The key is the wake-up time. You can always force yourself to get up once the alarm goes off, no matter how little sleep you’ve gotten. The opposite is not true without drugs to assist you (though it sounds like the cold shower helps, makes sense).
I do this about every four weeks. My work schedule is such that I work 160 hours in two weeks, and then don’t work at all for the following two weeks. This means I have to get up very early when I’m working and not at all when I’m not. The net result, since I lack discipline when I don’t have a goal set for the day, is that by the time I go back to work I am regularly staying up until 3am or later and waking up around noon, while I need to be at work by 7am when I’m working.
The fix for this is to force myself to get up at 6am the very first day I’m back at work. No easing in to anything, just cold turkey—alarm goes off I’ve got to get up. This means for the first day or two I’ll be running on 3-4 hours of sleep, but the need to sleep builds fast and by the third day I’m usually going to bed at a respectable time.
The key for me is that I must have a purpose for the day. I’ve tried to maintain this in my off time, but since I don’t have a specific place to be “on time” each day I tend to let my wake up time drift instead of getting up on-schedule. The fix for that is apparently having a regular morning schedule during my off time, but I haven’t put much effort into it.
Another important thing to remember when you are forcing yourself awake after insufficient sleep is to not dilly-dally. If you are tired when you wake up, the worst thing you can do is hit “snooze” and go back to sleep. It probably won’t make you any less tired unless you sleep for another hour (at which point you are almost certainly late for whatever it is you were getting up for) and it will make it a lot harder to get up.
There’s an extra problem I run with drastic sleep cycle changes. Say I’m sleeping from 3 AM to noon. Then I do the cold turkey wake up at 6 AM, so far so good. Next evening I go to bed at 21:30, then my brain apparently goes, “hey, it’s a lot earlier than usual, must be an afternoon nap”, and helpfully wakes me up sometimes at 1 AM. (Other people’s brains might not have this feature.) This tends to lead to having to go multiple consecutive days with little sleep if I want to change the cycle, instead of just the one, which gets considerably less fun. The fix to this might be to do something on the cold turkey day that gets me sufficiently tired that I’d just sleep 9 hours straight on the next night, whatever the bedtime.
The cold shower thing is still working, so far I’ve had only one night when I’ve failed to fall asleep after taking the shower.
The key is the wake-up time. You can always force yourself to get up once the alarm goes off, no matter how little sleep you’ve gotten. The opposite is not true without drugs to assist you (though it sounds like the cold shower helps, makes sense).
I do this about every four weeks. My work schedule is such that I work 160 hours in two weeks, and then don’t work at all for the following two weeks. This means I have to get up very early when I’m working and not at all when I’m not. The net result, since I lack discipline when I don’t have a goal set for the day, is that by the time I go back to work I am regularly staying up until 3am or later and waking up around noon, while I need to be at work by 7am when I’m working.
The fix for this is to force myself to get up at 6am the very first day I’m back at work. No easing in to anything, just cold turkey—alarm goes off I’ve got to get up. This means for the first day or two I’ll be running on 3-4 hours of sleep, but the need to sleep builds fast and by the third day I’m usually going to bed at a respectable time.
The key for me is that I must have a purpose for the day. I’ve tried to maintain this in my off time, but since I don’t have a specific place to be “on time” each day I tend to let my wake up time drift instead of getting up on-schedule. The fix for that is apparently having a regular morning schedule during my off time, but I haven’t put much effort into it.
Another important thing to remember when you are forcing yourself awake after insufficient sleep is to not dilly-dally. If you are tired when you wake up, the worst thing you can do is hit “snooze” and go back to sleep. It probably won’t make you any less tired unless you sleep for another hour (at which point you are almost certainly late for whatever it is you were getting up for) and it will make it a lot harder to get up.
There’s an extra problem I run with drastic sleep cycle changes. Say I’m sleeping from 3 AM to noon. Then I do the cold turkey wake up at 6 AM, so far so good. Next evening I go to bed at 21:30, then my brain apparently goes, “hey, it’s a lot earlier than usual, must be an afternoon nap”, and helpfully wakes me up sometimes at 1 AM. (Other people’s brains might not have this feature.) This tends to lead to having to go multiple consecutive days with little sleep if I want to change the cycle, instead of just the one, which gets considerably less fun. The fix to this might be to do something on the cold turkey day that gets me sufficiently tired that I’d just sleep 9 hours straight on the next night, whatever the bedtime.
The cold shower thing is still working, so far I’ve had only one night when I’ve failed to fall asleep after taking the shower.