Friday, August 15, 2008 ; 1:26 AM
Stay tuned for my 40 types of sleeping hacks.Sleep Hack #1 WAKE UP AT THE SAME TIME EVERY MORNINGKeep wake-up times consistent and sleep quality will improve dramatically, giving you more energy and decreased sleep need.
Your body has an internal 24-hour clock which controls your circadian rhythm. Sleep quality is optimized during a very specific window of your circadian rhythm. If you learn to sleep exactly within that window you will enjoy the best sleep of your life. That is, you want to perfectly hit the “circadian low-point”, which is the time when your body is programmed to sleep.
If you sleep in on weekends your internal clock is always playing catch-up as it tries to match itself with your indecisive wake-up times. For each hour you sleep in late on weekends it will take an extra day during the week to reset your clock. Sleeping in on weekends makes it difficult to hit the circadian low point. Your body tries to increase sleep duration to compensate for poor sleep quality.
Keep wake-up times consistent. Even on weekends. Your sleep quality will skyrocket.
Sleep Hack #2 TRY FREE-RUNNING SLEEPFree-running sleep means:
1. Go to sleep when tired.
2. Wake up without an alarm.
Early studies on circadian rhythm showed that our internal clocks run on a 25-hour period when isolated from external stimuli like daylight and timekeeping. External cues like sunlight reset our circadian rhythm and match it with the 24 hour day. These cues are called zeitgebers. (Other zeitgebers are food, exercise, and social interaction).
Even with a 25h internal clock, humans have slept with the 24h day before alarm clocks were invented. Artificial light prolongs the internal clock. To wake up without an alarm clock, don’t expose yourself to too much artificial light at night. That will shift your internal clock forward.
Many insomniacs have circadian rhythms that run on 26 or 27 hour periods. It is difficult to entrain a 27-hour internal clock with a 24-hour external clock. Solution: free-running sleep with 27-hour days. Go to bed when you’re tired, wake up naturally. Obviously hard to manage if you’re not self-employed or on vacation.
Studies show that free-running sleepers experience a 10-15% boost in creativity compared to those who use an alarm clock.
Health-wise, free-running sleep is the optimal sleep schedule. It can be synced with the 24h day, but with artificial lights (like computer monitors) it might run out of sync, which is OK too.
Sleep Hack #4 POLYPHASTIC SLEEPNearly all animals in the animal kingdom have multiple sleep episodes per day. Sleeping just once per 24h period is an anomaly, and may partially be an artifact of artificial lighting. Most adult humans are naturally wired for sleeping twice every 24 hour period – a 6-7h nocturnal rest with a 20-60m siesta in the afternoon. Sleep patterns defined by more than one sleeping episode every 24h period are called polyphasic sleep. Polyphasic sleep has created a buzz on the Internet lately. Self-experimenters usually try one of two schedules:
1. Nap for 20 minutes every 4 hours (total of 2h per day), or
2. Have a 3h “core sleep” at night with three 20m naps in the day (total 4h per day).
Polyphasic sleep seems to be the only way to function on less than 5 hours of sleep (for genetically non-short sleepers). Unfortunately, out of all the people who try to adapt to such a schedule, the majority fail, suggesting that some people just aren’t wired for this.
As some of the tips will be quite irrelevant to us I’ll only post the important ones.
