I'm being completely serious about this: Sleep schedules help

[Teutonic Knight]

Not: what are your sleep schedules, but my sleep schedule is REALLY bad right now. I'm comfortable sleeping at ~3-4 in the morning, getting up for school at 6:45, and repeating. I'm falling asleep during the day and when I get home, I feel like sleeping so much that I don't work on my homework until 9 PM, and then I finish at 3 in the morning and the cycle starts over again. On weekends, doesn't matter what time I sleep I always wake up past noon.

I'm a senior 12th grade in high school. How can I get better before going to college? Are there any tips on improving this besides just finishing my homework earlier?

Or what about tricks to wake up? My other problem is not waking up when it's time to wake up, so I'm almost late for school every day. Help?

[Tirian]

Erratic sleep schedules is something that you should bring up with your doctor. Even if it seems like more of an irritant than a medical problem, there are a whole range of problems that could cause it, from depression to apnea and potentially even more serious conditions. I've had some family members get some real improvement from having it studied even though some of them just got a good discussion with their doctor about lifestyle changes they could make to get toward a more socially-friendly sleep cycle.

[inky13112]

I had basically the same problem you did, and kept missing classes in favor of sleeping in, so finally I just embraced it and stopped sleeping at night. Now I sleep after classes so from around 3-11, and then I stay up all night and through to midday. I heartily recommend it :smallcool:

Probably not the solution you were looking for though.

[Fredaintdead]

I usually have to get up at 7 or 8am so I can get to 9 or 10am lectures. So I'll usually go to bed between 11 and 11:30pm. However, if it's the weekend, or I have the following day free of lectures, then I'll go to bed maybe 30 minutes later and it's unlikely I'll wake up before 10am.
I try not to nap during the day if I can though.

[Vella_Malachite]

I'm working out this same problem myself; my sleep pattern at the moment is from 2 or 3 am until eight, then nap as I can through the day, and repeat. I'm in uni, so it's not such a problem, but it causes timetabling issues when I go home, and it makes morning classes and exams an unholy terror.

I've tried a few methods; I can't go to sleep before 12, but I've been trying to get to bed as close to as possible, so I can gradually pull my "sleep time" back to ten or eleven, but that's slow and difficult when you've gotten into a habit. I've also tried staying up all night to try and 'push the reset button' as it were, but that doesn't work at all. The other thing I'm trying in the holidays is to wake up early and not nap, so I force myself to go to bed early and get my body used to it again.

I also second going to a doctor; they would have better advice and may be able to find a root cause that we non-doctors won't/shouldn't.

[Starwulf]

I had basically the same problem you did, and kept missing classes in favor of sleeping in, so finally I just embraced it and stopped sleeping at night. Now I sleep after classes so from around 3-11, and then I stay up all night and through to midday. I heartily recommend it :smallcool:

Probably not the solution you were looking for though.

Very much this. Despite medical scientists and what not claiming that everyone is meant for a daytime wake, nighttime sleep kind of schedule, it's not really true. I'm 30, and I was exactly like you in highschool, from grade 10 and on(albeit, I took it to more extremes. I rarely slept on weekends, maybe getting 1-3 hours for the entire weekend,), sleeping during the day(and classes), and being awake at all hours of the night. When I graduated, not even the military could straighten out my sleeping habits(let me tell ya, that was rough). When I got out, all my jobs were nightshift jobs, dayshift jobs were almost literally impossible for me to handle. Even now, with two kids and a wife, I sleep until 1pm, and am up until about 6 or 7 in the morning. Since about 10th grade, I've never felt comfortable on a normal sleeping schedule, and you might be the same way.