I am Sheamus - Very Personal Development

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“Sleeping is no mean art: for its sake one must stay awake all day.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

“If you can’t sleep, then get up and do something instead of lying there worrying. It’s the worry that gets you, not the lack of sleep.” - Dale Carnegie

“Leisure time is that five or six hours when you sleep at night.” - George Allen

“People who say they sleep like a baby usually don’t have one.” - Leo J. Burke

“The amount of sleep required by the average person is five minutes more.” - Wilson Mizener

Glen Stansberry over at LifeDev has written an excellent, and very insightful article about the ‘cure’ for people who have a hard time of it in the morning. You know, grumpy people. Grumpy people like me. (”The Cure For The Non-Morning Person: Quiet Times.“)

Glen writes about how he used to sleep in all the time, struggle to eventually rise (even when it was very late in the day) and be in a right foul mood for hour upon hour as he slowly went through the process of waking up.

By switching things around so that he now gets up pretty early in the day now (he doesn’t specify a time, but one assumes it’s very early), he guarantees some ‘quiet time’ that is just for him. This ‘me time’ ensures that not only does he get up easier - after all, it’s easier to get up for yourself than it is to be woken up by others who want you to do things (horrible things, always horrible things) - but as a result he feels less stressed, more refreshed, has a clearer mind, and has a good batch of personal time when he can get things done.

This appeals to me enormously.

So, with direct regard to the question posted by the title of this article; everything I know tells me it’s the former - that getting up early is the way forward. But if that is inherently true - and if I know it to be true (and I do) - why does the thought of a lay-in continue to feel so darn good? Why is it always appealing?

How Much Is Too Much?

Let’s look at this with some kind of logic. Most experts - and make of that term what you will - recommend eight hours of sleep per night. Let’s assume you agree with this, follow the principle religiously and adhere to that your entire life.

That means one-third of your life has been spent asleep.

33 per cent of the time, you are not awake.

Let’s also assume that on a Friday and Saturday night you go to bed later - say, 1am - and sleep in until 11am. That’s an extra two hours of sleep each day.

This means over the course of any average week, you’d be sleeping for 60 hours. There are 168 hours in a week.

60/168 = 35.7 per cent.

I mean, this has got to be too much, hasn’t it? Nearly 36 per cent of any given week - of your life - in La Land? No wonder you’re not getting anything done.

You Are Not Average

See, the problem with most things that are suggested to us by ‘the experts’ is that there’s only so much they can know about the human race, in its species sense. Any time you read anything that is telling you what you should be doing is based on analysis of the ‘average person’. This is notably true in things like diets, nutrition and health. Recommended Daily Allowances (RDA) tell us that the average adult male should be looking to consume 95g (or less) of dietary fat per day, and no more than 2,500 total calories. We’re also told to exercise for 30 minutes three to four times per week, and to digest a minimum of eight glasses of water per day.

The problem is: the average person does not exist.

In fact, they’ve never existed. I’m certainly not average, and I know you’re not either. My dietary needs are extremely likely to be not only very different from yours, but from virtually everybody I meet. For example, my body has a far easier time maintaining optimum weight and fitness levels when I almost totally abstain from the consumption of high-Glycemic Index foods like potatoes, white rice and pasta. After a period of consistent, regularly consumption of these foods I will inevitably put on some body weight. I also feel bloated and lethargic all the time.

However, that very well may not be the case for you. You might feel great on regular bowls of pasta and great mountains of mashed potato. Those foods may really work for your body.

I mean, don’t get me wrong - I love those foods, and I wish they did work. But they don’t. It’s 100 per cent wholewheat durum pasta for me, or bust. I can eat the high-GI stuff, but it comes with a price. As I fundamentally believe in a life of ‘everything in moderation’, I usually allow myself to eat whatever I want one day a week. Yes, I will have to pay, but man, it’s so worth it.

We should analyse our sleeping requirements with this identical mindset. If the average person does not exist, then a recommended average night’s sleep of eight hours is clearly a falsehood. It is bad advice.

What Do We Know About Sleep?

The human body needs sleep - of that there is no argument. When a body finds itself deprived of sleep - and, again, the number that would register as sleep deprivation varies from person to person - all sorts of strange things can happen. Muscles will begin to ache, vision can blur, depression can set in, the immune system begins to weaken and you’ll get those not particularly attractive panda-like dark circles under your eyes. (”How you doin’?”)

When a body enters severe sleep deprivation - for example, going several days without a moment’s slumber - it can get quite serious indeed, with flip-out hallucinations being extremely common, and a near-total body breakdown can occur after five or more days. It is, after all, used as a method of torture for a reason, and that’s not because it’s fun.

But what is to me relatively certain is that no one person needs a recommended number of hours of sleep per night. What they need is what they need - and that number cannot be predetermined.

It is whatever is the right number for you.

For example, I know I do better when I sleep less. When I get five to six hours sleep per night, instead of eight or more, I wake up sharper and with a clearer head. My body also becomes energised a lot faster. By that I mean that I’m ‘ready to go’ within 30 minutes or so. This is obviously quite productive.

If, however, I sleep for eight hours - and certainly ten (or more) - I wake slowly, will be extremely sluggish for quite some time, and I’m rarely ready to go until it’s almost bedtime again. We’ve all experienced that ‘sleep drunk’ feeling - it’s not exactly pleasant.

I’m also irritable and lazy - something to which my wife will (un)happily testify.

Naturally this assumes going to bed with a clear mind and sound body (i.e., not intoxicated, starving or physically exhausted from gruelling and severe manual labour.)

This is all to do with something called circadian rhythm. Your personal circadian rhythm - which some people refer to as a ‘biological clock’ - runs approximately over a 24-hour cycle and regulates things like when you sleep, when you (naturally) wake and the general ups and downs involved in the processes that govern the operation and maintenance of your body. The ‘approximately’ part is somewhat important - studies have shown that for the average person their circadian rhythm actually covers a period of slightly over 24 hours - about 24 hours and 14 minutes for most folk. Circadian translates literally as ‘approximately one day’.

And it’s not just people - all living organisms have their own rhythms.

Messing around with your own circadian rhythm can lead to unusual outcomes. Humans subjected to total darkness for extended periods of time eventually learn to function with what is called free-running sleep, where their circadian rhythm is altered (or, indeed, discarded) to such a level that their body is no longer dominated by the naturally-occurring ‘sleep now’ or ‘wake up now’ rhythms that are caused by daybreak and nightfall. Instead, they will inevitably begin to function around their own, absolutely self-determined sleep patterns, and to maintain a ‘normal’ existence in modern society have to learn how to overcome this.

As you may well imagine, this condition - which is clinically known as ‘No Light Perception’ (NLP) - affects a lot of blind people (around fifty per cent).

Getting It Right

The key thing here, then, is that if one is to maintain optimum energy levels from sleeping less than the recommended ‘average’ then one needs optimum sleep.

It’s absolutely no good at all if you’re only spending five or six hours in your bed each night but for the first 30-60 minutes of that you’re wide awake or reading, and the last 18-27 minutes are spend repeatedly hitting the snooze button*. That is not optimum sleep at all.

Likewise, as I suggested above, going to bed drunk, physically or mentally exhausted, sick or at knifepoint won’t typically ensure the kind of rest that is required to make the most of that six hours (or whatever you determine is the optimum level for you).

What has to happen is you need to go to bed and fall asleep pretty much immediately. This means going to bed at the right time - in short, when you are tired.

We’re all aware of the concept of REM sleep - rapid eye movement. This occurs approximately 90 minutes into the sleep cycle and as many as four or five times per night. However, it accounts for only 20-25 per cent of the total cycle - a maximum of about two hours (over an eight-hour night), in 15-25 minute bursts. (Conversely, a newborn baby, which sleeps for as much as 18 hours per day, has a sleep cycle which is 80 per cent REM).

Naturally, if we’re aiming to sleep for six hours per night, it’s essential that we enter the REM process correctly. One could perhaps assume that over time, regular six-hour nights would move the first stage of REM up to around the 65-70 minute mark. And over a 360-minute sleep cycle, our total REM would be around 72-90 minutes.

All this means is that you have to go to bed ready to fall asleep. Or, account for a period of time where you would read, or think about your day (or whatever) before you would sleep.

Hence, if our sleep time was expected to be 11pm through 5am, and you usually needed 30 minutes to fall asleep, you must be in bed by 10.30pm.

This is common sense, of course. But, certainly in the early stages before you’ve trained yourself to fall asleep at a given time (using the example above - 11pm), you could spend 15-60 minutes of that first hour either wide-awake or doing something else (i.e., reading, thinking, fooling around with the wife - it all counts against you, unfortunately). This would naturally have a pretty severe impact against both your total sleep, the time your REM began, and your total REM. End result: you’ll actually make yourself less productive, as you’ll be more tired.

However, if you train yourself to only go to sleep when you are actually tired - and I mean properly tired, not because you want to read or feel you might be sleepy in an hour or so - then you can generally go to bed whenever you like. This might be 11pm, or it might be 10.30pm or midnight. The only constant is that you set your alarm clock to the same point each day of the week - and yes, this includes weekends. In the example above this would be 5am, 24/7. If you sleep in on Saturday and Sundays, you’ll break any momentum you’ve built-up. It’s generally accepted it takes 21 days to form a ‘habit’ - that’s three weeks of 5am wake-up calls.

And that means getting up at 5am - not 5.09, 5.18 or 5.27.*

(Steve Pavlina has some excellent advice on training yourself to wake up early. Try here and here.)

The Wake-Up Call

I realise, right now, 5am sounds pretty hellish. The thing is, it’s probably as late as one can possibly afford, certainly if you’re in any kind of relationship, if you’re going to benefit from that all important ‘me time’. My wife gets up at 6am. If I want that hour, I need to get up at five. It’s that hard and fast. If I get up at six, it’s not my hour at all. It’s a shared hour. You’ll be talking and making breakfast. Then the kids get up. More talk, more breakfast, more stuff.

And less you.

If you’re single, you can probably afford to get up later, depending on when you have to do stuff - this may include things like getting ready for work or doing anything that you feel is not really beneficial for you.

I mean, look at the accumulated advantages here - if you normally get up at 7am, you’ll gain 14 hours per week by getting up at 5am. That’s 14 hours of time you can do whatever that you simply cannot do now, because you’re asleep - probably unnecessarily.

What should you do in your ‘me time’? That’s totally up to you - it’s your time. I wouldn’t even begin to make any kind of recommendation. But you need to give yourself a reason to wake up. Doing nothing is not much of an incentive (unless you are totally prevented from doing ‘nothing’ any other time of the day, in which case it might be a very productive mental break).

But make sure whatever it is that it benefits you and nobody else. This is the one hour of the day when you’re allowed to be totally selfish. It won’t - and can’t - work if you’re sharing this time with anybody else, or something happens to disrupt that golden hour. If you want to exercise, exercise. If you want to read, then read. Do what you want.

Me? I’m in a very unusual situation as I work a night shift 3-4 days per week. I’m working at 5am during those times, so getting up then isn’t really an option (unless something has gone horribly wrong). I’m actively in search of new (daytime) employment at the moment, so when that happens, I’m absolutely going to initiate this program. As it is right now, my shifts finish at 9am and I typically go to bed at 9.30am (after breakfast and a shower) and rise at 2pm, so I’m already pretty well-trained.

My weekends? Okay, you got me - when I’m not working, then they’re not so good. This is all a work in progress, after all. I know what I should be doing. Now I just have to do it.

One tip I can share: What you should never do is assume you will be able to get up early if you go to bed earlier. One, this concept usually fails - because you won’t be tired and therefore ready to sleep, you’ll just stay awake longer and end up sleeping the usual eight hours (or more) - and two, the benefits from this system are built around training your body to get all the energy and sleep it needs from the minimum possible amount of time.

Does this mean you should try and sleep for two hours? No. I wouldn’t personally recommend anything less than five or six. Your body will cope with less from time to time, but an average of six hours of sleep per night is a healthy and attainable target.

But that number might be totally wrong for you. Again, it’s only a recommendation - you need to find out your optimum number. It might be five hours, or it might be seven. But seven is still better than eight, certainly in any measure of potential productivity. You’ll still gain seven hours per week. And six is better still. I’d suggest trying for six hours for one or two weeks, and seeing how it feels. If six feels good to you, then six it is.

And, better still, it’s ‘only’ 25 per cent of your life.

* What’s the deal with the 9-minute snooze button? Who thought that made sense?

Here’s the scoop:

By the time the snooze feature was added in the 1950’s, the innards of alarm clocks had long been standardized. This meant that the teeth on the snooze gear had to mesh with the existing gear configuration, leaving engineers with a single choice: They could set the snooze for either a little more than nine minutes, or a little more than 10 minutes. But because reports indicated that 10 minutes was too long, allowing people to fall back into a “deep” sleep, clock makers decided on the nine-minute gear, believing people would wake up easier and happier after a shorter snooze. We’d tend to disagree with that logic, but, then, we must be in the lazy minority. Although today’s digital clocks can be programmed to have a snooze of any length, most stick with nine minutes because that’s what consumers expect.

Source: Mentalfloss.com

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