in reply to Re: (OT)Sleeping Patterns
in thread Sleeping Patterns
As you say, minor variations are not a problem for most people. (There was a case in Israel where a young man simply could not deviate, causing him enormous trouble in doing things like attending classes.) In fact very few people have exactly a 24 hour cycle, so you are "varying" from your ideal every day. Morning people have something under 24 hours (they get up earlier and earlier until they have a reason to stay up) while night-owls have a cycle over 24 hours (stay up later and later until they have a reason to get up).
The average is about 25 hours, and one of the best reset triggers is light.
The people most affected by this are those who do shift work. In studies (first carried out IIRC in the 70's) companies that adopted shift work cycles of 3 weeks, each week moving you to a later shift, had significant increases in productivity, reductions in accidents, and improvements in worker morale. Traditional shift work schedules give just as much opportunities for sleep, but they don't give opportunities that fit in the biological clock so well.
FWIW I followed this schedule for about 2 months once while I was working very hard on something and had no external scheduling restraints. It worked very well for me...
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