Sleep is very important and so I have always been curious about it. I have never been a great sleeper, so it has been necessary to learn a bit about sleep to make my life better. From my own experiments with alternative sleep schedules to reading Principles and Practice of Sleep Medicine, there is always something interesting to learn.

In college I ran a few different sleep schedules. I will break down my experiences below.

I ran what might be called a dual core without naps or a siesta schedule where I had two sleep periods while I was married. This started because I didn't have enough study time when I came home from college. I would go to school during the day, hang out with my wife in the evening, and then we would go to sleep together. After about 1.5 hours I would get back up and study until my homework was done. Then I would grab 2-3 more hours before going to class again.

This was my first, unintentional experience with alternate sleep schedules. I started this purely out of necessity. This experience led me to reading up on more potential schedules because I felt that I didn't have enough hours in the day. The appeal of possibly cutting sleep down with only minimal performance effects was enticing.

This sleep schedule has a few different variations. I tried the 3 hour core sleep with 3 twenty minute naps throughout the day. I found conversion to this fairly easy because before starting it I was basically only sleeping 4 hours a day. The hardest part was being strict with the naps. Moving them at all would ruin my day. I was having to keep my time within a 5 minute start window for it to be sustainable.

Going from 4 hours in one chunk to 4 over the course of the day really improved my sleep. I found that I was a little drowsy until after my second nap, though that may have just been because of the soul crushing boredom of life-guarding. I was doing this while I was going to college full-time, life-guarding in the morning, and then doing RA duties in the evening. I would nap just before and just after my life-guard hours. After that second nap, I was usually pretty sharp going into my morning classes. The third nap fit in perfectly after class and before studying and doing RA stuff.

I really think it was the perfect college sleep schedule, at least for how busy I was. It is a shame I only stumbled across it my Senior year. I still wouldn't substitute it for a solid 8 hour sleep schedule unless I absolutely had to.