Sleep Better: Be Uncomfortable. | Hacker News Reader

Sleep Better: Be Uncomfortable.

lifehack.org

20 pointslukeqsee28 comments

The entire idea behind this "hack" is that if you make your bed super uncomfortable, you will get out of bed in the morning and not be up all night because you slept late.

In other words, you can exchange not liking alarm clocks for being uncomfortable all night long so that when you wake up you'll want to get out of your uncomfortable bed.

A modest proposal for an enhancement: scorpions.

I'm sticking with the alarm clock.

I propose trying to cultivate nightmares. Go to sleep thinking about how bad the oil spill is.

That nightmare is too far removed.

Instead, leave a window open and place a nice piece of electronic equipment on the sill. Works twice as well if you live in a shady neighborhood.

I was thinking about how I could make it more HN-oriented. Perhaps thinking about a difficult problem.

But that might not be such a bad idea!

At any rate, I think the activities an hour before sleep have more of an effect on the mental component of my sleep than the comfiness of my bed. Also, I think reading a paper book* is the best one I've found. I haven't done it in over a month, though. Time to get back to it, I think.

* I haven't owned a Kindle. I've read my iPad before bed and it hasn't had the same effect as I remember a paper book having.

Subdued lighting in the evening promotes the production of melatonin. Conversely, staring at a lightbulb-like LCD screen inhibits its production. That's why you get tired reading a Kindle in bed, but not an iPad.

I'm wondering if there might be some way to start out being comfortable but setting some process in motion that would cause you to be uncomfortable 8 hours later.

How hard would it be to design a bed that, say, slowly inclines to vertical?

Perhaps, instead of an inclining bed, one could posit a light. This light turns on around 5:30AM and slowly gets brighter and brighter until it hits a maximum intensity; then, it slowly dims until it sets... err, "turns off"... at around 7:30pm?

Personally, I tend to use a sleepmask. Maybe I could build a sleepmask with a light...

Actually, I do the same, so my plan wouldn't work for me, either. Foiled! But I will purchase your sleepmask+light if it is cozy enough.

Wow, we wrote essentially the same comment at the same time. Funny how that goes.

Gently sarcastic minds think alike :-)

That could work... but how about something simpler? A light that slowly gets brighter and brighter as it gets closer to the alarm time, with an alarm as a backup? (This exists, btw.)

I did this once, to try to control my oversleeping (10+ hours a day). I put my mattress into a closet and slept on the floor for a year.

Eventually I just got used to the floor. It became pretty comfortable. I even returned to sleeping on my side after a few months.

I've since found a found some far better ways to control my sleeping habits:

- Eat more.

- Get a job where you must wake up at 5:30, combined with a lifetime habit of not going to bed before 11.

- Sleep under windows facing the sunrise, and don't close the blinds all the way.

I can't going to generalize these for everyone, but I can say it worked for me. Sleeping uncomfortably just didn't work over the long term.

If this guy tries dating a woman he'll probably get new bedding.

I have a hard time believing sleeping like this will be the same quality of rest as sleeping comfortably.

In my opinion, sleeping uncomfortably is not a good idea. I will take some of his advice and discard my large comforters and soft pillows.

In the morning I usually end up quickly turning my first round of alarms off and then crawling right back in under those warm and secure covers.

On a somewhat related note, I am going to start Uberman this summer. Does anyone have any experience with that?

I tried Everyman-3 last summer. It was a very weird experience. Highly unusual.

After a few times of failing to wake up on time, I became a bit alarm-paranoid. I once woke up on my own early, and jumped out of bed thinking two hours had passed (instead of 30 minutes). Turned out only 8 minutes had passed since I looked at my watch before going to sleep.

This reflects one of the cooler aspects of polyphasic sleep - you learn to fall asleep regularly in under 3 minutes. I slept on a bed, on a floor, on a lawn. You just learn how to relax and drift off immediately.

Also, once you've slept for 30 minutes, you don't want to sleep anymore. Your consciousness just regains control of your body and poof - you're awake.

It's not something I would do for years on end, because it can be difficult to accommodate having work and a social life, but it's very fun to do for a few months at a time. You gain a lot of time.

> This reflects one of the cooler aspects of polyphasic sleep

That "aspect" is called sleep deprivation.

Eh, maybe. I haven't studied polyphasic sleep and I'm not a scientist, so understand that my opinion comes from someone who has slept monophasically, experienced quite a bit of sleep deprivation, and also slept polyphasically.

That said... what I was talking about is not at all like sleep deprivation. Sleep deprivation causes tiredness, lethargy, lack of energy. You wake up feeling tired and maybe your eyes or your head hurts. What I experienced with everyman-3 was nothing like that. It wasn't you falling asleep because you were unusually tired; it was you falling asleep because you willed yourself and your entire body to relax and let go of consciousness, almost like a sort of meditation. You wake up feeling absolutely refreshed and ready to go. In any case, it feels completely different from going to sleep tired or waking up sleep deprived; I don't know about the specific mental mechanism, as I am not a neuroscientist, as cool as I think it would be to be one.

Anyway, I would recommend giving polyphasic sleep a few tries. I only managed it after trying and failing twice (once because I kept oversleeping, once because social things got in the way). Also, I would not recommend doing polyphasic sleep for many months on end. At least, I wouldn't feel comfortable doing it, as who knows why it's possible. Maybe I'm depriving my body of very necessary sleep and preventing long-term learning or something - until it's more well researched, I wouldn't want to sleep polyphasically for more than a month or two.

Based on my own experience I would suggest that you can sleep fine in an uncomfortable situation until you're in a light enough sleep that you'll wake up.

The rested feeling is simply not waking up in the middle of a deep sleep cycle when your body is flooded with melatonin. Alarms simply don't way us up optimally. They blare at us with no regard for how deep we're sleeping.

I don't think either extreme, sleeping uncomfortably or fighting with an alarm, is the answer. There's an interesting alarm app on Android phones that will ring quietly x amount of time before the real alarm is set to ring to see if you're more awake then. I'd like to see more attempts at hybridization like that.

Two existing alarms that also work on this premise:

- One has a light that brightens over the course of an hour to simulate the sun rising. Supposedly the natural progression of brightness in your room will help set your internal clock (or something like that) [1]

- Some sort of monitor that you wear that monitors what phase of sleep you're in. You set the alarm to a certain time, and the alarm picks the right time to wake you up, depending on your sleep cycle. [2]

[1] http://www.amazon.com/EZ-Wake-Digital-SunRise-Alarm/dp/B0002...

[2] http://www.amazon.com/aXbo-Sleep-Phase-Alarm-Clock/dp/B0014R...

Three birds with one stone: Build a bed with a shower above it. Hook the shower up to a timer. You'll get woken up in the morning, you'll get clean, and you won't want to get back in your (now soaking wet) bed. :)

I think the theory is more, sleep with as little comfort as possible. That way you feel rested in the morning, while at the same time you don't want to lay around because it feels so good.

from experience: the style mentioned causes a terrible hangover from lack of sleep. I felt sluggish through out the day.

imho, it is far better quality of sleep if you have 4 hours of 'comfortable' sleep vs 10 hours of 'uncomfortable'(as per the author)

This does work in that you'll never oversleep, but you also don't feel very awake for the first hour or two in the morning.

Speaking from experience here?

I'm not sure I can agree with you - I don't think humans had a selective pressure to get better rest in soft, coccoon-like circumstances.

Why should we be predisposed to do that?

Our ancestors also didn't have automobiles and airplanes. That doesn't mean that it's not faster to travel that way than on foot.

Did we have selective pressure to heal broken bones while laying in bed, with a cast, taking extra calcium supplements?

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