Sleeping-In Habbit

~ 6 Minute Read.

I want­ed to start this ar­ti­cle by telling you the sto­ry of how I de­vel­oped the hab­bit of sleep­ing in. Then I re­al­ized, I ac­tu­al­ly don’t know.

It might have been short­ly af­ter high­school, where I was fi­nal­ly able to en­joy my “free­dom” to do so. Back then I still lived at home and my mom would wake me at 10 am at the lat­est. It could just as well have been dur­ing the sec­ond se­mes­ter of Uni­ver­si­ty where my amo­ti­va­tion to at­tend lec­tures (be­cause I rarely learnt some­thing new or in­ter­est­ing and they were op­tion­al, so I was able to look at the slides af­ter­wards in­stead) may have kept me in bed along the lines of “I should, but if I just sleep long enough that I would be late, it won’t be worth driv­ing there any­more.” (Yeah, my men­tal­i­ty to­wards Uni was a lit­tle messed up.) It may have been some­time af­ter 2013 when my pas­sion for de­vel­op­ing Vir­tu­al Re­al­i­ty games with the team I gath­ered around Vhite Rab­bit drove me to work late in­to the night.

What­ev­er it was, un­til half a year ago (end of 2017) I had ma­jor prob­lems get­ting my­self out of bed be­fore 12pm, caus­ing my­self loads of frus­tra­tion about sleep­ing away half of the day and hav­ing less time to work. Con­se­quent­ly I stayed up late to com­pen­sate for the lost time and even not sleep at all a cou­ple of times, fear­ing not get­ting up in the morn­ing, be­cause I knew I’d be a to­tal­ly dif­fer­ent per­son who would not re­mem­ber why it would be amaz­ing to get start­ed with the day.

Btw, did you know that not sleep­ing a night makes you feel sim­i­lar to when you’re drunk? 1 And the at­mos­phere in the very ear­ly morn­ing is en­er­giz­ing.

In­cred­i­bly en­er­giz­ing sun­rise.
(Tak­en 5. Ok­to­ber 2017 7:42 am)

Get­ting-Up Hab­bit

My orig­i­nal in­tent was to write about the so­lu­tion and mere­ly use the prob­lem as a short in­tro­duc­tion – I guess I kin­da ran away with the lat­er.

Sleep is im­por­tant and im­proves your mood, cog­ni­tive abli­ty and phys­i­cal per­for­mance. You can get the most ef­fec­tive sleep some­where around 10pm to 6am 2, hence I rough­ly go to bed around 11pm and set my wake up lamp 4 to ei­ther 5:30am, 6:30am or 7:30am, de­pend­ing on whether I worked out and the time I went to bed. In ad­di­tion to that, I have my mo­bile phone set to an alarm five min­utes lat­er in the bath­room, with my clothes ready next to it. This comes with two ad­van­tages: I don’t use my phone at night – avoid­ing the blue light stim­u­lat­ing cre­ation of hor­mones that cause you to feel awake – and I have to get up, oth­er­wise my room­mate and neigh­bor­hood will wake up in­stead of me.

Once in the bath­room, I might aswell take a show­er, a cold show­er, which is usu­al­ly the point when I will be awake. I would then con­tin­ue with break­fast or go straight to the KN­IME of­fice (where I have a stu­dent job). It helps, though, to do mean­ing­ful work first thing in the morn­ing 3, which since I de­cid­ed to dai­ly blog for a while yes­ter­day is writ­ing a blog post.

If you are one of those lucky peo­ple who live for work, you may al­so be go­ing to bed, ex­cit­ed for the next day… and with that, un­able to fall asleep, maybe hav­ing to deal with “rac­ing mind”. In ad­di­tion to find­ing a reg­u­lar time to go to bed ev­ery day, med­i­ta­tion 5 was prob­a­bly the most sig­nif­i­cant hab­bit I in­tro­duced that helped with that. I use an app called Headspace 6, which has a “sleep pack”, which seemed to have helped with the fall­ing asleep is­sues.

Col­lect­ed links in 20 min­utes, writ­ten in 150 min­utes, ed­it­ed in 10 min­utes. (This re­al­ly grew out of scope, will fo­cus on bre­vi­ty to­mor­row!)

1
HOW to get more qual­i­ty sleep 0:24 by “What I’ve Learned”
2
HOW to get more qual­i­ty sleep 1:53 by “What I’ve Learned”
3
5 Morn­ing Rou­tine Habits of Suc­cess­ful Peo­ple 6:17 by “Charis­ma on Com­mand”
4
I use this wake-up lamp (ama­zon af­fil­i­ate link, in case you want to sup­port me ¯\_(ツ)_/¯), it’s noisy, but “does the job”
5
How Top Per­form­ers Start Their Morn­in­gs
6
Headspace in­vi­ta­tion link (in case you want to sup­port me)