (b) most people work indoors anyway, plus (c) we can get vitamin D from various sources. (Hell, I worked autobody for two years---up at 5:30 AM in the winter, back at 6:30 PM, gone in dark, back at dark...for six months I saw the sun only on Sundays and Saturdays, and yet I was diurnal; for years I was nocturnal, cyclically, and saw much more sun, not 'working,' though).

Additionally, I wasn't talking about being 100% nocturnal---impossible, as impossible as a human being waking up every single day of his/her life at one time, never being awake past a certain hour...

Seems to me that one can't possibly think about space or astronomy without staying up all night and sleeping during the day.

Thank fuck for the abnormals, really. I tip my hat to the nuts and flakes and eccentrics who dare to dream of something else, under the moonlight.

I don't know(?)...Is it reasonable to believe that ones intelligence may increase due to sleep deprivation? Or, is it like thinking alchohol helps?

All I know is this: in 1991, when I was 20, my perception was in the 95th percentile; I hit Nietzsche in 1993 and began applying things that made sense, in my personal effort to expand consciousness.

In 1994, I went through a month documenting and experimenting with a type of amphetamine---dextroamphetamine---and for 4 weeks, each week was a new experiement in REM deprivation, sleep deprivation. First week: 46 hours or so without sleep; slight hallucinations, shadows twitching, things seeming to move, but were still when I turned. Optical anomalies. There was no challenge this week in identifying them correctly as perceptual blips.

Second week: around 60 hours unsleep. Same, but intensified, and I could not adequately continue the notes, writing after about 50 hours, because it was so distracting, disturbing. Symbols mix with ones in your head, matching them strangely to your surroundings. It was all about symbols, henids, strained left brain trying to deal with the flood coming.

Third week I lost it---it went past 76 hours, and it all got confused; it was horrific, actually, terrifying. "The nature of things" I had known needed to be rewritten now. Order was melting away into a storm of some 'reality' in which nothing had rules.

It became a constant, dream-like series of interconnected hallucinations. It didn't end---I thought it was a fourth and separate week I had started, but I'd barely slept and it went from that waking point to well past 90 hours, and I lost count at some point.

I had a "slight psychotic snap," I was told; I recall going to sleep when auditory hallucinations began (no, I have not had hallunications before or since these experiences), but then my mind was fucked for about 3 months. Damaged, "broken" it seemed. It took a year for it to "repair" itself and be able to know I was sound and making sense once more.

[Funnily enough: I mentioned these experiences---to two different psychiatrists, one I wasn't seeing, was a friend of a friend---*without mentioning the drugs* I took to bring them about, and my unofficial diagnosis for that month was---wait for it---residual schizophrenia. Fantasica intrigue. This was all a month before reading about "The Doors of Perception." Huxley.]

My perception ran up 3 percentile points after that. A year after that, 1995.

Everything changed---I was able to enter periods of suffering over the following years more easily. Did I "get smarter?" No idea. I went crazy for a bit, and I now know my limits and how far I can push it all, ...so it's the single-most beneficial experiment I ever carried out. It was the best hell I could have gone through, and am glad I did it.

I say anything that taxes the mind sufficiently can lead to greater self-awareness, overall consciousness, and bring about dramatic changes to the mind; it depends how deep and hard one thinks through this suffering...that's the key.

Like I say, you'll get nowhere safely steeped in logical warmth, without pushing and challenging yourself...trying to break the walls of reason inside your mind. Reason can be humbled; it's not the end route to wisdom, nor is logic; simply another means to Truth.