[extropy-chat] Healthy, wealthy and wise

[Hal Finney]

A couple of weeks ago via digg.com I found this article on "How to
have a 36 hour day", with various time-saving and efficiency tips.
Worth reading, but the part I found most interesting suggested changing
sleep habits.  It points to a blog by Steve Pavlina, who has a couple
of ideas for more efficient sleep, a moderate one and an extreme one.

The moderate idea is simply, "early to bed and early to rise".  Steve
argues that getting up at a regular time will instill good sleeping
habits and lead to improved productivity.  He also discusses ways to
make converting to being a "morning person" easier for those of us who
more often are awake at midnight than 6 AM:

http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/05/how-to-become-an-early-riser/

> The optimal solution for me has been to combine both approaches. It's very
> simple, and many early risers do this without even thinking about it, but
> it was a mental breakthrough for me nonetheless. The solution was to go to
> bed when I'm sleepy (and only when I'm sleepy) and get up with an alarm
> clock at a fixed time (7 days per week). So I always get up at the same
> time (in my case 5am), but I go to bed at different times every night.

The key is to go to sleep when you are tired but to get up when the alarm
goes off, regardless.  After a few days the body adjusts and you naturally
get tired at a time that will give you enough sleep.  Steve found that he
was sleeping about 90 minutes less a night but still felt well rested,
and was very productive in the early morning hours when most people are
still sleeping.

I'm tempted to try this although it would be a big change for me.
I usually go to sleep after midnight and don't get up until about 9, or
even later recently with the time change.  During college I experimented
for a few weeks with a sleep cycle where I went to bed when I was tired
and got up when I felt like it.  I found that I naturally stayed up
about two hours later every day, living a 26 hour day.

Getting up early has always been hard for me but maybe Steve Pavlina's
ideas would work.  The prospect of gaining an extra hour-plus per day
is definitely exciting.

Steve is actually now using an even more extreme sleeping style:
"polyphasic sleep", basically taking short naps several times a day
instead of sleeping at night.  He switched to this method last fall
and has had good results from it.  He sleeps about 20-30 minutes every 4
hours, for a total of only 2-3 hours of sleep a day.  Few people have been
successful with this system but it works great for him.  He blogged his
whole history of switching to this method, what he went through and what
he felt like: http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/10/polyphasic-sleep/
It's an amazing case history even if not many of us would be willing or
able to make such drastic changes.

Hal