Autism and sleep.

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Everybody's sleep patterns are different, I know some people who are comfortable with only sleeping 4-5 hours a night or less, and function well during the day.
I could never do that. I have approximately 9-10 hours sleep a night, generally getting into bed around 11pm, sometimes earlier, occasionally later.

I don't go to sleep straight away, I like to watch a DVD to wind down, even if it's just half a film if I am really tired. Then I turn the TV set off and go to sleep, sometimes I sleep straight away, other times it could take up to an hour to fall asleep.

If I'm hot, I take longer to drop off, if I'm cold I can drop off quicker. I usually get up between 8am and half 10, depending on what I'm doing in the day.

I do like sleeping.

I usually require 9 hours or so. But I often have sleep interruptions such as nightmares or physical discomfort which causes me to wake up. I have to sleep by myself as I have some sort of "sleep epilepsy." My entire body jerks and twitches and this wakes up the Missus.

10-12 hours per night. In recent years sleep time is about 1am and wake time is 11am - 1pm. I have been able to schedule my work hours to accommodate this schedule for three of the five days I work per week. So regular sleep schedule five out of every seven days. That ratio is good enough to cover me on the two days I have to run on short sleep and recover without running into sleep debt.

My schedule when I was younger was erratic. Non-24 hour sleep/wake from highschool all the way to end of university. It was rough. Depression had kicked in pretty bad during that time as well.

I sleep on average about five hours, I have always had a problem getting to sleep since a child. I can’t control my thoughts, I spend too much time down the rabbit hole working things out.

I've always struggled with a delayed sleep phase. It's possible, but difficult, for me to advance it. The main problem is all the artificial light at night, which denies my body the time cue it evolved to watch for that it's time to sleep. Given constant light 24/7 I would probably have about a 26-hour day, and given what I naturally want to do with light it's about 25 hours.

Melatonin helps, but I suspect I build tolerance to it and thereby need "detox" every so often, sleep schedule be damned.

If I have somewhere I have to be in the morning, I can get up with an alarm anytime even on only 2 hours of sleep, and caffeine becomes necessary only a few hours AFTER getting up, although I still tend to have caffeine right upon getting up.

There are some other factors that can affect my sleep that belong in the adult section.

I used to need 12-14 hours of sleep per night when I was a teen, then it lessened to 10-12 hours in my twenties until this year it's gotten down to 2-7 hours. I can't nap very often, and I can't seem to get more sleep. Even on weekends when I don't have to get up, those are the nights I get 7 hours. I do get tired, but it goes away once it gets dark. I think I'm just supposed to be awake at night.

When I was really young I wouldn't close my eyes at all to sleep. Yeah I would fall asleep eventually but I just didn't want to close my eyes.

These days I sleep like the dead.

I've never had a regular sleeping pattern, no matter how hard I try.

When I was younger, my mantra was: sleep is boring.

Now I need sleep and it doesn't always come easy nor do I sleep very well.

I have the craziest sleep pattern. It's one of few things about my life in which there is any variation. I tend toward being awake at night and sleeping during day but I get bad insomnia and my sleep pattern can sort of shift through the day e.g. I wake and sleep 15-30 minutes later each day. For the past week or so I've been waking earlyish for me; about 10:00 (24h clock) and going to sleep at maybe 04:00 and it's actually great, it improves my mood to be awake during the day but I find it so difficult to maintain. It always inevitably flips.

Its gotten better than when I was little. I swear I had almost every sleeping disorder known possible in a kid: Insomnia? Check. Sleepwalking? Check. Nightmares? Check Night terrors? Check. Restless legs? Check. Some persisted for many years.
These days, I tend to do better, but still often need OTC sleep-aids to get to sleep ( because of odd shifts/scheduling to begin with).

Sincerely,
Matthew

I used to have really bad problems with falling asleep after going to bed.

What has seemed to help me the most is that when I go to bed, it is only to go to sleep. I no longer read or watch tv in bed. When I'm ready to go to sleep, then I go to bed and I'm usually asleep inside of five minutes.

Occasionally there are times when I can't fall asleep. When I do, I try to get up and do something else for an hour and then go back to bed and to sleep. Sometimes eating a small bowl of ice cream is all it takes.

I have a fairly normal need for sleep, though I am a very light sleeper. When I do eventually fall asleep (which can take a few hours on occasion), I usually sleep fairly solidly, though I usually wake up briefly once or twice in the night. If I don't have much "sleep debt" built up, I can function on less than an hour of sleep in cases where I am unable to sleep well, such as in a hotel.