Sleep Schedule That Sucks
For 29 years I’ve been trying to reverse engineer my sleep schedule and never succeeded. I’ve always been amazed by people who would go to bed at 10 pm because they feel tired, and the second they hit the pillow they fall asleep. My ex-wife was like that. I was not, and therefore this bothered me since the day I was born. Well, maybe not literally, I bet my sleep was fantastic at first.
The first issues, or better to say deviation from the norm, I noticed back in university when my alarm would go off many times, my roommates, already awake by then, will yell at me to turn it off, and yet I would sleep in until 10 am, 11 am, and sometimes even 1 pm. I knew I wasn’t an early bird. But what night owl will sleep in until 1 pm!?
A few yeas ago I read Why we sleep" by Matthew Walker that led me to a few discoveries:
- My pre-bed routine sucks
- My morning routine sucks
- Pretty much everything sucks and I still don’t know why my sleep is messed up.
But it gave me a few options to try, such as waking up at the same time, going to bed at the same time, remove all gadgets from the bedroom, tweaking the lights in the apartment to warmer tones, etc. Walker says there are 8 main contributors to poor sleep, and trust me, I tried eliminating most of them, to no avail still.
In the end of April I was coming back from Europe, and a having a 5 hour long jetlag helped me wake up very early in the morning once and then stick to the same schedule for a few months after. I don’t remember who I heard it from, or maybe where I read it from, but I remember that it takes about 90 days for the body to fully reset to a new sleep schedule.
After 3 months of waking up consistently at 7 am, I expected I would feel tired by the end of the day. That never happened. And not a single day in these 3 month did I wake up before alarm. I still felt terrible when I was waking up in the morning.
Then my wake up time slowly shifted from 7 am to 7:20, then to 7:40, and finally to 8:20, as I started allowing myself to go to bed a bit later. At 11 pm at first, then at 11:20, then at 12.
It’s been 7 months since my experiment began and I should say it failed successfully. All these months I’ve been perhaps the least productive. Every day when I was feeling just a little bit of energy to do something (usually by 10 or 11 pm), it was time to call it a day. And I was feeling completely unfulfilled by the fact that I didn’t do much that day. Some days were pretty good. But most looked like this:
- 8 am, time to wake up.
- Snooze
- Snooze
- Snooze
- 9 am. Now I can wake up. Wait, I better scroll reddit because I would really like to stay in bed a little longer…
- 10:30. Ok, now I feel the energy to get up!
- Breakfast.
- I’ve had breakfast and brushed my teeth. It’s 12 pm. Hey, I can start being productive now!
- 2 pm. I worked. Well, to be more precise, I did SOMETHING. I am hungry now
- Remember that I have no food and need to cook something simple.
- 2:30 cooking a simple meal. Simultaneously realizing that I should do laundry too.
- 4 pm. I finally had lunch, did laundry and can get back to work. Wait, maybe I should get to gym before it gets too dark.
- 5:30 I procrastinated. Ok, nowwww it’s time to go to gym.
- 9 pm I came back from gym. I am taking shower. I am having food.
- 11 pm WTF it’s time to sleep?!
By now it became obvious that waking up at the same time (or rather trying very very hard to wake up at the same time consistently) didn’t fix my sleep. I needed to keep searching for a better tool.
Among the things to improve my sleep schedule I tried:
- Not using any screens or sources of blue light after 10 pm
- Calming activities before bed such as meditation, doing the dishes and other monotonous hose chores, reading, listening to audiobooks, listening to relaxation music, playing guitar, writing, gratitude journaling.
- Setting my room’s temperature to 20 degrees 2 hours before bed
- To 19 degrees
- To 18 degrees
- Skincare and other fun things in the bathroom
- Hot tubs
- Staring at the wall (it is torture at this point)
Then I remembered that there was another interesting sleep related article that I found a while ago: http://super-memory.com/articles/sleep.htm
Very long read so it’s better to start with the summary: http://super-memory.com/articles/sleep.htm#Summary_2
It’s important to mention that the author of the article doesn’t really appreciate being peer-reviewed, so please proceed reading with caution.
But the most important insight from that article is the following: you should only go to sleep when you feel tired enough. And, consequently, wake up at the time that your body thinks it’s time to wake up, not when your alarm goes off.
By the time I first read this article, I was still employed full-time, and the whole idea seemed nonsense to me. How can I be fully functioning at work when I go to bed whenever and wake up whenever? My team expects me to show up in a meeting at 10 am? Nahh, my body disagrees. In other words, it seemed very much utopian to me.
By this day I exhausted almost every single option in search for my own circadian rhythm and the ideal sleep schedule that my body would appreciate. And since I don’t have a full-time job anymore, I am going to do an experiment of not setting up any alarms for the next month. And while I’ve been carrying this thought in my head for the last couple of months, this video from one of my favorite youtubers sealed the deal today:
A lot of words about sleep today, but the funny thing is… it made me sleepy! So I better not miss this train.