If you are awake at 4 am, and have to be at work at 7, should you even try to get back to sleep or should you try to do something with your time?
Any sleep will improve your work day, at least in my experience. It will still be pretty rough, of course.
I try my best to practice the basic sleep hygiene tip of not laying in bed when I can’t sleep. I get up, do something else (like I am now) and wait for the sleepiness to set in before going back to bed (even if it’s 4 am).
Even one more hour of sleep could change the course of your day. I vote sleep.
True, but I’ve found it is just as like to change things for the worse as the better. Waking up from a deep deep sleep after only an hour can leave me as a zombie for the whole day.
I ended up sleeping for maybe 20 minutes this time and it has worked out so far.
20 mins is about bang on the “power nap” zone btw
I thought the same thing, and fell asleep standing up at the expo line at Applebee’s.
Get what sleep you can. Trust me.
Sleep cycles are usually around 90mins, so you could theoretically get 2 of those in before 7am. Or, you could try doing something calming for 90mins, and only get one cycle in. Yoga, reading a book etc.
I vote this. The 90 minute REM cycle is no joke.
My personal sleep therapy approach:
- Deduct 30 minutes from when you need to wake up. Set one alarm for this time, one alarm for your normal time. If you do nothing else, do this. It’s awesome, trust me.
- Deduct another 30 minutes then figure out how many 90-minute periods fit between now and that time. Go to bed at the beginning of one of those periods.
- If you need to go to sleep 30 or 60 minutes earlier for some reason, add another “snooze” or two at the end.
What this does:
- Prevents getting up in the middle of REM, which is what causes you to feel like death even though you got enough sleep
- Gives you a 30-minute window to fall asleep first
- Wakes you up 30 minutes early in case something messed with your cycle and you feel like crap. Hitting snooze on your alarm clock gives you a bewildering 9-minute, 11-minute, or other arbitrary bit of extra sleep, but giving you a consistent 30-minute snooze period starts your morning with a reliable power nap instead of just gambling on your timing. You always wake up feeling good from a power nap.
Example: it’s 9 pm, I have to be up at 6. I set alarms for 5:30 and 6:00, then go to bed at 9:30 so I have 30 minutes to fall asleep, followed by 7.5 hours of sleep, which is 5 cycles. I wake up at 5:30, immediately kill the alarm, then wake up again at 6 and start my day.
Note: In general, I wouldn’t have three 30-minute snoozes. I’d just go to bed later. I try to avoid stacking two or more power naps at the end, but sometimes I will if I’m not going to be getting much sleep otherwise, like if I go to sleep NOW, I might get 3 hours.
Used to do this and it was wonderful. I have a smart watch to track sleep, I wonder if there’s an app to automatically detect a certain amount of sleep cycles and wake you at a good time instead of guessing.
There are several Apple Watch apps and such that rather than use a timer, use various biometrics and movement sensing to try and identify when you’re out of REM and start a vibration alarm that increases over time across a 30-minute window. Depending on what smartwatch you use, there might be something.
Edit: on Apple Watch I have an app that does this called AutoWake (it has a companion sleep tracking app called AutoSleep) but I don’t wear the watch to bed anymore.
Android has a good one that’s simply called “Sleep”. They track your movement and try to estimate light sleep in a set period before your actual wake time.
It worked pretty good in the past (not perfectly of course) but I’ve been waking close to my wakeup time for years now, so I just use it for tracking.
Downloaded it and it looks neat. My issue is I actually have to activate sleep tracking and I definitely forgot the past 2 nights.
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Pretty much what I do exactly. I have an app that notifies me 1hr before it’s 8hrs from wake up time. So basically, I get notified 9hrs before I want to wake up. I go to sleep 8hrs before, but realistically fall asleep around 7.5hrs before I want to wake up. Then, if I feel groggy when I wake up, I do a 30min snooze. Sometimes I’ll also take a caffeine/theanine pill before the 30min snooze. Then you reallly wake up.
The option to sleep an extra half hour when you don’t want to get up is key. I recommend it for anyone. It’s so worth it.
I actually do this but for a different reason. I keep an alarm 15m before my actual alarm, which tells me to get ready to wake up. This gives me time to get comfortable waking up and wake up to the time I want to wake up. This works so well because I don’t really want to hear the second alarm go off which incentivises me wake up atleast 5m before my second alarm.
Check out the phases of the sleep cycle. IIRC a full cycle is around 90 mins so in those 3 hours you can potentially hit 2 cycles and not feel groggy.
With all the benefits of sleep (and the problems from lack of sleep) it would be better to sleep
Between the time it takes to fall back asleep (which is nontrivial), getting ready for and getting to work, you’d be lucky to get 1 full cycle in before you had to get up anyway. And IME, rolling the dice on a rem cycle like that is more likely to fuck up my day by leaving me groggy AF than refresh me.
Cycles get quicker near the end of the night. Though I’m not sure how waking up effects things.
But those last cycles tend to be the most important. And studies have shown even trying but failing to fall asleep gives some benefit of actually falling asleep.
If I can get 2 hours, yes (“sleep”).
My cutoff is three hours. If I sleep for less than three hours, it’s worse than no sleep, at least in the morning
What about 3 hours early in the night, say 11pm to 2am?
If you’re just shifting the scenario, same answer.
For example, I used to save money when I had to fly by using an airport over an hour drive away and being willing to take the first flight. That meant getting up about 2-3am. That’s not even worth trying. I slept at my destination
When I was younger, I’d try to power through. Now that I’m older, I recognize that my day is always better when I try to get some sleep.
When I was younger, not sleeping was the result of bad choices. Lately it’s because of insomnia. I don’t know if that makes any difference, but I guess it’s worth noting.
PSA: 24 hours of sleep deprivation is similar to having a BAC (Blood Alcohol Count) of 0.10%. That’s over the legal limit in most places. If you have to go to work, don’t drive.
Sleep, dude. You can’t sleep at work. Or can you?
In a pinch I could, by pretending to be in a zoom meeting.
Close your eyes and rest, meditate…
If you absolutely must get up, do exercise, chores, etc until your back on schedule
sleep.
my tip: put your phone on silent and place it in another room to prevent you from reflexively taking it while you struggle to fall asleep. just make sure to have the alarm volume be high enough for you to wake up.
Depends when I went to bed. I sleep 7 hours on average so if I’ve got at least 6, I get up. Less, I try to sleep.
Definitely sleep if tired, or try to but my commute is short.
Sometimes (infrequently) I’ll take a magnesium pill, and that will help me go back to sleep. Or, I’ll go read in another dimly lit room for about 20 minutes and then return to the bedroom go back to sleep.
But, once in a while, I’ll feel creative at 4am and just get up and do something (write, code, whatever) until it’s time to get ready for work. I’m an early bird out of decades of routine, but wish I could be a night owl. I love how quiet it is at night.
I really enjoy lying in a warm, comfortable bed, especially a little groggy from sleep. I’m happy to wake up an hour or so ahead of my alarm so I can have that experience. That said, if my mind is really racing with anticipation of the day’s concerns, it kind of wrecks the lie-in. I’ll get up an hour or two early, have an extra special breakfast, start chores or some other thing I didn’t think I had time for.
I really enjoy lying in a warm, comfortable bed, especially a little groggy from sleep. I’m happy to wake up an hour or so ahead of my alarm so I can have that experience.
I knew that I wasn’t the only one…
awake at 4 am, and have to be at work at 7
This is just my life. I could probably stay in bed until 5.30 at the latest, but then I’d be in a rush, and might get fucked by traffic.
