[extropy-chat] Healthy, wealthy and wise

[Martin Striz]

On 4/10/06, "Hal Finney" <hal at finney.org> wrote:
> 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.

While this may work, it ignores the fact that there are real
biological differences between people in tems of their sleep
physiology, such as length of circadian cycle, ability to phase shift,
rate at which sleep debt gets paid off during sleep, etc.  There's a
lively debate among sleep researchers over what particular sleep
variables differentiate "morning people" from "night people," and
there's no clear concensus.  The species average circadian period for
humans is 24.3 hrs, slightly longer than a day.  That's why most
people find it easier to stay up/get up later than earlier, and to fly
east to west (where time effectively gets delayed) rather than the
other way.  Of course, some people will be on the low end of the
spectrum, right around 24 hrs, or even earlier, so each day they feel
a pressure to get up at the same time or even earlier.  Those may be
morning people.

Martin