Put the screen down and go to sleep

Posted by William Gallagher

You do this. I’ve seen how tired you are in the mornings so I know you do this. It’s pretty late at night, you’re walloped and you know you should go to bed. You know you want to. You also know that there is not one damn thing stopping you going. Yet you stay there.

You find something to read on your iPad, you check out something on your iPhone, maybe you use other devices and one doesn’t like to judge. But it’s bad and you should stop it and I don’t care that it’s hard or that you just want five more minutes:

Why it’s harmful: Anyone who’s missed out on sleep thanks to a deadline or bawling infant is familiar with the irritability, stress, and gloom that can set in the next day. If sleep deprivation and disturbances become chronic, they increase a person’s risk of developing depression or anxiety disorders.

What you can do: Prioritize sleep and practice healthy bedtime behaviors, such as limiting caffeine and alcohol in the hours before bed. It’s also important to curb your computer, tablet, and smartphone use late at night, Buse says; the blue light emitted by these devices suppresses the sleep hormone melatonin and can disrupt your circadian rhythm.

12 Ways We Sabotage Our Mental Health – Health.com

That quote is of the complete text to the 4th of the 12 Ways. I quote it so you don’t have to schlep through an irritating slideshow where every step is on a different page solely to build up the hit counts on the site. But actually, the other 11 are pretty good. If you have a minute, some patience and a steady hand, do take a quick glance through them on the full feature.

This is why you are all the time tired

Posted by William Gallagher

You’re getting up at 5am, you’re stopping around 6pm. Also, you’re stupid. Nah, it can’t be any of that, except maybe the stupid. Time magazine has 14 better reasons, which include ones that I know for sure are what cause me problems:

You have trouble saying ‘no’

People-pleasing often comes at the expense of your own energy and happiness. To make matters worse, it can make you resentful and angry over time. So whether it’s your kid’s coach asking you to bake cookies for her soccer team or your boss seeing if you can work on a Saturday, you don’t have to say yes. Train yourself to say ‘no’ out loud, suggests Susan Albers, a licensed clinical psychologist with Cleveland Clinic and author of Eat.Q.: Unlock the Weight-Loss Power of Emotional Intelligence. “Try it alone in your car,” she says. “Hearing yourself say the word aloud makes it easier to say it when the next opportunity calls for it.”

14 Reasons You’re Tired All the Time – Time magazine (8 June 2014)

Click that link and immediately see a four-word summary of the whole piece. As I’m seeing so often now, it looks like a writer saved the story under a straightforward title and that’s what the URL was built from. The article itself has had its name changed but the underlying web address still refers to how /bad-habits-drain-energy/.

I love spotting that kind of thing. It’s like web detective work. CSI: WWW.

But anyway, that never-saying-no is just one of several salutary sections of advice in the full piece.

To sleep, perchance to put the screen down and snore

Posted by William Gallagher

If I’m only sometimes good about adding contact phone numbers right after we speak, I’m terrible at this. I am atrocious at switching off my iPad or any screen. And I should fix that. You should fix that.

Put – the – screen – down.

Do it at least an hour before you go to bed and you will sleep better.

Promise.

Pinky promise.

A pinky promise that I swear to stand by for myself too.

In space, no one can hear you snore

Posted by William Gallagher

Astronauts have a bad time sleeping, apparently. Such a bad time that it affects their work. And as I am still doing this ridiculous getting up to work at 5am and collapsing asleep at any time from about 5:05am to midnight, I’m seeing some of these problems myself. If you have similar problems, this may help. If you haven’t, if you sleep like a lamb with an electric blanket, read it as a somewhat dull episode of Star Trek:

…cosmonaut Valentin Lebedev reported in his diary that he had a tendency to make mistakes on days following an unusually late bedtime; on one occasion he took fifty Earth-observation photographs through a closed porthole before realizing his error.

Four Things Astronauts Can Teach You About a Good Night’s Sleep – Barking Up the Wrong Tree

Writer Eric Barker is quoting there from a book called Bold Endeavors: Lessons from Polar and Space Exploration and says first that NASA took some notice – and, second, that the issues that cause these problems are now ones affecting us all. Astronauts no longer have sunrise and sunset, they don’t have day and night or at least they get a lot of them, an awful lot of them, as they whip around the planet. Quoting The Paleo Manifesto: Ancient Wisdom for Lifelong Health:

Today our bodies have become thoroughly confused by the artificial signals of modern life. Light is no longer a cyclical function of the sun, but of always-on indoor lights, TV screens, and computer monitors. Temperature no longer follows a dynamic cycle of cooling at night and warming during the day but sits at a static level set by the thermostat. Human chatter and social interaction used to follow a natural ebb and flow, but now we are more likely to live and sleep in isolation from real people, even while we have 24/7 access to artificial people (faces on TV, voices on the radio). Then, after utterly confusing our circadian rhythm, we try to take back control with stimulants (caffeine, nicotine) and depressants (alcohol, sleeping pills). Is it any wonder that a third of Americans are chronically sleep-deprived?

Barker himself suggests some solutions:

Maintain a consistent schedule, even on weekends. Keep in mind the “free-running” problem. Your body will push later if given the chance.
Take an hour to wind down before bed. Yes, you’re busy. But your time is not more precious than an astronaut’s. So take the time to wind down.

He has more in the full and deliciously link-replete article that will have you off reading in deep corners of the internet.

You are feeling very sleepy

Posted by William Gallagher

The Blank Screen is about being productive. I have a section in the book (UK edition, US edition) devoted to the issue that “Time off is vital” and it says:

Apparently.

That’s all I’ve got for you about time off. I don’t do time off, I don’t know from time off.

But I’m learning a hell of a lot about sleeping.

This is still a work in progress and I would like to have figured it all out now but I’ll take anything I can get. Since January 2013 I have been getting up to write at 5am weekdays. (Not every weekday: I’ll book time off for lots of reasons like speaking engagements that mean I’m not home until 1am the night before. I’m not daft. I’m insane, but I’m not daft.) Today was day 223 and it was stunningly hard but as I almost always am, I am glad I did it because I got three big things done that were pressing on me. I’d finished them before 10am so suddenly Monday morning looked pretty good to me.

But.

The big downside of getting up at 5am is – well, okay, it is the getting up at 5am. But the second big downside is how tired I get toward the end of the day. Both the end of the working day and of the real day of the week. Actually, in some ways that’s an improvement for me: I now want and get evenings off where before I’d just carry on working until I stopped. The trouble is that I can be so bone-tired that the evenings are a struggle to stay upright.

It’s not as if you get a choice about stopping working and taking the evening off, though. Tonight I’ve got a Writers’ Guild committee meeting, for instance, and I’ll be home from that around 10pm. I don’t know about you but I can’t just go straight to bed. At least, I rarely can: I’ve had some times in the 5am Years when I’ve had to crash out instantaneously. But usually I have to wind down a touch so that means tonight it’ll be 11pm before I go to bed.

So 5am to 11pm, it isn’t tenable. Much as I wish it were, I can’t do it. Can’t do it without help. I’ve tried caffeine, I am currently powered by caffeine, but I’m also trying napping.

Even saying that to you feels wrong. Why is that? I don’t work 9-5, I do work for myself, why does it feel so wrong to take a nap? I was struggling today so I slept from about 1:30pm to 2:30pm. It isn’t like having a second day, like getting up entirely refreshed, but where I was finding my mind folding in on itself before the nap, after it I sprang back out of the bed.

It feels like such a waste of time but the work I’ve done since has been better for it. As far as I can tell subjectively, the work I’ve done since that nap has been as good as the work I did first thing this morning. That’s got to be a good thing, that’s got to be a productive thing to pull off.

So we’ll see. There are so many days when I can’t do this – because I’m working in someone else’s office and they’re paying me to, I don’t think naps would go down well there – but when I can, I’m going to try doing it. I should try to do this with some statistical measure so I can assess what’s working regularly and reliably.

One thing that may help is a new app that I haven’t tried yet but wanted to tell you about. It’s called Best Sleep Hygiene and that’s one of those titles that doesn’t make any more sense the longer you know it and that you don’t get used to. It’s not about hygiene, it’s about how long and how well we sleep. I tell you, the title is giving me pause. But it’s a free app and it promises to analyse your sleep patterns. So I want to at least point it out to you even if, like a typical writer, the title is holding me back from exploring it here.

Time Your Power Nap Naturally with Einstein and Dali’s Key Method

Posted by wg

Not one article about power napping but several – take a look through this from Lifehacker:

http://lifehacker.com/time-your-power-nap-naturally-with-einstein-and-dalis-1476441918

That article includes the Einstein and Dali methods of the title but it also begins with links out to other rather good Lifehacker pieces about the best time for a nap – and the best duration too.