Reversing My Sleep Schedule
I decided to become an early riser recently because I figured I could get more done during the day than staying up all night on the computer. Ben Franklin and Aristotle both made a good point with connecting early rising with success.
Failed attempts
When I first started trying to get a handle on this situation, I got up at 5am for thirty days as a trial. The alarm would ring, and I’d wake up in a slightly unconscious state until 8am. My strategy was to simply set the clock back to 5am and go to bed anytime I wanted. I had read about this technique on Steve Pavlina’s blog; however, I didn’t find it that effective because I had to hold my eyes open for 3 hours until I was fully awake. I later realized I needed to figure out how to change my biological clock as well as the alarm clock.
Another thing I tried to do was decrease my wake-up time in slow increments. I noticed how slowly evolving from a diet to another actually helped my friends lose weight. So I thought, “Hey that could work for getting up early too!” At first I was getting out of bed at 2:30pm which was pretty bad. My goal was to wake up at 8am the latest, so I set the clock back 13 minutes a day. I went from 2:30 to 12noon successfully, but the hard part was trying to go below 12:00pm. I would always sleep in and get up at noon. The evolutionary method for waking up earlier was deemed a failure for me. I guess my circadian rhythm doesn’t reprogram itself that way.
Weird, yet slightly successful attempts
Due to the failure of the last attempt, this time I decided to become an early riser without any alarm clocks. I stayed up the whole night first night of this exercise. When the sun came up at around 7 or 8am, I went to bed and slept during the day. I cracked the window a little bit to make sure there was some light while I was sleeping, but not enough to keep me awake, just enough to keep me out of REM. So I slept during the day for 2 days. I noticed that after doing this, I went to bed the next night at around 10pm, and got up at 2am. Then I went to bed the following night at 10pm because I was extremely tired, and I woke up at 5am. What messed up the whole thing was that the third night, I forgot to set the alarm clock to a goal time and instead woke up at 10am, forcing me to go to bed at 2am the fourth night. This attempt would have been successful had I used an alarm clock.
I figured out this method from when I used to DJ at clubs and came home the next day. I would get mad and assumed I messed up my sleeping schedule, but actually I noticed it would reset my weekday schedule because I’d sleep during the day and lose REM, and then when Sunday rolled around I was going to bed early. Instead of building my sleep schedule from the top down, I was building it from the bottom up.
My breakthrough
Here’s how I became a consistent early riser. One day I thought to myself, “If I could only be able to keep my eyes closed during the night, falling sleep wouldn’t be a problem.” So then I grabbed a long, clean black sock from my dad’s drawer, tied it around my eyes like a ninja, and went to bed and kept it tied for 20 minutes. I then took it off because I didn’t need it and it became slightly uncomfortable; my eyes were shut closed, and it felt like the sock was on anyway. I had my alarm clock set to my goal time which was 7am, and woke up without a problem. I stayed awake throughout the whole day.
June 8th, 2008 at 6:48 am
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