4 AM: Sleep or Make the Most of It?
4 AM: Sleep or Make the Most of It?
If you are awake at 4 am, and have to be at work at 7, should you even try to get back to sleep or should you try to do something with your time?
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Sleep cycles are usually around 90mins, so you could theoretically get 2 of those in before 7am. Or, you could try doing something calming for 90mins, and only get one cycle in. Yoga, reading a book etc.
I vote this. The 90 minute REM cycle is no joke.
My personal sleep therapy approach:
- Deduct 30 minutes from when you need to wake up. Set one alarm for this time, one alarm for your normal time. If you do nothing else, do this. It’s awesome, trust me.
- Deduct another 30 minutes then figure out how many 90-minute periods fit between now and that time. Go to bed at the beginning of one of those periods.
- If you need to go to sleep 30 or 60 minutes earlier for some reason, add another “snooze” or two at the end.
What this does:
- Prevents getting up in the middle of REM, which is what causes you to feel like death even though you got enough sleep
- Gives you a 30-minute window to fall asleep first
- Wakes you up 30 minutes early in case something messed with your cycle and you feel like crap. Hitting snooze on your alarm clock gives you a bewildering 9-minute, 11-minute, or other arbitrary bit of extra sleep, but giving you a consistent 30-minute snooze period starts your morning with a reliable power nap instead of just gambling on your timing. You always wake up feeling good from a power nap.
Example: it’s 9 pm, I have to be up at 6. I set alarms for 5:30 and 6:00, then go to bed at 9:30 so I have 30 minutes to fall asleep, followed by 7.5 hours of sleep, which is 5 cycles. I wake up at 5:30, immediately kill the alarm, then wake up again at 6 and start my day.
Note: In general, I wouldn’t have three 30-minute snoozes. I’d just go to bed later. I try to avoid stacking two or more power naps at the end, but sometimes I will if I’m not going to be getting much sleep otherwise, like if I go to sleep NOW, I might get 3 hours.
Used to do this and it was wonderful. I have a smart watch to track sleep, I wonder if there's an app to automatically detect a certain amount of sleep cycles and wake you at a good time instead of guessing.
There are several Apple Watch apps and such that rather than use a timer, use various biometrics and movement sensing to try and identify when you’re out of REM and start a vibration alarm that increases over time across a 30-minute window. Depending on what smartwatch you use, there might be something.
Edit: on Apple Watch I have an app that does this called AutoWake (it has a companion sleep tracking app called AutoSleep) but I don’t wear the watch to bed anymore.
Android has a good one that's simply called "Sleep". They track your movement and try to estimate light sleep in a set period before your actual wake time.
It worked pretty good in the past (not perfectly of course) but I've been waking close to my wakeup time for years now, so I just use it for tracking.
Pretty much what I do exactly. I have an app that notifies me 1hr before it's 8hrs from wake up time. So basically, I get notified 9hrs before I want to wake up. I go to sleep 8hrs before, but realistically fall asleep around 7.5hrs before I want to wake up. Then, if I feel groggy when I wake up, I do a 30min snooze. Sometimes I'll also take a caffeine/theanine pill before the 30min snooze. Then you reallly wake up.
The option to sleep an extra half hour when you don’t want to get up is key. I recommend it for anyone. It’s so worth it.
I actually do this but for a different reason. I keep an alarm 15m before my actual alarm, which tells me to get ready to wake up. This gives me time to get comfortable waking up and wake up to the time I want to wake up. This works so well because I don't really want to hear the second alarm go off which incentivises me wake up atleast 5m before my second alarm.