Sleep Patterns

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Anyone else have odd or difficult sleep patterns? I usually go to bed at 9 PM, and wake up between 4-5 AM. On Thursday I usually get up around 3 AM, I think because the week and work-related socializing have started to wear on me. However, today I got up at 3, probably because we have a big work meeting and I'm just done with a four-day weekend, so I know it will feel like a long day. My mind seems to sense the need to get up early and listen to music to anchor myself and feel calm. It's not really a problem (more like problem solving, really), but can feel weird. Do you enjoy your sleep patterns? Do they frustrate you?

Do I enjoy my sleep patterns?
When I have the freedom to keep to my body's natural pattern, yes.

Do they frustrate me?
When I don't have the freedom to keep to my body's natural pattern, yes, lots.

The trouble is that my natural pattern is to go to sleep in the early hours (3-4am) and wake up around midday. It's always been that way as far back as I can remember, and I can't seem to shift it. All the way through school, and in every 9-5 job I've had, I just had to get by on only 3-4 hours sleep every weekday night and whatever I could claw back at weekends. No matter what I do, I just can't get to sleep any earlier, even if I'm already exhausted from lack of sleep. Sleep deprivation is very unhelpful when you're trying to mask your autism all day as well!

I do really like the night-time, though; the same way your early mornings feel good to you, maybe. Complex thinking and creative things are so much easier for me to do when the outside world is quiet, and I know that I won't be interrupted. It can be the only time that it's quiet enough to be active if I'm feeling very burned out, or had a recent shut-down/melt-down. I've no idea if liking the night-time when I was very young led to the offset sleep-pattern, or whether it's a more physical problem with my body's internal clock; I suspect the latter, as other members of my close family have chronic late-onset insomnia too.

every 3 weeks or so my biorhythms go around the clock, I morph from diurnal to nocturnal and back. left to my own decides it has ever been thus.

Did you try melatonin?



I sleep at 12ish in the morning and wake up around 7:30ish. My natural is to sleep at 10ish and wake up at 6:30ish

I am losing that one hour of sleep every night or so. I don’t do anything different during the weekends. But the biggest problem for me is I wake up a few times during the night to check on some stuff and fall back asleep. I am sure that isn’t healthy. Only time I sleep straight for 9 hours is when I take an antihistamine.

Plus I travel a lot and that definitely has bothered my circadian rhythm.

If you look at the time on my post and shift to UK time zone, you'll notice it's in the middle of my pattern's sleep time. I thought I'd whined enough already, so I didn't mention that I was on an all-nighter!

I get a similar effect, but it's not so much a cyclic drift, more that, if I have a late night**, my pattern will ratchet up a bit later, and then won't fall back again. An all-nighter lets me bring it back to its usual place, but I can never get it to stick any earlier than my usual 3-4am. Maybe that's just the best fixed-pattern that I can manage, though, and I would cycle if I weren't trying for at least a regular routine. How do you cope with scheduling time-constrained things like shopping trips etc. when you cycle?; I need very regular routines with that kind of thing otherwise my EF gets too troublesome.
(**: I'm not sure what my equivalent of a "late night" should be called - "breakfast", maybe! )


Thanks for the reminder! I tried it once before, but only briefly and with not much idea how to use it properly, and I'm planning on trying it again. It used to be very hard to get in the UK and wasn't licensed even for prescription by a GP until quite recently. It is available now, still with a lot of prescribing constraints, and I read recently that some autistic people with insomnia have started to be prescribed it, following evidence that it is particularly effective for us. I'm hoping I can get my GP to follow this advice. The only trouble is that being a bit nocturnal does suit my autistic traits so well. As I'm currently out of work, it suits me to keep my normal sleep pattern for the moment; I do need to stop putting off asking the doctor about it, but I'm enjoying the peace and quiet a bit too much, especially as the world is so much noiser during the long summer days!


I think I'd find that harder to deal with in many ways. Despite my odd pattern and my usual sound hypersensitivity, it's astounding what I can sleep through once I'm out (including alarm clocks!)

You could take an antihistamine to help too if you really need the sleep.

Haha yeah I miss being able to sleep through the night. I was a heavy sleeper before the puppy and my daughter came along. Since then my sleep has gotten fragmented.

Yes, there have been times where I've actually fell asleep in the early afternoon or waking up around 3-4:00 am in the morning either way, I try to acquire as much sleep which for me is 6 hrs.

I do the 'round the clock' cycle referred to by Auntblabby too. Today I'd have been going to bed round about now (1.55 pm), but I'm having to stay up until a package from Amazon arrives (could be another 7 hours.... ).

Blessed are you that can go to bed at 9pm! lol. If you go to bed at 9 and wake up at 3 arent u still getting a nice 6 hours? I go to bed around midnight, wake up around 2:30am, go back to sleep, wake up around 5, and either stay awake or go back to sleep till some time between 7-8 depending on how early I need to be up and moving. Some nights I cant fall asleep at all and those are paiiinful cause ur staring at the clock and its moving so slowly... Every now and then I have to make time to go to bed early and try to catch a couple more hours. On the bright side tho I get a lot of homework done on the nights sleep isnt an option!

our distant ancestors had something called a first and a second sleep. they'd go to bed at sundown, wake up at midnight or so, eat, blank, roam around, do housework and whatever, and then go back to sleep an hour or two before sun-up.

^ You might like this article I bookmarked a while ago about sleep patterns in non-Western societies. The title is cheesy and it's rather light on references, but the range of different sleep patterns, places of sleep, communal sleeping arrangement etc. are fascinating, though many seem utterly unbearable to me.
How To Sleep Like a Hunter Gatherer.

the body will get its rest in the end, one way or another. if denied this rest, it will die way ahead of schedule. studies of people with brain injuries that affected their sleep cycles showed a vastly reduced life expectancy.

I have a terrible time falling and staying asleep. When I do sleep, I am a lucid dreamer. My dreams are very vivid and usually unpleasant. I remember them too. It leads to me waking up feeling like I need a nap because I'm exhausted from running from ax murderers, etc.

So it goes like this: I go to bed after taking Trazodone, Valium and melatonin. I wake up several times in the middle of the night. Then I wake up utterly exhausted and take a ProVigil so that I can be kinda sorta functional.

Probably not healthy.

I work nights so my sleeping patterns are weird. Then again, I work nights because I've always had odd sleeping patterns. On work nights, I sleep at 2 PM and wake around 9 PM if I actually sleep all the way through. I like it that way but my vitamin D is abysmal.

Doctors, even a dentist, wanted me to do an in-depth sleep study but they happen during the night obviously. That wouldn't work for me. I've done an at-home sleep study which sucked because I couldn't sleep with all the stuff attached to me...

yes, I've long thought that we have it in us to sleep like many of the so-called lower animals do, at the first opportunity that meets tiredness. tiredness sometimes attacks me with no warning, and to keep an accident from happening to me I always carry some caffeine tablets with me wherever I go.