The Great Experiment Oh Nine, part Nine: Sleep : thescruffypirate.org

The Great Experiment Oh Nine, part Nine: Sleep

This is a follow up to last night's post.

Now as many of my long time readers* know, I have trouble going to bed at a consistent time that leaves me with enough sleep to face the next day. Left to my own devices, I will go to sleep later every day. Unfortunately, the world sort of expects you to function during the day. So, as I see it I have a three choices:

Polyphasic sleep**: I think it is safe to say that for the most part I have given up on this one. I'd still like to try it again sometime because it was fun and quirky. But I don't think I have the discipline in me to make it work.
Try a 28 hour day: Now this is one that I will most definitely try at some point. But it too seems a little too gimmicky to be a long term viable solution.
Come up with a normal sleep schedule that I can maintain.

And I'm going to do...

Number 3!

Now I know you have heard this before. But I'm going to do it this time! I have a new strategy. It is from an article I read in 2005 titled How to Become and Early Riser.

[Interesting factoid: it was while reading that article (which actually has good advice on getting on a normal sleep schedule) that I clicked through to the same author's experiments with polyphasic sleep. And it was his article that set off that whole thing! Oh, speaking of that guy, he gave up on polyphasic sleep shortly after I gave it a try.]

Anyway, the article advocates doing one thing, waking up at the same time every day.

No matter when you go to sleep, wake up at the same time every day. This makes sense to me. It is flexible, if you want to stay awake, stay awake. But it is also self-fixing. Eventually you are going to be so tired that you want to go to bed early. And that is how you catch up.

I think there is one other trick to this. No naps. Unfortunately, both my parents are big nappers, so I might have a genetic predisposition to sleep during the day.

So the only thing left to do is decide what time to wake up! Now this is tricky. I think I'm going to go with 6am. Really, philosophically I think the ideal time is 5am (I mean it worked for Benjamin Franklin and he has a great first name) but maybe we should ease into this sort of thing.

The one hiccup to this plan is that the only thing harder for me than going to sleep early is waking up. I'm awful at waking up! It is going to take a lot of work! Maybe we should set up a phone schedule so people call me every morning to make sure I am not cheating.

I'm considering buying some alarm clocks. And by some I mean a lot. And then setting 1 for 6am, 1 for 6:01am, 2 for 6:02am, 3 for 6:03am, 5 for 6:05am and so on. That way if I don't get up and take the time to turn off each one then I'm gong to bother everyone within a 1 block radius. That will at least get me out of bed!

In addition to trying to wake up consistently, this article titled 'Top 10 Ways to Sleep Smarter' has three good suggestions (namely, suggestions 10, 9 and 8). We can do this people!

But I'm not going to do any of this until I get back from my hike (for which I leave on Monday!). So I still have tomorrow to sleep in! Woo! Oh sweet, wonderful, blissful sleeping in.

* And those aren't even all the posts on the subject. I only added tags to TSP in 2007 (after 5 years of its existence) (here is the first post with them) and have only recently started going through the old posts and retroactively tagging them.

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