Wake Up!: Part III

I have had some success in my battle against the alarm clock, for about 10 days straight before I went home for Christmas vacation I got up at 6am when my alarm went off even on the weekends. Using Steve Pavlina's strategy of making my reaction to my alarm clock automatic, instead of trying to will myself out of bed. It actually worked quite well, the only problem is that when Christmas rolled around I was less motivated to get up at 6am. Pavlina suggests you stick to the same wake up time for 30 days. Well now that I'm back into the swing of things I am going to try and incorporate it again with a bit of a twist. Link to Steve Pavlina's post

I received the book the 4 Hour Body by Tim Ferris author of the 4 Hour Work Week Tim has done a lot in his lifetime and can probably be best described as a Productivity guru, I think that would probably be my dream job. Tim talks about effective ways to gain muscle, lose weight, run faster and further, as well as engineering the perfect night's sleep and more check out the table of contents and sample chapter.

Table of Contents
Sample Chapter (From Tim's Blog)

The two things that immediately interested me was how to get more quality sleep and how to sleep less. I will talk more about this in my following post on my New Year's Resolutions, one being to sleep less. I have already started to experiment with different sleep strategies and the one that I am trying to do now will allow me to get a total of 5.2 hours of sleep a night. The basic strategy is that I get 4.5 hours of core sleep each night and I take 2 20-30 minute naps throughout the day. This forces my body to enter the REM portion of the sleep cycle which is the most beneficial stage of the sleep cycle. The normal sleep cycle last about 90 minutes with REM occurring at the end of the cycle, most people sleeping a normal 8 hours a night will get 2 hours of REM sleep. The REM portion of the sleep cycle is where dreams occur. There is no real strong evidence out that suggests the other portions of the sleep cycle serve much purpose.

There are even people that sleep only 2 hours total a day and claim to feel fully rested, they do this by taking 6 20 minute naps throughout the day. This is a bit extreme for me...at this point anyways. I am going to try and stick to this 5.2 total hours of sleep a night plan and will post regularly on how it is going.