Tero Miettunen .com

Do not neglect the importance of good sleep. If you live alone, the optimal way of sleeping is not to have any alarm clocks at all and sleep whenever you are tired. This would probably lead you to a bi-phasic sleeping pattern without caffeine. So you’d sleep two times a day, like the Spanish. Bi-phasic sleeping pattern has been scientifically studied to be more suitable for the brains of humans than the most common, monophasic one. Sleeping cycles are very near to exactly 1.5 hours each, which means that the most optimal amounts of actual sleep are 1.5, 3, 4.5, 6 and 7.5 hours. Between each cycle there is a time when you don’t sleep and that is the best time to wake up at. I understand that it is real hard if not impossible to sleep the optimal amounts at optimal times when you don’t live alone but then you just have to try what fits your status the best. Never, ever intentionally try to sleep exactly 1.5 * X hours if you don’t easily fall into sleep quickly because it will just make your body think that there’s some threat which causes you to want to get some sleep so quickly and you’ll have a much harder time getting sleep. Thinking too much about optimal sleep can be worse than not thinking about it at all for those of us who often have a hard time falling asleep.If you wake up while you are on REM sleep (dreaming), you will often not feel groggy but probably some data transfer in your brain was interrupted. It is much worse if you wake up while you are on non-REM sleep (not dreaming) because you will probably wake up feeling groggy and drowsy and that can ruin the start of your day especially without caffeine.

It is also a good idea to become an early riser because people are meant to rise early in the morning and thus our sleeping habits are more natural then. Some other modern benefits of doing so are that there’s often less noise and less heat. I’m talking about 6-7 AM, any sooner than that is often not optimal.

If it takes you longer than 20 minutes to sleep after you’ve gone to bed, avoid caffeine during the last 6 hours of your awaking time because caffeine affects for about 6 hours after consumption.
Sports (except those that put your body on adrenaline, like the gym), food and sex also help with getting sleep faster.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 13th, 2006 at 4:40 pm and is filed under Efficiency. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.