I’ve talked about my sleep cycle being out of whack for a while now and last week I mentioned a plan to get my sleep back to normal. This isn’t the first time I’ve had this problem, back in 2010, I spent an entire month wide awake all night and sleeping during the day. That time I couldn’t even sleep in my bed and slept on the couch all day. But I just naturally shifted back to night sleeping without trying. And I did work the overnight shift for over a year about 7 years ago, but it took zero effort or time to go back to night time sleeping after that.

This time my skewed sleep cycle has gone on for a couple of months and resisted several attempts to shift it back. So I had to embrace it before I could make any changes. Instead of trying to force myself to fall asleep at night or stay awake during the day, I just let my body do what it needed to do and adjusted the rest of my day, including meal times, around my sleep. Once I did that, I started to make adjustments each day.

My original goal was to adjust my fall asleep time by one hour each day, but soon discovered that was a little ambitious and 30 minute adjustments worked better for me. There were some days that I made no changes and kept the previous days sleep schedule until I was ready to move on. And while I was changing the time I went to sleep, I didn’t set any rules about the time I was waking up, and naturally let myself sleep between 7-9 hours each night. My wake up time naturally shifted with my sleep time and after a week and a half I’d gone from falling asleep at 2 in the afternoon to falling asleep at 7:30 at night. I still wasn’t there yet, but at least I was sleeping most of the night and staying awake most of the day.

Once I got to this point, things picked up speed a little and I have been able to make bigger adjustments towards getting back to my normal sleep time (midnight), and waking up naturally after 7-9 hours of sleep each night.