Have you ever felt you wanted to sleep for longer? Heck yeah! Have you ever felt you wanted to stay up later? No duh! Well then 24 hours per day is just plain too few, right?
Relevant XKCD
In Sweden, every high schooler has to to a term-spanning project on basically any subject of your choosing. People I know have written about the psychology of being a middle child, sewage water pollution in the channels of central Malmö, making their own Weasley Clock and the shapes of snow flakes. I got the idea to try living according to a 28-hour day from an XKCD and my friend Pontus was up to join me!
I moved in with Pontus in his tiny 22 m² apartment where we lived together for 7 weeks. We begun with three control weeks, followed by a week of converting to the 28 hour day, and then finally three weeks of 28 hours per day.
Every hour we would write down in a note how tired we were on a scale of 1-10, and I designed, printed and laminated two cards with said scale.
Said Scale
Our results were mixed. Basically it kinda sucked because, to our dissappointment, not everyone else was in on it. As our day was 4 hours "too long" it would be offset further by 4 hours for every passing day. This would mean on saturdays and sundays we would sleep all day and be up all night.
Not in the fun "go to sleep at five in the morning" way, but in the awful "get up at eight and go to sleep at two in the afternoon" way.
Unlike in the XKCD, our school was not flexible and we had to totally adapt our sleep schedule to try and fit it together with our studies.
All in all it was not horrible, and I've often thought about doing it again. Surely it would work better this time?
Graph of sleepiness over time for 24/28 hour days.
