Damn, damn, damn, damn, damn. It’s not just that I’ve always been something of a night-owl while all of society around me functions on a “get up with the sun” morning schedule. It’s that the night is often the single uninterrupted block of many hours I have for studying or coding.
Also, would someone happen to have tips for dealing with grad-school-level time pressures while maintaining a healthy sleep schedule?
TLDR: I managed to fix my terrible sleep pattern by creating the right habits.
I’ve been there, up until a month ago actually.
I’ve tried a whole slew of things to fix my sleeping pattern over the past couple of years. F.lux, conservative use of melatonin, and cutting down on caffeine all helped but none of them really fixed the problem.
What I found was that I’d often stay up late in order to get more done, and it would feel like I was getting more done (where in actual fact I was just gaining more hours now in exchange for losing more hours in the future). Alongside this my pattern was so hectic that any attempt to sleep at a “normal” time was thwarted by a lack of tiredness, I could use melatonin to ‘reset’ this, but it’d rarely stay that way.
The first thing that helped was sitting down and working out hour by hour how much time I actually have in a week; this prevented me from thinking I could gain more time by staying up later. The second thing was forming good habits around my sleep. Habit’s typically follow a trigger-routine-reward pattern and require fairly quick feedback. As a result building a habit where the routine is sleeping for eight hours is quite hard.
Instead I appended two patterns either side of the time I wished to sleep, the first with the goal of making it easier for me to sleep, and the second with the goal of making it easier for me to get up.
The pre-sleep pattern followed:
Cue: ‘Hey it’s 10:30pm’
Routine:Turning off technology->Reading->Meditation
Reward: Mug of hot-chocolate
While the post-sleep pattern followed:
Cue: Alarm goes off,
Routine: Get out of bed.
Reward: Breakfast.
Since doing this I’ve been awake at 8 am every morning with little trouble, and the existence of those habits has made easy to add other habits into my routine. Breakfast, for example, is now a cue to go out running on days when I don’t have lectures (this is very surprising for me, I’ve received several comments along the lines of “Who are you and what have you done with the real you” since I began doing this).
Just occurred to me that I could put TAPs I want to install into Anki! Like the cue could be the thing on the front of the card, and the routine+reward can be the text on the back.
Also, would someone happen to have tips for dealing with grad-school-level time pressures while maintaining a healthy sleep schedule?
I happen to have a) grad-school level time pressures, and b) a healthy sleep schedule. I’d never have done it own my own, it just worked out because I had a bunch of kids. But the kids are actually incidental. What kids do is make it so you get up at the same time every day, because once they’re up, they find some way to destroy your house or kill themselves in 20 min. So you have to get up.
What I learned from all this, what I wished I’d known all along, was that the amount of sleep you get is, within reason, not that important. What matters is getting up and going to bed at exactly the same time every day, even on weekends.
Damn, damn, damn, damn, damn. It’s not just that I’ve always been something of a night-owl while all of society around me functions on a “get up with the sun” morning schedule. It’s that the night is often the single uninterrupted block of many hours I have for studying or coding.
Also, would someone happen to have tips for dealing with grad-school-level time pressures while maintaining a healthy sleep schedule?
TLDR: I managed to fix my terrible sleep pattern by creating the right habits.
I’ve been there, up until a month ago actually.
I’ve tried a whole slew of things to fix my sleeping pattern over the past couple of years. F.lux, conservative use of melatonin, and cutting down on caffeine all helped but none of them really fixed the problem.
What I found was that I’d often stay up late in order to get more done, and it would feel like I was getting more done (where in actual fact I was just gaining more hours now in exchange for losing more hours in the future). Alongside this my pattern was so hectic that any attempt to sleep at a “normal” time was thwarted by a lack of tiredness, I could use melatonin to ‘reset’ this, but it’d rarely stay that way.
The first thing that helped was sitting down and working out hour by hour how much time I actually have in a week; this prevented me from thinking I could gain more time by staying up later. The second thing was forming good habits around my sleep. Habit’s typically follow a trigger-routine-reward pattern and require fairly quick feedback. As a result building a habit where the routine is sleeping for eight hours is quite hard.
Instead I appended two patterns either side of the time I wished to sleep, the first with the goal of making it easier for me to sleep, and the second with the goal of making it easier for me to get up.
The pre-sleep pattern followed:
Cue: ‘Hey it’s 10:30pm’
Routine:Turning off technology->Reading->Meditation
Reward: Mug of hot-chocolate
While the post-sleep pattern followed:
Cue: Alarm goes off,
Routine: Get out of bed.
Reward: Breakfast.
Since doing this I’ve been awake at 8 am every morning with little trouble, and the existence of those habits has made easy to add other habits into my routine. Breakfast, for example, is now a cue to go out running on days when I don’t have lectures (this is very surprising for me, I’ve received several comments along the lines of “Who are you and what have you done with the real you” since I began doing this).
I hope you find this useful.
Just occurred to me that I could put TAPs I want to install into Anki! Like the cue could be the thing on the front of the card, and the routine+reward can be the text on the back.
I happen to have a) grad-school level time pressures, and b) a healthy sleep schedule. I’d never have done it own my own, it just worked out because I had a bunch of kids. But the kids are actually incidental. What kids do is make it so you get up at the same time every day, because once they’re up, they find some way to destroy your house or kill themselves in 20 min. So you have to get up.
What I learned from all this, what I wished I’d known all along, was that the amount of sleep you get is, within reason, not that important. What matters is getting up and going to bed at exactly the same time every day, even on weekends.