sleep

Clickhole: This Incredible Sleep System has Maximised my Efficency

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The fact is, human beings just didn’t evolve to sleep eight hours at a time. They evolved to do something like this sleep block system I now swear by.

After work on Thursday, I go home right away and do 10-minute rest increments—10 minutes asleep, 10 minutes awake—on and off for 14 hours. Now, this sleep doesn’t officially “count” toward any block. In the system, it’s actually called independent sleep. But it’s crucial, because when I wake up, it’s Monday again. Not the next Monday. The previous Monday. All the work I did that week? Never happened. But do I feel rested? Very.

This Incredible Sleep System Has Maximized My Efficiency – Will Haney, ClickHole (7 November 2014)

Read the full and dizzying piece.

Take naps, just not like this

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Today was the 276th day that I got up to work at 5am and I say this not entirely to boast – actually not to boast much at all as it’s only 276 and I’ve been doing this lark for nearly two years now – but rather to bitch about how I still struggle with going to bed. Two hundred and seventy-six times I’ve got up at 5am. I spelt that 276 out in full because it was the start of a sentence.

(If you kill me and threaten my pets, I still could never begin a sentence with a digit. Partly because I’d be dead, you did that in a stupid order. But I might even be relieved at that instead of the certain knowledge I will soon be writing about 1Password again and it is a right bugger finding different words to put in front of it.)

Anyway. Can’t start a sentence with a digit. But also writing it out in full just underlines how many two hundred and seventy-six times is. It is enough that I should surely to god have worked out how to go to bed at such a time or in such a relaxed way that I don’t want to cry when the alarm goes off.

I’m not there yet, I’m not close. But I’m getting close to being close.

And the latest experiment is the nap.

Lately I’ve been starting at 5am and working through to about 7pm and on days that I take a nap around mid-afternoon, that is a doddle. In fact, I work then to 7pm not because oh-I’m-so-busy but because I’m just into the work and not noticing the time going.

So. I’m not the first to say this and it makes me feel so very old saying it, but here you go, here I am: take a nap.

The good things first. For some reason I really enjoy the sense that I’m getting two days out of every one. I mean, I often feel like this morning was yesterday. Or last night was a week ago. It’s partly my body getting confused but also that when this is working, I am flying through things and it feel as if I am getting so much more done that I must be having more time in which to do it.

So yes, you get refreshed and you do more. Great. The energy you get from a nap, terrific.

But.

I can’t go to bed, even though I work at home. Can’t do it. So I have been napping in my office chair. I tell Siri to switch on Do Not Disturb on my iPhone and then to set a timer for 15 minutes, then I sit there with my eyes closed. And on a good day – I’ve now done this a whole four times, I’m an expert – I go into a remarkably deep sleep.

Except.

Lately it’s been a bit cold and my office tends to be the coldest spot in the house, even though I have a heater in there. So just occasionally and not because I am officially 120 years old, I have a blanket. For three days running now, I have pulled the blanket over my head as I sat there napping.

And.

Today it didn’t work.

I sat there, timer running, Do Not Disturb do not disturbing, with a blanket over my head. And that head of mine thought the words “Our little reading group isn’t perfect, I’ve never said it is.” You’re thinking that’s very random and the part of me that wants to appear in any way mysterious is tempted to just shut up now.

Okay, that was never going to happen. This quote is the opening line of a short story I was commissioned to write. It’s called “The Book Groups” (the plural is everything) and I am going to be reading it at an event later this month. It’s written in first-person prose by a (very) unreliable narrator and that means to me it’s dialogue. It’s a script. I am a scriptwriter even in this short story.

Now, I reckon if you’ve read this far then you’re in, you’re committed, you’ve invested time here and I can tell you something those lesser people who don’t read to the end of articles will never know. It’s this. I am very proud of how often actors have told me that learning my scripts is easy because the dialogue is good. It’s natural and real and it is what the characters would say. I am very proud of that. I recognise that if you don’t happen to be a scriptwriter you might not feel the import I do, but I am and I really do.

And, whisper it, I think I agree now.

Because I can perform The Book Groups. Not read it, I don’t have to read it anymore, I can perform the entire story from memory and in character.

This is relevant because of what happened in the nap today. I sat there with the blanket over my head, I mostly-silently performed The Book Groups, practicing away. I looked like I was furniture that had a drape cloth over it and was moving like a ghost in response to unseen and unheard drama.

I looked like a prat and a half of full-cream milk.

And Angela was working at home today.

Eat that

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Okay, so, there is no question but that the best food in the world is dark chocolate and that the best drink in the world is builders’-strength Yorkshire Tea. Easy. Some poor eejits don’t realise this, though, and have gone off on some damn fool idealistic crusade to find out what foods make you sleep well and which ones keep you up.

Tossing and turning. Long, sleepless nights. They’re draining, frustrating, and, well, exhausting—physically and mentally. And they’re usually unnecessary, experts say, but can be counteracted by minor dietary tweaks. Indeed, what you put in your mouth can directly affect how many ZZZs come out. “The majority of people with day-to-day insomnia could be sleeping like puppies if they made just a few changes,” says Jacob Teitelbaum, medical director of the Fibromyalgia and Fatigue Centers, which are located nationwide, and author of From Fatigued to Fantastic. “And if you know how to eat right? You’re going to be way ahead of the game.”

From cherries to almonds, consider these soothing, snooze-inducing foods:

Bananas. Make them a daily staple. They’re packed with potassium and magnesium, nutrients that double as natural muscle relaxants. Plus, they contain the sleep-inducing amino acid tryptophan, which ultimately turns into serotonin and melatonin in the brain. Serotonin is a neurotransmitter that promotes relaxation; melatonin is a chemical that promotes sleepiness. It takes about an hour for tryptophan to reach the brain, so plan your snack accordingly.

[See: Top-Rated Diets Overall]

Sleep-Promoting (and Sleep-Stealing) Foods – Angela Haupt, US News (19 July 2012)

Bananas are just the first of the good ones and there some bad boys in there too. Read the full piece.

Put your phone away and go to sleep

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photoI have very clearly noticed that I sleep better when my iPhone is not displaying a clock face all night. (I do lower the brightness, I’m not daft. I’m not that daft. Okay, I’m not that daft about that one thing.) Even so, I carry right on doing exactly that and apparently so do you.

Okay, most people with smartphones keep their phones near them at night. Okay, 95% of people in a very specific study do:

I asked staff at BuzzFeed, in a survey, if they ever fall asleep with their phones in their beds. Of the 82 people who responded, 70% said they at least sometimes sleep with their phones in their beds, and 41% said they do it almost every night.
Single people were somewhat more likely to sometimes sleep with their phones in their bed — 78% of singles and 61% of people in relationships said they at least sometimes sleep with their phones in their bed. Roughly 95% said they sleep with their phones either in their beds, or on a nightstand or floor right next to it, and only four people said they leave their phones away from the bed, either in another room or on another side of the room.

We Can’t Stop Sleeping With Our Phones And We’re A Little Anxious About It – Hillary Reinsberg, Buzzed (25 August 2014)

I’m just not sure it’s a problem. I pop my iPhone onto its stand each night and I have this conversation with Siri:

Wake me at 4:59am
Wake me at 5:01am
Switch on Do Not Disturb
Open Awesome Clock

Awesome Clock is the curiously no longer available app that lets me have that clock face on my phone all night. (Gorgeously, you just swipe down and it dims, swipe up and it brightens. Love it.) And the bit with two alarms is that for some reason my iPhone will occasionally fail to make a sound if I ask for one. I set two and it works.

But the key thing there is probably that Do Not Disturb. The phone is on but unless you’re someone I’ve said is important enough to get to me, you don’t. Mind you, in case you’re reading this and thinking both that you thought you were important to me and yet I didn’t answer last night, your getting through my phone is no guarantee of your getting through to my skull. And I did dream about you last night, so you got to me on some entertaining if not very useful level. Hello again. What did you want to say?

Sorry? You want the link for the full Buzzfeed piece? It’s no trouble.

Or you could just set the bloody alarm

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Without exception Matt Galligan’s internal clock nudges his body awake at 6:30 a.m., give or take 20 minutes. “If I go to a bachelor party in Vegas and I’m out until 6 in the morning, I still wake up at 6:30 a.m.,” the CEO of Circa, a popular news app, told Fast Company. “I can’t change.”

Galligan taught himself to wake up without an alarm clock about seven years ago, when he first learned about body clock training. The process is simple: Set an alarm for the same time every morning for 30 days and resist the snooze button. Beware: Waking up early for an entire month, including weekends, results in a lifelong dedication to being a morning person.

How Crica CEO Matt Galligan Trained Himself to Wake Up at 6:30am Without an Alarm Clock – Rebecca Greenfield, Fast Company (11 August 2014)

To be fair, mind, Greenfield’s full piece is really about how you rig your sleep to make sure you’re ready to get up.

Still, I get up at 5am and I’m finezzzzz

When and how to work through the night

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That is, how you can do this when you really have to, when it’s an emergency. Not when you work the nightshift anyway, that’s a whole different bag of hurt. But for deadline-induced all-nighters, Lifehacker has some cautious advice.

Denying your body sleep is naturally unhealthy. As such, there’s one rule above all others for pulling an all-nighter: don’t. Obviously, that’s not always the most practical solution and some days you just have to work late. However, you should always keep in mind that reducing your amount of sleep takes a toll on your body. If minimizing sleep is a part of your typical routine, you’re going to ruin any of the productivity benefits you’d gain with those extra few hours.

All-nighters are also not great for your memory, attention, or focus the following day. Staying up til 4am to study for a test at 8am is a bad idea. Just because you spent all night reading words on pages doesn’t mean your brain retained the information. If you need to function the following day, cut your losses—or at least compromise and get some sleep.

There are still some situations where staying up all night might not kill any benefit you would otherwise gain.

How to Pull an Effective All-Nighter – Eric Ravenscraft, Lifehacker (30 April 2014)

Those situations include how your next day is going to be, whether it’s a light day once you’ve delivered on that deadline. But there is more: do have a read of the full piece.

I did none of this

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Barely slept last night but was so tired I couldn’t focus. There’s an email I want to reply to but I’ve had to leave it because its words just were not going in to my head. Now that there is daylight and I’m full of tea, I find this which might help either of us if this happens again:

Regardless, those hours of wakefulness at night can be spent in panic or paralysis, or you can do something productive about them.

“What is insomnia, but the gift of more time?” says Michael Perlis, associate professor of psychology and director of the Behavioral Sleep Medicine Program at the University of Pennsylvania. Perlis is not advocating for purposely losing sleep, but if faced with short-term insomnia, he says, it’s best to treat the time productively rather than tossing for hours in bed. Think of insomnia as an opportunity to get stuff done.

How to Turn Your Insomnia into a Productivity Tool – Jane Porter, Fast Company (21 January 2014)

Porter’s full advice boils down to not spending too long trying to get sleep, grab a pen and do some writing work instead. She has a point of course but right now I dread to think what peculiar words would’ve come.

Why you need and how to get energy

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The productivity blog Asian Efficiency – blog isn’t a big enough word, AE is a huge deal I should check on more often – argues that you should stuff productivity and instead focus on your energy. Because without energy, you can’t be productive. This feels like a theme of the week for me because writer Thang Pham begins with sleep:

Sleep is the first thing we tend to sacrifice when life gets busy, but it should be the last. When we don’t get enough sleep, our decision making skills, quality of focus and engagement drastically go down. Every book on neuroscience I’ve read verifies this.

The problem is that we tend to mask it with 3 cups of coffee a day but that doesn’t fix the root cause. Then when friends and family come to me for a solution, they look at me weird when I tell them to sleep more.

It sounds so counter-intuitive, but it’s that one thing that actually makes a huge difference.

Forget about time management. Focus on this instead – Thanh Pham, Asian Efficiency (undated)

I’m not sure it’s the best article Asian Efficiency has done. I’ve got a lot of OmniFocus advice from the site before and this one feels a bit lecturing. But the advice in the full piece is good, I think.

Work while you sleep

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Sounds perfect: where do I sign up? Sleep is for tortoises, except at 5am in the morning when only the insane are up, alongside the nightshift, suffering parents and all farmers.

From The Muse:

…What if you didn’t have to say goodbye to sleep in order to be productive? What if you could utilize your sleeping hours to actually get chores and tasks done?

8 Ways to Get More Done While You Sleep – Catherine Jessen, The Muse (12 June 2014)

I’m listening. Go on.

We decided that you should be able to be productive while you sleep, so we’ve rounded up these eight awesome links that will inspire you to dive under those covers and catch come Z’s (while still getting stuff done).

O-kay… and an example? Give me one example of the 8.

1. Develop creative solutions by allowing the intrinsic part of your brain’s pattern recognition systems to assess what it saw during the day and spit out innovative answers in the morning.

2. Do you need to remember something important? Studies show that we can reinforce existing memories during deep sleep. Make sure you’ve already reviewed or learned the material you want to memorize at least once before conking out.

3. Make money while you sleep by siphoning off a portion of your paycheck into an account where it can grow thanks to compound interest.

That’s three, but thanks. The last one is specific and financial, the first is a psychology way of saying give it a rest and the second is the kind of optimistic thinking I employ the night before a deadline. But each one of these and the other five tips is really just a heading and then includes a link out to more detail and more research. Do give the full piece a read, then.