Alignment

Alignment is a subset of repartition, more specifically it is the same as "external repartition". It refers to repartition of sleep within the circadian day.

Symptoms

When alignment is happening, sporadic episodes of tiredness throughout the day are expected. Over time, these will begin to match up with the scheduled sleep phases. Once they do, this sleep phase has been adapted (though the schedule might not have yet). It is common to expect about 10 minutes or so of tiredness before each sleep, but the longer the sleep is, the longer this period becomes.

Relationship with internal repartition

Internal repartition depends on alignment. For it to happen, alignment has to happen as well, and the time in the circadian day affects which sleep stages are preferentially repartitioned into the sleep.

Relationship with flexing

Flexing, moving sleep around, hinders alignment: The body doesn't know when a sleep will reliably occur and thus not perform alignment, resulting in subpar sleep quality and thus lack of adaptation. In naturally flexible schedules like MonoCore-X, this doesn't matter as they do not reduce TST - so no alignment needs to happen for a successful adaptation and thus flexing is fine there.

Once alignment is however already done, the range to which the sleep is aligned can be expanded with controlled flexing, which is how flexing adaptations work.