The human body is an amazing thing.

It’s incredible how much we can learn about ourselves and how our body will react to certain situations. You can tell someone you’re a morning person because you know you jump right out of bed and aren’t often staying up until the wee hours of the morning. You know whether you’re a coffee drinker, or if you need to eat breakfast before work.

This past weekend I worked my first overnight shift in almost a year. Actually it was exactly 11 months to the day since I produced the 7 a.m. hour of The Morning Show, my last shift at WJXT. I had spent about 8 months on a schedule where I worked W/Th 4 a.m.-noon and 10 p.m.-10 a.m. on the weekends.

In that time I learned a lot about how my body deals with sleep–and the lack thereof. The Wednesday/Thursday shifts really weren’t that hard to adjust to. But the weekends were brutal.

I spent a lot of time trying to devise the perfect sleep strategy. I left work at noon on Thursday and had to be back at 10 p.m. Friday. That’s a tough flip of the schedule. I tried going to bed late Thursday so I could sleep in Friday. I tried going to bed early so I would be up extra early–and thus more able to nap.

Neither one of those seemed to make any difference. I tried running and not running–again no real difference. After a month or so it became clear that I wasn’t going to get much sleep on Fridays, so I pretty much stopped trying. It became a day devoted to doing as little as possible.

Because I was asleep during prime-time during the week, I had a DVR full of stuff I could watch. In the late afternoon I would try to get about an hour-long nap, or at least sit in my nicely darkened room. Even with the windows largely blocked, it’s still very unnatural to sleep when the sun is blaring outside.

Fortunately, I had an entire collection of VHS tapes I hadn’t seen in a long time (and a TV that doesn’t have connections for a DVD player). Relaxing to Apollo 13 or Renaissance Man became my Friday “sleep” routine.

During the shift itself, I discovered there are two distinct times that I can bet on feeling like I’m about to pass out–no matter what I’m doing. Between 11 p.m. and midnight, and again around 4-5 a.m., the eyelids get very, very heavy. But once I get through those points, it’s as if it’s 2 in the afternoon and I’m perfectly rested.

Of course there are other oddities that come with working those hours. I assure you I was the only one in my age bracket doing grocery shopping at 7 a.m. In fact, on more than one occasion, the checkout clerk basically asked me, “what are you doing here?”

The major perk to working back-to-back overnights and then having Mondays and Tuesdays off was the Sunday sleep schedule. I’d get home from the station sometime around 9:30 a.m. The routine was always the same–down a bowl of cereal and get in bed as soon as possible. Once the show went off the air, it was as if I could feel a ticking sleep bomb in my head and I better be near a bed when it went off.

But the key to the Sunday cycle is to only nap for about 4 hours. I wanted to be able to do something with the day and that was enough to get me through to the early evening. Then it’s back to bed for the most absolutely glorious night of sleep a person could ever in a million billion kajillion years enjoy.