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I am 38. If I lie down, I am sleeping in 30 seconds max regardless of time of day. I typically sleep around 11-ish and wake up at 7. On Tuesdays and Thursdays I sleep later than midnight since I come back from badminton around 1130-midnight. But still wake up at same time.
I have a gift - I can sleep anytime, anywhere in any position (I have slept once while in standing in a queue).
"It is easy to decipher extraterrestrial signals after deciphering Javascript and VB6 themselves.", ISanti[ ^]
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charlieg wrote: Is this an age thing?
Yes.
Or at least probably depending on age.
charlieg wrote: She's snoring within 5 minutes and has an internal alarm clock for 5am
People tend to think getting older means exactly the same thing for everyone. It doesn't. Sometimes older people sleep better than when they were young.
Following seems like a good link
A Good Night's Sleep | National Institute on Aging[^]
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I'll read it.
FWIW, I believe the beginning of wisdom is realizing you lack it and ask questions. Hence this thread.
Charlie Gilley
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
Has never been more appropriate.
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Ask you doctor for alprazolam. 0.5 mg at bedtime will likely let you sleep all night.
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charlieg wrote: How are you sleeping?
At almost 57, I sleep just fine but I tend to wander. 
The missus and I have a routine:
0: around 8PM, she falls asleep on the couch and I typically watch news until 9PM when Alexa tells me to take my meds.
1: go to bed, put on the news again and am usually out before 10.
2: around midnight, the missus and the hound move from the couch to the bed.
3: typically around 2AM I wake up drenched in sweat, or the hound has turned crossways and is kicking the hell out of me.
4: I move from the bed to the couch, put on the news again and sleep until 5AM or so
5: 50/50 either stay on the couch or go back to bed, depends on the position/disposition of the hound! 
"Go forth into the source" - Neal Morse
"Hope is contagious"
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3 made me lol
An Elvis song comes to mind.
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Am 58.
Usually go to bed at around 11 pm. And get up around 5.30 am. No disturbance except for occasional not-so-good dreams.
One important thing. All digital devices are shut down before retiring to bed. Especially the mobile phone will be set to airplane ✈️ mode at 11 pm everyday. Only at 5.30 am will it be brought back live. I feel this matters in our sleep cycle.
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I always leave my phone downstairs. Always. My inlays (in laws, my laptop keyboard is dying) live 5 houses up the street, and if you think I or we have sleep problems, my MIL is legendary. My wife charges her phone next to the bed. The good thing is she has the latest iPhone and it radically dims the display at night.
HOWEVER, she does get a number of butt dials and this launches the phone. I've found I'm very sensitive to light variations.
Neither of us really sleep deep. Now before all of you noobs go bonkers, I've raised 11 children. You old timers already know this. So the wife and I are very sensitive to small sounds (like cracking diapers from toddlers roaming the halls).
Charlie Gilley
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
Has never been more appropriate.
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I tend to go to bed between 3-4am and wake up at 10am. I wish I could sleep a couple more hours. My natural body rhythm favors an 18 hour day followed by 8 hours of sleep, but that causes me to go out of phase with my coworkers, so I compensate by sleeping less on weekdays. 
PS: I'm also 64 and have had this sleep cycle as long as I can remember.
PPS: When I fall asleep I sleep soundly. Very soundly.
/ravi
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Hehehe... I've been here more than 2 decades, and I still love it, even though my job no longer needs me to program.
I go to bed between 10 PM and 4 AM, depending on absolutely nothing. If there's nothing interesting to do, it's early; if I'm engrossed in something, it's near dawn before I lay me down. Sometimes I wake in a couple of hours, sometimes it's hard to wake up. I have a bottle of scotch for that.
I retired 7 years ago, then went back to work for twice the salary last May; it's fun! The Dr gave me Trazadone to help get to sleep; I rarely take one, and the effect only lasts a couple of hours. Of course, he prescribed a year supply, so I have enough to last several lifetimes. Regardless of when I get to sleep, most mornings I wake around 5 - 6 AM, then roll over and solve all the world's problems while I wait for the alarm to fire off. As for wives, I got over that expensive habit 35 years ago, and haven't met anyone worth the effort to settle down with since. Even if I did, she wouldn't last one night; I snore enough that no one but me is getting any sleep, or so I'm told by occasionally sober witnesses. I'm 69 next month, and looking forward to it.
Will Rogers never met me.
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I tried the med thing - I wanted to jump out of my skin, or felt like I should. As for getting over the wife thing, yeah I have a keeper (if she'll keep me).
Charlie Gilley
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
Has never been more appropriate.
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all of you that have replied - I truly appreciate it. Sometimes, we get isolated and lean toward concluding that it's just our problem.
Keep paddling.
Charlie Gilley
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
Has never been more appropriate.
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Same happens here. I crash arount 10 PM, sleeping one cycle - about 1.5 hours, then awake for a cycle. Or two.
But everything is OK if I can sleep till 7 AM.
If I survive this 10 PM shutdown, I am up till ~ 1 AM, but then it is better not to sleep till 7 AM. Then 6 AM - 6:30 AM is the best.
Force shutdown: Valeriana (Valeriana Officinalis + Passiflora Incarnata + Humulus Lupulus) Harmony capsule. According to my Honor Band 5, it significantly increases the amount of deep sleep, which translates to being more awaken next day.
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I'm 61 and like a lot of you I used to work into the wee small hours and get up mid-morning. During lockdown I needed to impose some discipline on my life and started going to bed at 09:00 and getting up at 05:30 - every day of the week.
Occasional nocturnal cat issues aside (who knew?) I now sleep better than I have ever done in my life. I wish I had done this years ago.
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Going a bit medical (sorry)...
Have yourself checked for sleep apnea, it can come on later in life due to slack(en)ing of various throat muscles. It can wake you up and often causes excess urination.
Give the melatonin a chance, the wife and I use it but it needs about a week to really kick in.
Get your prostate checked, mine was 4 times the normal size, a simple op cleared it and got rid of one of my main reasons for waking up in the night.
However, I still wake up at 3 am if I have been doing anything more than social media on the computer before going to bed. Usually I have to get up, have a cup of tea and google whatever was bothering me (last night it was asynchronous Python) and then I can get back off to sleep. So the best advice I can give you is to watch a couple of episodes of M.A.S.H. (or anything similar that you know off by heart) before going to bed.
So old that I did my first coding in octal via switches on a DEC PDP 8
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"give the melatonin a chance" - interesting, I had not known that. I'll keep working at it.
Prostate - yeah, I see the P man in December.
Charlie Gilley
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
Has never been more appropriate.
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My sleeping in getting less and less.
I'll go to bed around 01:00 (earlier makes no sense for me) and I am awake at 07:00.
During the day I am tired but that is easily cured by black coffee ![Java | [Coffee]](https://codeproject.global.ssl.fastly.net/script/Forums/Images/coffee.gif) and Red Bull. (I have to support Max. He is my countryman  )
But I tend to 'wake up' around 19:00 and when bed-time comes I am not sleepy at all.
I noticed that it get worse with age. (when I was born, I could sleep 20 hours a day )
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As George Carlin would say, I'm pushing 70  and running (as well as working on) a laundry list of projects. The short answer to your question is sort of, lol.
I still drink a glass of water shortly before bed, so there's a wakeup call around 2am. If nature calls again before 5am, it can take an effort to go back to sleep. If I know my day will be hell, or I have an unfinished concept that is nagging, I'll work hard to set my mind on something unrelated to fall back to sleep for an hour or so. I won't physically get out of bed before 5am but it's a rare day that I get up after 6.
My own observations are:
- I drink a few cups of coffee in the morning; sometimes a small glass of coke at lunch and zero caffeine the
rest of the day. As it wears off by early evening, I'm losing my edge on getting work done on most days.
- I do tend to nod off between 9pm and 10pm unless the TV really has my interest. Last night I fell asleep at 9:05 during the Sunday night game, woke up around 10 and stayed awake until the end of the game around midnight.
- I'm fine at 6 or more hours of sleep generally. The problem is I can generally function for about half a day on only a few hours of sleep. If I manage to stay awake later, getting up at 6-6:30 isn't difficult.
- I find standard time to be much tougher on sleep than savings time, along with the shorter days as well.
The need to pee, probably prostate related, doesn't in itself torch my sleep. My Samsung health app says most of the time, those breaks are less than 10 minutes. I try to keep that as a mechanical function, get up, go, and go back to bed without thinking about anything else. The four to five am time can be tough, but I try not to give in. The app isn't totally accurate, but it gives me a decent picture of sleep/heart rate/stress/O2.
Having lived in Colorado for more than 30 years and way down south at the moment, my sleep is generally better. I'd put two factors that are affected by that. First, the weather lets me get more exercise during the day and second, being closer to equator allows time to be a bit more balanced.
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Well, I've always been a morning person. So, now being past retirement age (but not retired!), here is my work day schedule (weekends are different). Bedtime routine starts at 9pm. Shower and associated activities, in bed, read for a few minutes, lights out at or near 10pm. Wake up (according to the Fitbit) a couple of times during the night that I usually don't remember, then when the alarm clock goes off at 5:15am, start the day. If I had a technical problem from the day before, I may wake up around 3am with the epiphany of how to fix it and then fall back asleep. I just need to remember it after the alarm clock goes off a couple of hours later. Usually, I can and if not, a few minutes of looking at the problem will help recall the miracle solution later in the day.
I work from home, so work starts at 6:30am until 11:30am...then lunch and TV (usually I watch General Hospital from the day before...Monday I watch Friday's episode, and so on) and skip the commercials. I can usually watch another show from the DVR, too. Back to work at 2pm for 2.5-3 more hours for a time-clock measured total of 10-10.5 hours/day. Boss knows and he's okay with that, as he's a programmer/developer too and knows the inspiration strikes when it wants, not on a company-driven timeframe. I do not eat supper (trying intermittent fasting to lose some weight). Which translates to, "hubby makes his dinner, cuts up cherry tomatoes, gives them to me to eat with two fiber pills and a glass of water". I was happy with just the water, but he doesn't understand what fasting means, I guess.
Now, I will admit...sometimes, if the second program off the DVR is a game show, I might take a 20 minute nap at lunch. If I can sneak in an episode of Babylon 5, I'm wide awake for all of lunch.
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If I have a "hard" problem then I tend to stew over it even after work. I have learned if I can
get the problem completely "in my head" sometimes I will have an answer or a line of attack in the
morning when I get up.
If not working on a hard problem then I do absolutely push everything work related out of my head
in the parking lot on the way to the car. Push it out and leave it there in the parking lot.
That being said I am a night-owl type anyway and function on about five hour sleep a night, can do three hours a night for a week or so. Anything more than about six hours and I feel logging and
sort of disconnected the next day. During vacations or between contracts my bed time gets later
and later till it hits 4am or so and I am up and running by 10am (night-owl mode).
While working I get up at 6am EVERY morning just to be consist. In bed by 11pm or midnight EVERY night.
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Exactly to the T with me as well, including the wife...
I have also tried the medical way, no luck. Then a TV in the room where it took the wife awhile to get used to the sounds, eventually worked a charm, mind you only on non violent heavy noises. Must have seen a billion movies with no recollection afterwards.
Started exercising lately after work for around half to full hour, works like a charm for me...
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The natural state of sleeping for humans is to go sleep when it's dark and wake up at sunrise. However, this is usually more than the 8 or so hours we need. Therefore, waking up in the middle of the night is normal. The Romans did this. Our modern lives just break up this pattern with artificial lighting.
Also, older people tend to sleep lighter, so random noises are more likely to disturb your sleep. Somewhere around very early morning (4 am?) our hearing is at it's best, so that only compounds the problem.
I suggest using that mid-night wakefulness to meditate, think on problems (work or personal), and generally be mentally productive while physically relaxed. Must most importantly, don't stress over it. Stress will only aggravate it, making it harder to go back to sleep.
On a side note, I have a personal theory about how early humans that were little more than animals kept watch during the night. Teenagers stayed up late, old people woke up in the middle of the night, and little kids got up very early, waking up their parents. So the whole night was more or less covered by someone keeping an eye out for predators.
Bond
Keep all things as simple as possible, but no simpler. -said someone, somewhere
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I noticed similar stuff (me 42yro). If I go to sleep earlier (say 21 or 22), I tend to wake up at 3-4am and cant sleep more.
They say:
1 hour of sleep before 00 is 2 hours of rest,
1h of sleep at 00 is 1h of rest,
1 hour of sleep after 00 is 0.5h of rest
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Melatonin is only good if you have problems falling asleep.
If you don't have problems falling asleep, but can't maintain sleep (like me, I'm 60) you should try 5-HTP and/or Magnesium Glycinate.
But in any case you need first to manage stress, which can raise your cortisol levels (the so-called stress hormone), waking you up in the middle of the night.
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No, I've always been a morning person. I can't code anything difficult after 9 PM. I go to sleep at 11:30+/-. I sleep soundly until 4AM, when an alarm wakes me so I can turn my disabled wife over  . It takes awhile to get back to sleep, maybe 30 minutes, but then I'm asleep until the morning alarm at 8:40. Sometimes I will wake up as early as 8 on my own.
When I was working, I went to sleep at 11 and up at 6:30, and by Friday I was a zombie from the missing hour of sleep, so clearly what I needed hasn't changed, just now I'm actually getting it.
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