Rethinking Sleep

Strange (and boring... you've been warned) little anecdote.

Yesterday (like so many days, ha) I spent too much time typing out silly posts for HN. Last night, I couldn't sleep well because of some noise outside and I had this dream. One of those dreams where it is so vivid and the story line is so clear, and there are "scenes" almost like a film where the "camera" zooms in on some aspect, that you wake up remembering the details and go "WTF? What does that mean?"

So I thought about some of the things I remebered for a little bit. Some of these details made absolutely no sense. They served no purpose in the storyline of the dream. And suddenly it hit me they were derived from words I had used in HN posts. Not topics, but individual words. My brain had woven them into the story. And it had done so with some pretty crafty storytelling. I'm not sure I could have done it so well if I was awake.

As if you gave someone a list of random words and said, "Make up a story and weave each of these words into the story."

I guess this is nothing unusual. Probably happens to people every night. But it left me thinking about how just how "self-driving" the brain is. What the heck is it doing when we go to sleep? It is running on its own software, to use a computer analogy. And it's not exactly "open source" code. I would love to see how that code works.

I've adopted a biphasic sleep pattern of sorts by chance. It started by occasionally falling asleep when putting my son to sleep, and when I'd wake up I'd compensate by staying up longer.

After a while I realized it works very well for me to got to sleep for a couple of hours around 8 when he goes to sleep, and then stay up for a few hours before going back to sleep - I usually feel very mellow and relaxed when waking up after my first sleep period, and then very energized after I've been up for a little while. I get far more done this way than by trying to make myself work on stuff at the tail end of a long day. In fact, I'm coming out of my "mellow and relaxed" phase after my first sleep period right now, and is about to start working on a project...

Sometimes I end up "exploiting it" by cutting my total number of hours of sleep drastically, and feel little ill effect as long as I compensate with sufficient rest the following evening.

Occasionally I'll combine this with a 30 minutes nap at lunch time. If not I'll usually spend that time meditating instead.

This sounds like a gross oversimplification. For one thing - even if 90 minutes is the average length of a sleep cycle, this surely varies between humans. My sleep cycle might easily be 80 minutes or 100 minutes long, rather than 90. If I were to use sleepyti.me, it might recommend that I go to bed at 11:00pm to get up at 6:30am. But if my sleep cycle is only 80 minutes long, it will be 40 minutes out in its recommendation, which means that I would wake up in the middle of a sleep cycle, rather than at end of one - exactly the opposite of what it's supposed to achieve!

In addition, although the first sleep cycle averages 90 minutes, the second to fourth cycles are generally 100-120 minutes [1] which again throws off your calculations.

In short, I'm extremely sceptical that such a simple rule could ever be effective for most people.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep#Sleep_stages

I did this for a year during high school and loved it. That mellow feeling is a very particular state of mind that I really cherish. I've yet to encounter it in any other circumstance. I recall reading on Wikipedia that a number of historic writers are reported to have induced this state of mind for the purpose of writing.

Unfortunately I had to stop because I was keeping my parents awake at night – and now I live in New York and my evenings are always occupied – but I hope that one day when my life calms down I'll be able to return to that schedule.

I did this for the first two years of college-- I'd often sleep for about 3-4 hours each night before class, and then sleep another chunk of time in the afternoon. However, it had the opposite effect on me as it became more and more difficult to go "back" to sleep in the afternoon unless I waited until the evening. What ended up happening the last year or so is that I started sleeping 5-6 hours per night without a nap, and then sleeping more on the weekends. Surprisingly, this schedule (with morning coffee) got me through classes much better than having a combined total of 8 hours per night. I started researching sleep to build a sleep tracking app and the theory (there are a number of books regarding this) is that your body can catch up on a certain amount of sleep "debt" within a period of 1-2 weeks. The "debt" is not a scientific measurement but within 14 days, your body has a general idea of how much sleep/rest is missing, and if the debt is made up gradually instead of all at once (and also by going to bed earlier rather than sleeping in), it can actually decrease the effect of drowsiness from past nights.

Actually now that I started working I sleep 7 hours a night and wake up the same time every morning and it's the first time in 6 years I don't need coffee to get through the day.

Disclaimer-- I also referenced a product I built. The app is called SleepBot and it's a very simple mechanism to help people track sleep and get an idea of their sleep "debt" over short periods of time. As David mentioned, sleep has been an untapped market but there's recently been an influx of sleep apps into the market including tackers, sound machines, and alarms. I think what we're seeing is an increased concern for sleep as more of us try to figure out how to improve our health beyond diet and exercise.