How to sleep less, and do more
In any given day there are 24 hours. Subtract from that the 8 average hours a regular human adult is recommended to sleep per day, 3 hours eating, 1 hour spent showering, getting dressed, changing, etc, and maybe 2/3 hours getting to and from your place of work/school/commitments/etc and you are left with just about 9/10 hours to be productive or relax with your day, perhaps more on days you don’t go out.’
Now take into consideration that if you are working a full time job or school, the time you have to be productive at work/school takes 8 more of those hours, or 4 hours if you work part time. Assuming you’re a normal human being, you also need SOME downtown to relax, relieve stress and ground yourself, be it through meditation, entertainment such as TV or video games, hanging out with friends, or reading. This to most of us is something we typically need a little bit of at least every day, and then we fill our weekends with it to get that “work-life” balance everyone seems to care about so much. (Find a job you love and you’ll never need to care about creating “work-life” balance again effectively doubling the time spent working towards achieving success in some instances).
When you take all that into consideration, that’s not actually a lot of time to get things done. Take those 8 hours of full time work, that’s how much you’re working per day, but how much are you actually getting done during that time. It could be argued that 4 hours of well rested and highly efficient work can be used to accomplish more than 8 hours of groggy and inefficient work. Thus most studies agree that being well rested allows you to be more productive, healthier, mindful, happy and creative. But given the fact that we just discussed that we really don’t have all that much time to be productive on 8 hours of sleep, is getting that amount or more of sleep and taking more time out of your day (which will either cut into relaxation or work time) really what you want? There’s a reason people will stay up late to watch netflix rather than go to sleep if they think they’ve worked hard and “need a break”.
The solution then is to consolidate the need to be more well rested to gain all of the accompanying benefits and the need to maximize the time we have to do things we want to do, like making productive progress towards our personal goals, careers, or hobbies, and taking personal time to relax and regenerate mentally (mental health is highly important as well as being well rested) by simply being more efficient with our sleep.
What if instead of sleeping 8 hours per day, you slept 6 hours? What if that extra 2 hours could go into your 8 hours of productivity, in theory you would become 25% more productive, but not if you’re more tired, which could make you accomplish less per hour. How you wake up has a large effect on how well rested you feel. Typically sleep is cyclical, meaning you rotate through various stages of sleep. REM sleep, when your body is paralyzed, you’re in dream land, and your brain is essentially cleaning itself of byproducts created during consciousness, the things that make you feel “sleepy”, is naturally the most efficient time to be sleeping. This is when your body is actually becoming less tired. This process rotates however between REM sleep, which we’ll call deep sleep, a midway point, and then being almost awake, before rotating back down into REM sleep. This process is known as the ultradian sleep cycle. When you are at any point in this sleep cycle during unconsciousness that is not at your deepest point, REM sleep, you are not regenerating from fatigue at your maximum capacity. Conversely, if you wake up at any point that is not shallow, almost awake sleep, you will feel groggy and tired because your brain hasn’t finished of it’s ultradian brain-cleaning sleep cycles.
Most people hate their alarm clocks, but sometimes they’re not that bad. Let’s say you have a music alarm. If you wake up to AC/DC or Justin Bieber (not my first choices, even though AC/DC is awesome, but most people I assume know these artists) or some other artist when you’re near the peak of the sleep cycle and are almost awake it could be quite a lovely awakening, after all you do love that song you picked for an alarm. But what if you wake up to that same song during REM sleep, you might instead decide you would rather strangle Justin Bieber than gush at his husky lesbian voice (okay, he’s not THAT bad). This cycle being interrupted makes your sleep less efficient, so in a perfect world we’d ALWAYS want to wake up at the highest point of consciousness in our ultradian sleep cycle. Well there actually is a way to do that and it’s through this application: www.sleepcycle.com/ — I believe iPhones also have a similar functionality now in the default alarm app.
When I was running my previous company I didn’t get a lot of sleep, in fact sometimes creativity struck me at the oddest and most inconvenient times. For example one night I had hit a roadblock in my creativity for a web development design brief I was making for our IT team, so I went to the bar with my friends, and when I got home at 1am I was struck with an idea that caused me to work till 7am to finish it. I do not recommend this to anyone, but for me when I get an idea I need to run with it while the creative juices are flowing. Using this sleep cycle application however I was still able to get 6 hours of sleep, wake up beautifully, and be well rested enough to power through multiple meetings that day, and even be inspired to write this blog post. My other co-founder used this application as well, it’s fantastic. I’d recommend it to anyone wanting to maximize their sleep.
What this app does is it tracks your sleep cycles, so you can see how much time you spend in each stage of sleep, deep sleep, mid-range sleep or light sleep. Eating right, going to bed at consistent times, and waking up at consistent times, avoiding TV and computer screens 2 hours before bed, and exercising regularly all allow your body to better regulate sleep, and allow you to spend more time in REM deep sleep — this is why I don’t recommend staying up till 7am, it’s irregular on your sleep cycle. By maximizing the proportion of REM sleep to the time spent sleeping, you can sleep less hours and feel like you slept more, allowing you to be more well rested, on less sleep, and spend up to 25% more time working towards your dreams and goals. The pro version of the app also gives suggestions to help you do this.
Success is only a matter of time spent towards your goals, make it count.
