Sleep, The Final Frontier

I have always remembered the old army commercial, "We do more before 9 o'clock than most people do all day." It resonated with me for a couple reasons: the first was that I truly believed that early risers get more accomplished and in general are more successful than those of us who struggle to get up with the alarm every morning (set as late as possible with just enough lead time to barely get us into the office by 9 o'clock where we still find ourselves half asleep). The second reason was a shameful acknowledgement that I myself usually accomplish nothing before 9 o'clock.

Do you also like to wake up at the crack of noon? I like to tell people that I am a "night person". I often do not go to bed until 2 am, and I can in fact be very productive late in the evening. The downside is that 9:00 am is a struggle, and as the week progresses I am progressively more exhausted everyday - literally dragging myself into the office.  Since I usually have to forgo a morning workout in order to get some sleep, the workout gets pushed into an extended lunch, which causes me to stay in the office later to make up for that lost time, which in turn causes me to stay up later the next night, and so on, and so on. Worse still, afternoons and evenings are when we have the greatest possibility of being distracted by work and social commitments, so often the workout or the make-up time for heads down work is simply dropped. Add kids to the mix and you have a time management disaster on your hands. You start feeling like you will never catch up. It is simply stressful.

In the past I have fantasized about getting up early, that extra three or four hours with no distractions would allow me to put in a solid workout (healthy body - healthy mind, as they say) and no doubt give me a decent head start on work, thus reducing my overall stress and leading to time management nirvana. To implement such an early wake up time, it usually goes like so: I determine based on history that I seem to like 8 hours of sleep per night, but can get by with 6 hours rest.  Therefore, to get up at 6 AM, I should go to bed sometime between 10 and 11 PM. What happens next is I dutifully go to bed at 10 or 11 PM and promptly lay awake in bed for what seems like hours, my mind obviously quite awake despite my body's horizontal position. It is a kind of torture actually, and in the end just reinforces my belief that I am genetically a "night person" and will just have to resign myself to the stress this might cause.

A few weeks ago, I came across Steve Pavlina's How to Become an Early Riser, and I realized that perhaps I had gone about conquering my late night sleeping habits all wrong. Steve outlines a rather simple program to become an early riser:

• Rule 1: Go to sleep when you are tired.
• Rule 2: Wake up at a set time every morning.

It was so simple, I had to try it out! The first rule immediately addresses the going-to-bed-just-to-lie-awake issue I mentioned from my previous attempts. It makes so much sense, it is almost silly one would do otherwise - what is the point of sleeping if you are not tired?!? Now that logic has been reapplied to the situation, we move to the second rule which is really the crux of the matter: you have to get up at the same time everyday, including weekends and holidays. And yes, some mornings it will be very difficult to do this (I said it was simple, not necessarily easy!).

It is rather illustrative to share my experiences with this approach so far as I have been at it for three weeks now.  I decided that my wake time would be 5 AM every morning. The first few nights, I was naturally not even tired until after midnight. I just stayed up and did various activities until I felt sleepy. My alarm would go off at 5 AM and I would force myself to get out of bed. The sooner I physically got out of bed the better. I tried not to even think about it as my sleepy mind would have reasoned someway to justify going back to sleep (perhaps something like this: "I am so very tired, hmmm, why don't I sleep some more? Yes, excellent suggestion!"). While it was difficult to get up, I found that as the first week went on, I was becoming sleepy earlier in the evening, and as I started going to bed a little earlier each night, I started to get more sleep naturally as a result. After two weeks, I was waking slightly before the alarm went off! In the whole three weeks so far, I have had 3 lapses where I went back to sleep after my alarm went off at 5 AM, and I can attribute every one of those to excessive socializing over the Holidays, so I don't feel like they have been total failures. Anyway, read Steve's post and give it a try. He also covers polyphasic sleep, which I won't be trying because it sounds silly. Ultimately, you should be able to stay awake for 30 years at a time.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, December 29th, 2007 at 7:19 pm and is filed under Articles, Productivity. You can subscribe to any comments to this entry via RSS 2.0. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.