11–20 of 120 posts
I try to keep that routine during the week, because if i stay up too long only 1 night, it makes it more difficult for the rest of the week. I am more of a morning person anyway, rarely been very productive late at night.
> “Sleeping 8.5 hr. might really be a little worse than sleeping 5 hr.” How can people even take this kind of pseudo-science seriously? If I sleep for 5 hrs, I'm a complete zombie during the day, unproductive and depressed. If I sleep for 8.5 hrs (which is how long I sleep naturally), I feel great, productive, and happy. I get way more done. There are all sorts of studies showing all the negative effects of not getti…
I have lived in a country (Taiwan) where a siesta, a mid-day nap, is quite a regular practice. The first time I lived there (1982-1985), I was only unlearning my American habit of sleeping only at night near the end of my stay. The second time I lived there (1998-2001), I was better able to adapt to napping in the middle of the day like my co-workers, perhaps because I had become a care-giving parent of young children in the meanwhile.
As the submitted blog post mentions, there is a research basis for thinking that symptoms of what is characterized as "lack of executive function" or "ADD" can be relieved just by getting sufficient sleep. It appears that one of the roles of sleep is letting the brain have opportunity to restructure based on new experiences while awake, so sleep seems to aid learning, planning, and attention control.
I had a friend back in my college days who was a very hard-working research scientist trying to find a cure for diabetes. Her claim, which she read somewhere back in the 1970s, was that an hour of sleep before midnight is just about as beneficial as two hours of sleep after midnight. It does seem to me that I wake up especially rested on the rare occasions when I am fully asleep for the night before 11:00pm. As my own lifestyle changes over the next decade (= as my children grow up and live on their own), I will be eager to try the experiment of better matching my hours of sleep with the actual hours of darkness in my time zone.
AFTER EDIT: The top level comment by rayiner mentions allergies and writes
I jack up a humidifier
and I agree with his statement that it is worthwhile to figure out what helps sleep be deeper and less disturbed, including breathing without obstruction during sleep. Depending on what a person is allergic to, DE-humidifying may be the way to go. Dust mite allergies, for example, will be worse for a person who lives in a humid room. Good luck to all in your experiments.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/17/magazine/mag-17Sleep-t.htm...
All told, by the end of two weeks, the six-hour sleepers were as impaired as those who, in another Dinges study, had been sleep-deprived for 24 hours straight — the cognitive equivalent of being legally drunk.
My personal experience certainly tells me that a solid eight hours a night makes me far more productive than consistently getting six.
In order to make the best of your sleep cycle, it requires excellent sleep hygiene.
1. regularity is important. Going to bed and waking up at the same times weekday and weekend is very helpful.
2. sleep environment is important. simulating night time including shades, turning off message beeps, comfort, slightly cool temperatures make a big difference
3. eating - avoiding eating at least 3-4 hours prior to bedtime. Your blood sugar levels are easily disturbed and play a large part in your sleep cycle as glucocorticoids are active in sleep cycle.
The amount you sleep has a lot to do with your daily stress level, physical activity and damage your body takes.
hydrate like crazy, let your body perform its reparative miracles at night including memory consolidation.
I have noticed that people who have constant low-level death-by-a-thousand-cuts stress have many problems sleeping and getting quality sleep than those who have short bursts of high level stress. We are victims of our always-on world.
As another poster pointed out - Sleep is worth experimenting. Physical activity/exercise during the day helps.
It's common sense that 8 straight hours per day is not ideal in general, nevermind for everyone. If you check out your sleep rhythms (and with exercise and without stimulants like alcohol, coffee, nicotine, etc.) the ideal is usually something like: 1) sleep 5.5ish hours. 2) wake up at like 3am, work for an hour or two 3) sleep for another 1.5ish hours 4) wake up at dawn and somewhere in the early afternoon take a br…
You know how there's people that can get by on 4-5 hours of sleep each night? I think I'm the opposite. Left to my own devices, I will sleep 10-10.5 hours a day. If I wake up with anything less than 9, I feel pretty horrible. Not sure why, but I sure wish I could get by on less.
Although, like most hot-air-pushers in these sleep threads, I never tried objective measurements of performance under different circumstances. Maybe I just _feel_ like shit, but actually perform well, with less than 9 hours of sleep.
The post also doesn't seem to account for sleep debt. If you undersleep one night, you may have to sleep longer than normal the next night to make up for it.
Since I gave up carbohydrates, I haven't had that hypoglycaemic productivity dip at a predictable time after lunch. As a contractor, I've sat in different offices and witnessed those around me experience 'the dip', whereas I can now soldier on through the day from morning to evening with consistent alertness and focus levels. Oh, and creatine supplementation helped a lot, too.
Another useful trick is to buy a blackout blind or window cover. I've managed to make my bedroom pitch black from the beginning to the end of my sleep cycle, and I know that my sleep is much better for it. It goes without saying that if the sun rises early where you live, and you happen to go to sleep late one night, it can be impossible to get the full 8 hours you want if the light starts streaming in before you've finished.