TL;DR: If you’re looking for ways to improve sleep, particularly wake times and the first hour of wakefulness, then it might be worth trying an alarm clock that plays music with a fading volume. You may find that music fading in from silent to “loud enough” over a 10 minute period significantly improves your experience of waking up in the morning. If your sleep cycles are so screwed up that you’re not even sleeping at night, then try sleeping pills so that you’re at least sleeping consistently during night hours and then have the luxury of tweaking your sleep habits.
I just had the best waking up experience of my life.
It was the best because I felt refreshed and ready for the day after only sleeping 5 hours, woke up in a particularly great mood, and had none of the usual urges that I assumed were a required part of waking up before midday. Things like continually hitting snooze and feeling exhausted, dreading that first hour or two of cloudy thinking and drowsiness while I approached a fully conscious state, etc.
I have almost always been a “night person”. There have been periods in the past where for a few months or so I’d get into the habit of waking earlier than usual, maybe 6 or 7 am because of work commitments, but generally I’d trend back towards waking up anywhere after 9am, usually much later. I found it annoying because that would mean arriving at work or a meeting after only having been awake for an hour or less, not being totally “on”. I’d mitigate by scheduling meetings later in the day, but this can interrupt hours of greatest productivity. Recently it got worse.
Events and symptoms that brought things to a critical point and had me start seriously seeking change:
- Falling into new sleep cycles that were very different from a typical 7 hours of sleep during night hours every 24 hours. My typical experience in the new sleep cycle was 30 hours awake, 1 hour sleep, 8 hours awake, then anywhere from 10 to 16 hours catch up sleep.
- The new sleep cycle gave me a sense of being “stupider”, as though I’d lost a few IQ points even in my most activated waking states.
- On the rare occasion that I woke up at 6am after at least 5 hours of sleep I would feel happier – to me this really feels like the way life should be lived. I love beautiful things, and the morning is beautiful. I’d have more energy throughout the day, and lots of other hard-to-measure benefits like a different, more positive attitude, clearer thinking, etc.
- In a recent project I worked on, I had a few occasions where I’d be barely present at the daily 11am project meetings – not cool. This felt like operating at about 1% of my potential.
- The ever increasing weirdness of my sleep cycle started concerning me more and more, so whenever I woke up after 8am, which was almost every single day, I’d start the day feeling “beaten”. Again, not cool.
- I developed a special ability over the years of hitting snooze or turning off an alarm all together without waking up or remembering having done it. I could do it even if it meant walking to the other side of my bedroom, where I might place my alarm to “force” me to wake up at a certain time. It couldn’t have been total unconsciousness because I wouldn’t do this if there was some crucial reason for waking up in time. How long am I going to tolerate this? A few months becomes a few years becomes a lifetime. Do I really want to waste 2 hours every single day of my life fighting with an alarm clock?
The first thing I did was intentionally not make value judgements about any of this, even though it was tempting some times. I found this required intentional effort after mentioning my sleep issues to some people. I got the impression that they thought I was some kind of lazy person, or loser.
At other times I’d encounter people who could relate, and we’d console ourselves by acknowledging that we’re “night people” and come 8pm we work like demons and produce great work. Sleep problems and being useless before midday are the price we pay for our “genius”. It’s comforting to believe this, but I think it’s bullshit. Is it really impossible to have 100% of your waking hours be purposefully used, whether for work or play?
Making a judgement like “I must just be lazy” or “that’s just me” is a waste of time. Judgements aren’t solutions – they’re like stalling tactics and it’s lazy thinking to accept a judgement as a solution.
Problem 1: How to sleept at night
The first thing I had to solve was getting back to consistently sleeping at night, regardless of exact waking periods. If you’re not falling asleep until 8am then figuring out how to improve your morning wake up times is the least of your worries for now. These attempted solutions did not work:
- Incrementally decreasing wake up time
Why not slowly change your wake up time over a period of days, starting at 2pm one day, then 1pm, 12noon, 11am etc? This totally failed in my case. It is possible to wake up at any time for at least a few days just as an act of will, which I did, but I felt completely wasted all day, and wasn’t fully awake until many hours later. Then after a few days of feeling completely wasted using these acts of will I’d crack and have a night of lying in bed awake until 8am, then sleep till 4pm, and all my re-adjustment work would go to waste - Going to bed earlier
This one seemed to work pretty well in years gone by but just didn’t seem to do it any more. I never suffered insomnia per se, because I’d always recover sleep debt within 3 days, but I had many nights where I’d dutifully go to bed at about 11pm and then lie there for 6 hours or more just waiting to fall asleep. I never felt anxious or stressed or a “racing mind” as I’ve heard other insomnia sufferers describe – I just had the sensation that it was day time and that I should be awake. Totally bizarre, and probably due to a work schedule in the second half of 2012 during which I unwittingly evolved well away from normal sleep habits.
The wikipedia entries on shifted sleep cycles and other various sleep disorders that aren’t insomnia make for interesting reading, but I’m less interested in self diagnosis and understanding my special and unique problems than I am in growth.
Solution:
In my case it was Zolpidem. I didn’t have to take it often – just once a week initially then almost never. This drug was strong enough to send me to sleep at 11pm even if I’d only been awake for 8 hours, so this reset my sleep cycle and got me back to sleep during night hours. Then I could work on the next, original problem of perfecting wake up time.
Problem 2: How to enjoy waking up at a predetermined time of your choosing
One solution that didn’t work was going to sleep early enough so that I’d have at least 8 hours of sleep before my wake up time. This surprised me because I’d accepted the common belief that tiredness is caused by lack of sleep. It didn’t work because
- Even with 8 hours of sleep I would find that my wake up experience could still have all the negative aspects attributed to short sleep.
- At other times after only 5 hours of sleep I would wake up feeling just great. This would happen rarely and if I had the option, I would like all my sleep experiences to be in this category.
I achieved my best wake up experience ever by using a morning alarm with volume fader.
After solving problem 1 of being able to sleep during night hours, the only other change I made was using an app called Alarm Clock on my iPhone instead of the default Clock app. The experience:
- Night Before, 11pm: Set alarm for 8am. I used my two favorite songs from the Heat Soundtrack God Moving Over the Face of the Waters and Ultramarine (total play time of 17 minutes) and set the fade in time to be 10 minutes with volume increasing from 0 to my estimate of loud enough. My iPhone is plugged into my stereo for better quality audio.
- Night Before, 2am: Still awake after reading for a couple of hours, no need for Zolpidem because I was already used to falling asleep during night hours.
- Morning of, pre-wakefulness: I was dreaming that I was in a Biggest Loser training session with the cast of Jersey Shore (weird dream as usual, related to recently watching a few episodes of Biggest Loser and also the movie Three Stooges in which the Jersey Shore cast make cameos). The dream turned epic when I started having a deep conversation with the trainer about God and the meaning of life. This was probably when my sleeping self first became aware of the music growing in the background
- Morning of, on waking at 8:07am: I open my eyes, staring at the ceiling, feeling refreshed in a great mood, no sudden urge to run out and turn off alarm. It’s just calmly there in the background and I’m enjoying waking up in my warm bed.
OH MY GOD!
- I continue laying there and let the music play out.
- Morning of, 8:17am: The music is on loop so when track 1 starts again I get up and turn off the music. I have no noticeable urge to go back to bed. I go about my day.
This was my best ever wake up experience because I did not have to chose between intentional wake up time OR enjoying waking up. I got both, and on only 5 hours sleep. Beautiful.
The main lesson for me here is that I now think achieving a great waking experience has more to do with managing my sleep cycles than it does the actual amount of time I slept. By using music with fading volume my theory is that I gently brought my sleep phase to light sleep before waking, avoiding a sudden wake event during deep sleep which would trigger my ability to shut of alarms without remembering.
Another factor could be that if you are dreaming right before waking up, then managing the content of the dream so that it makes you feel positive in some way increases the likelihood that you respond positively to waking stimuli.
Yet another factor in this case could be that the hope of improved sleep experience was enough to temporarily alter my usual habits. Future posts in the coming weeks will confirm / deny this one.
Final Thoughts:
I’ve found that some will power is still required to get in bed at a reasonable time and disengage from media. My specific weakness is consuming books and various blog articles for hours on end. One change that I found helped with this was to use either physical books or the lowest possible brightness setting on my tablet while reading. In my experience an LED screen on full brightness has a kind of energizing effect that wires me up and activates my mind.
I’ve also noticed that the quality of the media being consumed relates to my general level of happiness but I’ll save that for a future post.