Findings by Self-Experimenters on Sleep

December 17, 2018 5 Comments

If you don’t get enough sleep, your ability to function in day-to-day tasks is impaired. There’s million articles that give you advice on how to sleep better, but these three articles are by people just like you that took the data and research into their own hands and experimented to find what worked for them. Their results are nothing short of inspirational.

What I Learned from Six Months of Obsessive Sleep Hacking
How I tracked data to reveal the best habits for improving my own sleep — and how you can, too

What began as a “let’s do this for a week” thing turned into a 6-month obsession with spreadsheets, graphs, experiments and hypotheses, and some interesting/fascinating/odd findings. I want to share those with you, because I was able to quickly improve my sleep — and perhaps you can, too.

Despite how click-bait-y this title sounds, it is not an exaggeration.

In the last six months, my average wake time has been 6:30am — including weekends, holidays, and frequent time zone crossings. To be fair, 6:30am is not that early in the realm of early-birds, called larks, who espouse the miracles of a 5am wake up time. But for me, this has been such a momentous change that I’ve become quite literally a different person.

I am now someone that wakes up naturally before their 6:30am alarm with enthusiasm to tackle the day, and with a wide menu of pre-breakfast activities including meditation, yoga, strenuous bike rides, reading, writing, making old-fashioned oatmeal, etc.

I may sound like a holier-than-thou health nut, but I assure you I am nearly as confused as you might be about how I got here.