What time should I go to bed if I wake up at 6:00 pm?

For a 6:00 pm alarm the day is your night. Five cycles start at 10:15 am; the minimum four start at 11:45 am.

Why three times and not one

The middle option, 10:15 am, is five cycles and 7 h 30 min of actual sleep; 8:45 am is six cycles and 9 h. Both sit inside the adult range. The 11:45 am option is 6 h: enough to get through the day, not enough to do it twice.

A cycle is one trip through light sleep, deep sleep and REM. The 90-minute figure is an average from NIH material; your own cycles could run 70 to 120 minutes, so treat each time as the middle of a 15-minute window.

Walk through the night from a 10:15 am lights-out: asleep by about 10:30 am, into the first stretch of deep sleep around 10:50 am, first REM period near 11:45 am, the halfway point of the night at 2:15 pm, and the longest REM period of the night starting around 5:25 pm — which is what a 6:00 pm alarm at the end of cycle 5 lets you finish.

All bedtimes for a 6:00 pm alarm

Formula: bedtime = wake time − (cycles × 90 min) − 15 min · adult range from the NSF 2015 panel and the AASM/SRS 2015 consensus · methodology

6:00 pm: a late-morning bedtime while the street is awake

With a 6:00 pm alarm the five-cycle bedtime is 10:15 am and the six-cycle one is 8:45 am, which makes this the first afternoon alarm where a night worker finishing at 7 or 8 am can get the full nine hours. If you have a run of shifts ahead and short nights behind, 8:45 am is the option to take.

The cost of sleeping from mid-morning is that everyone else is up. Deliveries, lawn mowers, the school run at three: the hours between 10 am and 6:00 pm are the loudest of the day in most homes, and day sleep after night work tends to be shorter and more broken than night sleep for that reason as much as for body-clock ones. Steady sound helps with the unpredictable kind of noise; so does the room farthest from the road. The second thing to plan is food. A 6:00 pm wake-up lands on the household's dinner, which is your breakfast; eating then and again near the middle of the shift is easier than finding a meal at 4 am, and 4:15 am is also the caffeine line for a 10:15 am bedtime. Before an 11 pm start you have five hours, enough to be properly awake and to see people, and you reach 7 am having been up 13 hours.

Every alarm in the 6 pm hour

Lights-out times for each alarm · last coffee = six hours before the five-cycle bedtime (Drake 2013) · full grid on the open data page

If you can't fall asleep by 10:15 am

Fifteen minutes is the average time a healthy sleeper takes to drop off; ten to twenty is normal. If you are still awake twenty minutes after 10:15 am, sleep-medicine guidance is to get up, do something dull in dim light, and return when sleepy — lying there teaches the brain that bed is for being awake. Miss the window and the next one, 11:45 am, is only a cycle away.

Try a different time