The 5:30 Rule

Something I learned from my first partner was that there are times it doesn't pay to try to go back to sleep. The agency we worked for at the time, along with the one I work for now, say in their policies that crews have to be awake by 7 AM for shift change at 8. There are people that complain about this, but I'm not one of them. I live quite a distance from work, so my normal wakeup call is sometime between 5:30 and 6. I get to sleep an extra hour at work. Most of the time.

My old partner/FTO told me very early on that if you were up at 5:30, it usually didn't pay to try to go back to sleep when you returned to the station. The logic is simple. You've been up forat least an hour if it was a transport, a little less for a patient refusal. If you get back to quarters right at 5:30, you have about 10-15 minutes of paperwork to finish up (Get run times, log the call, PROOFREAD!), then if you're like me, you need  to pee. Now we're up to 5:45 at best. If I try to lay down, I can rarely go right back to sleep. I usually toss and turn for a while, especially if I had a really sick patient. I tend to replay every call in my head, trying to decide if I could have done anything differently. So now we're probably looking at 6:15 or so. My alarm goes off at 6:45, so that leaves me half an hour to sleep. I firmly believe that if you can't sleep for at least an hour, you shouldn't sleep for more than 20 minutes. (Normal sleep cycles support this. Much over 20 minutes, and you drop into REM sleep, which you really don't want to interrupt if at all possible. That first sleep cycle lasts about an hour or so.) So, since less than 20 minutes isn't really worth it, and I wake up groggy if I'm inside that 20-60 minute window, I don't bother trying to sleep at all. That's what coffee is for.