Sleeping patterns: when is it better to sleep

In the last weeks I have been interested in polyphasic sleep. Polyphasic sleep is a sleeping pattern where the person does not sleep in one big chunck, but in many roughly equivalent pieces throughout the whole day. The first time I heard about it was from my father, some twenty years ago. The pattern is sometimes used by solo sailors, who travel through long oceanic trips. My father has always loved to sail, and read many books on the subject; so that’s how he knew about it. According to thos books Leonardo Da Vinci was a polyphasic sleeper, sleeping some 15 minuites every 2 hours.

But I don’t want to discuss in this post about polyphasic sleep. I want to describe everything else I know about sleep, so that at a later post I can say: “And this has totally blown off everything I knew about sleep” (with a link!). It’s like when in go you play a stone, that is not that important, but such that later you can link to it. You build your framework.

And if all I said in the rest of this post will sound like pseudoscience, is because mostly is. It comes out of personal observations, some lessons explained, learned, and integrated, but no scientific work that I know off (or that I searched for).

My knowledge about sleep originate from a lesson I received some sixteen years ago. At the first yoga class I went to. The teacher explained to me that not every hour is equally important to sleep. There are some moments that are definitly more important, and others less. Some time between 1 am and 3 am the body produces the hormones that will let you be awake and active during the next day. At that time you are supposed to be asleep. If you are sleeping those hormones will be stored and later released slowly during the day. If you are not sleeping, instead, the body will just enjoy those hormones immediately. Have you noticed how if you are awake after midnight, suddenly all the sleepiness seems to be gone. And you become really alert, really awake, and also really smart. You can study complex material at 2 am that you would often not have the clarity to tackle at 10 pm. But all this comes at a price, and what the price is, is that you are not going to have those hormones available for the next day. And this is why people who stay up late feel often very tired the day after. Even if they over sleep, and still get 6 or 8 hours of sleep. So, sleeping from 4am to 12am is not the same thing as sleeping from 10 pm to 6am. Although the number of hours is the same.

Because the body is partially designed to generate those hormones at those fixed times, it is very important for it to be asleep by around midnight. For this reason, between 9 pm and 1 am the body will send signals. Will say: “hey, it’s time to go to bed”. They are like buses to dream land. And you need to catch them. Sleepiness will not arrive all at ones, but will arrive in waves. And if you go to bed as soon as you feel tired, you might sleep even as early as 9 pm. But if you fight it, half an hour later the sleep will be gone… and then it will come again. Wave after wave, until 1 am. And if at that time you haven’t gone to bed, sorry mate, you are put of luck. Your bed will turn into a pumpkin, and you will probably not be able to catch sleep until 4.30 ish. Until all those hormones have been generated, released and used up. This is why, for many years I would turn down invitations to do things in the evening that would involve going back at 2 or 3 am. I knew that the next day I would feel really tired for the whole day, and usually the evening 3 hours program was just not as important as the whole day after.

But all this info can also be turned around, if the necessity comes:
when I was 22, I already knew all this. I was at the time in Rome getting a degree in mathemathics. This included some 15 exams. Some compulsory, and some that could be chosen among a wider range. On the third year (out of four, that always became five) a really har exam is waiting: Istituzioni di Analisi Superiore. It includes theory of measure, and other nasty stuff I don;t remember any more, thirteen years later. The exam is compulsory, and as the teacher explained us the first day: “it is not only the hardest, but statistically it represents a barrier, who does not pass it will not graduate (as it is compulsory), but who passes it, statistically will often graduate. There are nearly no students who pass this exam, and then drop off.”. Analysis was not my favorite topic, so I was moderatly terrorized by it. I organised myself a studying schedule, and I would study … every night between 12 pm and 4 am. I was helped by my sense of duty, and repulsion for the topic. At 8 pm my body will fall asleep, rather than study. At 12 I would wake up feeling there was something that had to be completed before dawn. I would get up, get my books, go on a confy chair and study there. When sleep would hit me again it was usually around 4 ish, and I would then go to bed for a couple of REM cycles (3 hours), and wake up again. I passed the first time I took the exam, as I planned. Yes, during the day I was a bit more tired than usual, but not much, and in that case I really needed the chemicals that were released in those hours to pass the exam. Thus the same concept of before, just a different application.

Some people (my brother for example who likes to consistently go to bed at 5am and wake up at noon) might suggest that all those bldy clock can be moved around like whne you adapt to a differenr country. Well, I have to say I never manage to do it. I might not have been consistent enough, nor did I ever really tried, but also the people that I know off that consistently wake up late and go to bed late, they seem never to adapt. Maybe it is linked with the sun light. Maybe with the eating pattern, or maybe just that if you go to bed late because you like to use 1am chemical rush, if you were to adapt you would still try to go to bed even later. And you never settles. I don’t know. But I never met someone who was consistently adapted and would clearly produce those hormones at a different time, as well as I have noticed that during the switch between summer time and winter time we all seem to adapt. And this is where the theory predictability fails.

The next element in the topic is how to get up. Because if you are going to bed early you might not want to pass some 10 hours a day in bed. Especially when you are single.

BtW, most of my girlfriends always found very strange how I could go to bed and fall asleep on the spot. But what they really hated was when I tried to wake them up at 5am to make love. The world is divided among people who would naturally make love at 5 am, and people who would do it at 2 am. The 2 am people are just wrong.

Let’s face it, waking up with an alarm clock simply sucks. So the solution is to naturally wake up early.
Easy said thatn done, right? Wrong. The fact is that sleep follows a repetitive pattern, where every 90 minutes circa you cicle through your REM sleep. There are moments in this pattern where if you wake up you will feel nice and refreshed for the whole day. Other moments when you simply will feel bad, as if something inside you did not had the time to complete itself. And this is why alarm clock generally sucks. They tend to wake you up at different phases of your sleep, and this might be good or might be bad. Well, the secret, is that most of us tend to wake up much earlier than the time when we actually get up. We tnd to drift off sleep, see what time it is, and go back to bed. Don’t you do that too. We do it so rapidly that we hardly notice, but if you pay attention you will notice that you had brief moments when you were awake before falling asleep again. The key is to use those times to get up. Yoga people say to jump out of bed as if it was full of poisonous snakes. I found that it is enough to just breath deeply a few times (oxygen will wake you up), and sit on the bed. Different schools.

There are other possibilities that I should mention.
There is an alarm clock that (according to the producers) should measure your sleeping pattern and wake you up when the sleep is more light.

A better idea seem to be to put two alarm clocks, one very light with some soft music, and one stronger that should wake you up no matter what. SUpposedly the first alarm should make you up only if you are in the light phase of sleep.

I haven’t tried either of them, so I can’t tell.

Steve Pavlina in his very mentioned How to become an early riser suggests to go to bed when you are tired, and wake up wiht an alarm clock. I find that strategy to be subotimal for the reasons explained above (about waking up with an alarm clock). But it worked for him as long as he was monophasic.

As a final note, I should also mention that 1-3 am ar not the only time when those chemicals are produced in the body. Another time is around 5 pm. And this is why if you haven’t slept during the 1-3am hours, you often will feel tired, and empty… until 5pm. Then you will often start to feel better.

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