The following things have become quite clear to me in the last couple weeks:
- I really like rising early and having more time in my day.
- The schedule, when it works, really works
- Midday naps are awesome
- I can’t keep the schedule for shit.
Okay, that last one requires some explanation.
I possess the necessary self discipline to go to bed or nap at all the correct times, and I very rarely oversleep on naps. In fact, I’ll quite often wake up from naps just before the alarm would go off. However, where I’m failing is waking up from my 3 hour core sleep, and I’m failing hard. Only 6 of the last 13 days have avoided falling back asleep after the alarm goes off or missing the alarm entirely. That’s more than a 50% failure rate. As a result, I don’t think my data is accurate in terms of how well the schedule works is sufficiently accurate. I’m not sure I’ve been able to correctly fall into REM sleep during 20 minute naps.
So the obvious course of action is to chalk this up as a failed, if informative, experiment and return to a sane sleep schedule.
Ahahahahah. No.
The obstacle I’ve run into is that I’ll wake up and then neglect to get out of bed before I fall asleep. This very irritating: I’ll wake up, hit my alarm, and lie down, and then I’m DONE. At 2:30 immediately upon waking up, I am NOT thinking straight, so it’s not a matter of willpower. However, this isn’t an insurmountable obstacle.
I found this article, and like most of the advice on this guy’s site, it strikes me as very sound advice. In general, I’d recommend reading the articles on StevePavlina.com, since they’re free and he got good, common sense advice and nothing really sets off my bullshit detector.
The gist of this particular piece of advise is that since you can’t trust yourself at the moment of waking to make the right decision, you instead make it a habituated response. The moment the alarm goes off, you pop out of bed by habit. The way to do this is simple: practise.
So I’m going to be making a conscious effort to change how I wake up. This means more than just practising in the mornings, though that’ll happen too, but to practise throughout the day as well. Since I’m already scheduling 20 minute naps throughout the day, that provides me an excellent opportunity. For the most part, nothing will change, except that I’m now going to be trying to simulate real sleeping conditions when possible (same alarms, lighting, etc) and to bolt up and get moving the moment that alarm rings! Again, since I’m already on the Everyman, this shouldn’t be quite so difficult as it sounds.
So lets see if I can’t get this thing on track.
