David Shorten

This post is directed at anyone who has to get up early.

I work part time at a coffee shop and I’m usually booked for morning shifts. If you asked me about my sleeping habits, I would tell you that I hate sleep and that I try to sleep as little as possible, or as little as my body will allow me without making myself sick. But the fact that I think sleep is a total waste of time does not in any way mean that I’m good at getting up in the morning. I don’t know if you’ll be able to empathize with me in this situation or not, but I’ve had days where I wake up in such a bad mood that I ponder the meaninglessness of my own existence, thinking, “Life sucks. What’s the point in even trying to make it through this day?” Yeah, pretty depressing. That’s before the pills though. Just kidding. I’m not on any pills.

My morning routine (up until recently) consisted of me getting up early enough to shower, eat, make a lunch and sit in the warmest room in my house to mentally prepare myself for work and/or sleep for fifteen minutes before I had to leave for work.

It worked decently. It was better than being really rushed and having no time to relax before I went, but I was still always half asleep on the way there; upon arrival, I’d always be quite tired and not exactly fit to deal with customers for at least an hour into my shift; I would be cold, spending every moment of free time I got “cleaning” the bagel toaster. It’s pretty clean. All this would be even worse if I didn’t have such amazing coworkers. They’re the source of almost all my optimism at work and just seeing them will actually boost my morale.

But lately I’ve been changing my routine and I’ve improved my strategy. Instead of sitting in a dark room for a while before I have to leave for work and doing nothing, I tried forcing myself not to be tired. I did it by plugging my iPod into a stereo, playing really upbeat Electronica, and dancing around like a tool bag. I practiced some Tecktonik moves, too, all with my winter coat on, which warmed me up post haste. I did this for the same amount of time as I would otherwise have just sat or napped. It was very, very effective. On the way to work, when I would normally mumble half-word answers, I found myself using entire sentences and even sparking conversation with my dad all by myself. It was astounding. When I got to work, I was in a good mood and I was awake. Then when I saw Julie and Deidra, my manager and coworker. I was in an even better mood. Simply amazing. I also noticed that I wasn’t cold, due to the fact that I was dancing in a huge parka a few minutes before.

You may be tempted to ask, “David, you work in a coffee shop. Why don’t you stop complicating things and just drink some coffee?” Well, coffee sucks. It’s like a lot of drugs in that it causes big highs that are followed by big lows. Just take a look at the graph! Graphs never lie.

So it’s really not an effective method of maintaining high energy levels. The fight against fatigue, I’ve found, is more about stimulating the mind by natural means, whose effects won’t reverse themselves in a short amount of time. That’s great news ’cause there are so many different ways of doing it. Like I said already, for me it’s music. That’s because I’m passionate about music. It excites me and puts me in a good mood. Other things I’ve found delay tiredness are laughter, interesting discussions, and sometimes meditation (when I say ‘meditation,’ what I mean is being deep in thought about something I feel strongly about). I’m sure most of you have had problems sleeping due to a problem in your life you can’t stop thinking about, or even blessings in your life you can’t stop thinking of. Anything that you have trouble getting off your mind is something that’s likely to keep you awake.

So that’s my advice. It’s based on experience and some graphs, which is more than most people will give you. Ideas that have come to mind for me are Forum discussions, trolling, blogging, upbeat music, singing, dancing, comedy, thinking about an upcoming and exciting event, or beat box battles.

Things I don’t recommend include watching movies, reading books and praying*.

To close, I thought I’d throw in a little bit of information about sleep patterns. If you read any of my entries on polyphasic sleep, you might already know a thing or two about what I’m about to tell you. There are different stages of sleep you enter during the night. Basically, the only differences between them are brain wavelengths, except what we call REM (rapid eye movement) sleep. It’s in this stage where almost all of your dreams occur, and it’s also your lightest form of slumber. If you manage to get eight hours of sleep every night, you’re probably a minority who’s generally very well rested. Most of us don’t manage this, whether it’s because of business or plain irresponsibility. In any case, it’s during your REM stage that you want to wake up. If you’re awoken during this stage, you’ll be way less groggy because you were hardly asleep anyway. On the other hand, if you wake up during the deepest part of your sleep, you’re likely to friggin’ hate life when you wake up. Here’s a graph of the average sleep pattern during an eight hour period. Feel free to cross-reference this with other graphs you may be able to find. That way you can get the best estimate on which parts of your sleep are better to wake up during.

As you can see (according to this graph), the REM stages occur approximately from 2-2.5 hours, 3.75-4.25 hours, 5-5.5 hours and 6-6.5 hours. A practical use for this knowledge would be in a case where you know you won’t be able to get a full eight hours of sleep. I’ll use you crazy busy college students as an example.

Imagine you’re up until four o’clock doing your homework. Finally you’re done, but all this intellectual exercise has chased away your fatigue, and even though you don’t feel tired, you also know you should probably get as much sleep as you can until seven o’clock, which is when you have to get up to get ready for your first class. Four o’clock to seven o’clock is three hours, and if you look at the graph, the third hour is when you’re in your deepest sleep. If you set your alarm for seven, you’re likely going to have a really hard time getting out of bed. If you were to wait about an hour (until five o’clock) before you went to bed, you would wake up during your REM cycle, and despite the fact that you’ve only gotten two hours of sleep, you’ll wake up easily and feel better than you would have with three hours of sleepy time. Likely, because of your lack of sleep, you’ll feel tired later in the day in both scenarios anyway. Now, say you finish your homework and you’re feeling extremely tired. Instead of forcing yourself to stay awake so you can wake up at seven in your REM cycle, you can always go to bed right away and get up an hour earlier instead.

This pattern for the stages of sleep is the same for just about anyone, although the exact times in which the stages begin or end may vary. It might require some experimentation so you can figure out how your personal sleep schedule works.

So, with the combined knowledge of sleep stages and methods of countering fatigue, I hope this helps some of you have an easier time waking up and feeling good during the day. It’s helped me quite a bit. Let me know what you think!

*I always encourage praying, hah. The kind of prayer I’m referring to is the eyes closed, kneeling down (or even worse, laying down) style, since it’s especially easy to fall asleep while doing that.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 18th, 2009 at 12:50 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.