Getting up early

After reading Steve Pavlina's articles on getting up early (Part 1 and Part 2) and thinking about my own experiences with getting up early, I took on a 30 day, pre 5:30 wakup challenge.

I, like Mr. Pavlina, have never really been an early riser. In college, I avoided 8:00 am classes like I would catch cancer by attending. My tendencies were encouraged by an English department that really didn't get going until about noon. I then married and started getting up earlier, but still hating every minute of it. Yet, on days when I got up early (especially on weekends), I was amazed at how much longer the day seemed. The problem of "not enough time" seemed to diminish in a major way.

Reading his articles led me to do some more looking into sleep research and discovering that, like so many other things, there's an optimum zone of sleeping time: 6.5 to 8.5 hours. Outside of that range, for most people, there are consequences like diminished attention, tiredness, etc. I did the quick math and realized that I'm frequently on the large side of 8.5. So, this 30 day challenge that I started this week was to see if moving it backward in the optimum range would find where I actually should be. Sure enough, within the first couple of days, I was yawning less, staying awake just fine and, with 1.5 or so more hours in a weekday, getting more done.

However, the weekends are where the challenge finds both it's greatest benefit and it's greatest challenge. I'm sitting at the computer at 5:40 on Sunday morning after an epic inner struggle to leave my bed. Yet, once up, I'm fine. And, I'm now facing an extra 4-5 hours that I wouldn't have had on a normal Sunday morning. Think about that once. By moving from a 7:00 am rise on weekdays and a 9:30 am rise on weekends, I'm gaining 15.5 hours a week in available time. That's equivalent to a part time job. It's nearly 2 full working days per week. I think I'll definitely be keeping up with this once the 30 days is up.

And, once the Sleep Number bed arrives, I'm expecting the sleep I do get to make it easier to keep up with this. After trying it in the store and reading through the research, I'm hopeful. Particularly encouraging is the quote from the Stanford study on the bed, "and that subjective report of sleep quality is paralleled by objective sleep parameters, including a lesser amount of light sleep stages, increased amount of REM sleep, and slow wave sleep." I like that bit because of the objective portion. People often are their own best placebo, but you're not going to fake more REM sleep.