Sleep — an attempt to reduce it
Saturday the 11 of November, 2006 Filed in:
Productivity
Sleep. If only we could do without!
Sleep is not my friend. As a budding young entrepreneur I have a desire to go about life with less sleep and more waking moments in life. I always feel like those moments in bed are moments that could be used for a more noble purpose. I had such a strong desire to sleep less that I set out to do something about it.
As any good Industrial Technologist knows—for something to be controllable it must be measurable. So I wrote down the time I went to sleep and time I woke up every morning for a year. Measuring it gave me a good benchmark to improve upon.
To summarize — I slept an average of 7.40 hours each day and was awake for 16.6 hours of each day. This is a total of 112 days asleep and 253 days awake. Or, to put it another way, I slept away 31% of the year, and was awake for 69% of the year.
After the above graphed year I tried a few experiments with my day to see if I could reduce the time I spent sleeping. For example, I once tried strictly limiting my sleep to 5 hours each night … it lasted about 2 weeks and I gave myself a fever. Then I tried pulling an all–nighter once a week for as many weeks as I could manage. That did not last long either. Most notably because the 2nd day after the all–nighter was always so unproductive that the extra time I was awake did not produce a net increase in my productivity.
I guess I should feel privileged though. I slept 7.40 hours per day on average. That is 1.20 hours less than the average person my age in 1910.
Sleep is not my friend. As a budding young entrepreneur I have a desire to go about life with less sleep and more waking moments in life. I always feel like those moments in bed are moments that could be used for a more noble purpose. I had such a strong desire to sleep less that I set out to do something about it.
As any good Industrial Technologist knows—for something to be controllable it must be measurable. So I wrote down the time I went to sleep and time I woke up every morning for a year. Measuring it gave me a good benchmark to improve upon.
Graph of sleep time for one year
To summarize — I slept an average of 7.40 hours each day and was awake for 16.6 hours of each day. This is a total of 112 days asleep and 253 days awake. Or, to put it another way, I slept away 31% of the year, and was awake for 69% of the year.
After the above graphed year I tried a few experiments with my day to see if I could reduce the time I spent sleeping. For example, I once tried strictly limiting my sleep to 5 hours each night … it lasted about 2 weeks and I gave myself a fever. Then I tried pulling an all–nighter once a week for as many weeks as I could manage. That did not last long either. Most notably because the 2nd day after the all–nighter was always so unproductive that the extra time I was awake did not produce a net increase in my productivity.
I guess I should feel privileged though. I slept 7.40 hours per day on average. That is 1.20 hours less than the average person my age in 1910.
So to make a long story short — I have yet to find a good way to sleep less on a consistent basis. Any ideas?Today, average young adults report sleeping about seven to seven and one-half hours each night. Compare this to sleep patterns in 1910, before the electric lightbulb, the average person slept nine hours each night. This means that today's population sleeps one to two hours less than people did early in the century (Webb and Agnew, 1975). — Stanley Coren, Ph.D. Psychiatric Times. 1998