Thank you! Yeah, I mentioned the 20hr/7hr thing because that's what it feels like my body is trying to do. It's hard to say for sure because I've never just completely let myself go natural and journaled it for any length of time - I always get caught up in schedule guilt. I'll also randomly have nights where I sleep 12-18 hours straight, then easily stay up with no fatigue for 24-26hrs, then sleep 4, then stay up only 15-16 then sleep 7-8 again and... It just feels like chaos sometimes.
I can definitely relate to the boss saying "your schedule is getting insane." That's where the guilt starts to come in, and boy, all I can say is it's a good thing I'm good at my job and it's worth it to the company to let my schedule fall where I'm most productive. (EDIT: By which I mean, I feel unbelievably grateful and lucky to have such a flexible job.)
i recommend talking to a doctor, and making sure you don't drive while sleep deprived. keeping a log of any kind of it may help, but again, i'm not a doctor! :P anyway, bust of luck to you, and for me at least, the "getting away" with something because i was "good" got to be old, and i realized i wasn't getting away with anything or something, i dunno... i guess my point is I felt that way too, and my perspective on it has changed some. best of luck!!!!!
so, my thing was like my boss was like "you're just getting insane with your schedule" so I started googling around and came across DPSS, which sounded like me, so I had a visit with my GP, who sent me to a sleep clinic.. their first advice was to do sort of like you and just give into whatever happens naturally, and i wound up doing like a 2~4 am to 10am~12noon thing most of the time, and I felt, well, better rested, and it seemed safer to drive.
i work an on-call job for a fortune 500, so they had to go back and forth with the doctors to figure out something that would work in regards to making sure i could sleep uninterrupted. this was an ADA thing.
once that was figured out, i started the treatment which was to take melatonin in a small dose at like 11pm and then go to sleep when it felt like i could (and generally practice a whole litany of sleep hygiene practices like avoiding naps unless absolutely necessary, watching caffeine and nicotine in the evening, keeping a journal of it all) ... and then set the alarm for like 8am, and ASAP be in front of a 10k lux light box at the rated distance for a half hour. there are a lot of caveats to all of this, so i would recommend to you or anyone else reading to consult a doctor about all of this. I may be missing sometime important here, so just FYI.
I started this on a Friday night into a Saturday as that's when I got the box delivered, and the correct low dosage of the pill. I would say I felt like a million bucks every since then, which was like well, a month ago. Over thanksgiving I was travelling and had two days without the box, and I could definitely feel the afternoon and evening dragging on, and a little more awake at midnight than I had been.
That's about all I could say for now. I've pushed this back an hour to see if I can get in a little earlier to work, but that was just yesterday, so we'll see how that goes. I go back for a follow up in February.