saving ink

As I wrote the other day, I am now trying my hand at freelancing, with the goal of surviving without a “real job” and becoming financially- and location-independent. One curious aspect that I’ve already noticed in the first few days is how quickly my sleep pattern adjusted to a more “natural” one - natural for me, that is. 

The first thing I did in my newfound freedom was to delete all of the alarms on my phone. With the ability to go to sleep when I’m tired and sleep until I’m not, my circadian rhythm, no doubt relieved at no longer being artificially regulated, put me in a cycle of going to bed at dawn and waking up in the afternoon.

That hasn’t surprised me. As I’ve written before, I’m naturally a nightowl, and I do my best work long after the sun has set. What has surprised me is that it seems I suddenly need less sleep than before. Granted, this is just the beginning of the experiment, so I’ll need a few weeks of consistent data to see if this really is the case, but so far, it seems that not only am I not lethargic in the afternoon (my morning) as I used to be when forced to get up in the actual morning, but after a certain minimum point, the amount of sleep I get is irrelevant - and that minimum threshold has dropped. Case in point: last night, I finished working around 5 am, and fell asleep sometime before 6. When the cat woke me to feed her at 9, I felt far more rested than I should after that little sleep. Of course, I knew that wouldn’t be enough, so I went back to bed and woke up on my own just shy of noon, completely rested. I mean, look at me - I’m writing a coherent blog post on six hours of sleep, when normally, I required seven to eight hours for my brain to possess any kind of creative energy.

I’m kind of obsessed by this topic. Perhaps in the future I’ll start a separate blog* documenting my 9 pm to 5 am workdays. At the moment, though, I have actual work to do, and I’m finally more than awake enough to do it.

*I would call it “Nightworkers”. No ambiguity there…