Making my room 100% blackout (as in I cannot detect my hand waving in front of my face during daylight hours when I wake up) has reduced apparent sleep need by ~an hour. I used to need 8-9 hours, now I seem to need 7-8 hours. Some nights I’m even getting closer to 6.5 hours! Which would previously have barely felt like sleeping at all but now feels totally fine. This seems to bring me more in line with human norms. It is difficult to measure quality, but my internal ‘go to sleep now’ shifted forward an hour without affecting my waking time with no apparent negative consequence.
This was after already having two layers of ‘blackout’ material! But in the morning I could see there was some light on the sides that vaguely bothered me, or would wake me up more if I happened to look at it before waking up properly. I had not applied More Dakka, but there is a huge difference.
Although some of this is due to going to bed at 2-3 am, which means half of my sleep would be in partial light conditions. I have also always been particularly sensitive to light. I just wasn’t aware it was having this big of a sleep quality reduction.
Heuristic that I should have applied earlier: if a sensation bothers you enough to grab your attention, it is probably causing you problems. Reduce it and see if it helps.
Making my room 100% blackout (as in I cannot detect my hand waving in front of my face during daylight hours when I wake up) has reduced apparent sleep need by ~an hour. I used to need 8-9 hours, now I seem to need 7-8 hours. Some nights I’m even getting closer to 6.5 hours! Which would previously have barely felt like sleeping at all but now feels totally fine. This seems to bring me more in line with human norms. It is difficult to measure quality, but my internal ‘go to sleep now’ shifted forward an hour without affecting my waking time with no apparent negative consequence.
This was after already having two layers of ‘blackout’ material! But in the morning I could see there was some light on the sides that vaguely bothered me, or would wake me up more if I happened to look at it before waking up properly. I had not applied More Dakka, but there is a huge difference.
Although some of this is due to going to bed at 2-3 am, which means half of my sleep would be in partial light conditions. I have also always been particularly sensitive to light. I just wasn’t aware it was having this big of a sleep quality reduction.
Heuristic that I should have applied earlier: if a sensation bothers you enough to grab your attention, it is probably causing you problems. Reduce it and see if it helps.