pedanther

This week was more in the way of fine-tuning, identifying specific things (like doing 750 Words) that should not be left to the evening because they always blew out the bedtime schedule. The real hard yards I put in to get my sleep schedule on course were some years ago.

Here are some things I remember being helpful for me:

- Working on mornings as well as evenings: getting up early made it easier to go to bed early as well as vice versa. One thing I remember doing was to set a time in the morning (I think it was 5am or thereabouts) and if I woke up after that time for any reason I was Up and not allowed to go back to bed.

- Also, sticking my head outside the house at the first reasonable opportunity after getting up, to get some fresh air and demonstrate to my brain that the sun was up. I exist mostly indoors, so I needed to consciously create opportunities to observe things like "the sun is coming up" and "the sun is going down" and not just exist in a perpetual state of "the lights are on".

- At night, reining in the temptation to do just-one-thing before bed. One thing that really helped me, that's no longer specifically an option but there might be something comparable, is that when I started using Habitica to manage my to-do lists and habit-building, it had a hard limit at midnight, after which it would count me as having failed to do the thing that day even if I did it between midnight and going to bed. That made it a lot less tempting to stay up past midnight to get things done, and encouraged me to think ahead about things like "Does this need to be done this evening - in which case I should do it before midnight - or can it wait until the morning?" (It also helped that, once I started leaving things to the morning, I usually found that they went easier because my brain wasn't tired, which encouraged me to do more things in the morning.)

- Also, because my default method of killing time is to futz about on the computer, I installed a program (I used f.lux) that reduced the amount of blue light the computer screen emitted as the evening wore on. Blue light in the evenings is apparently supposed to keep you from getting sleepy, and I did find that after I installed the filter I was more likely to find myself getting sleepy at the computer and not just going along being square-eyed for hours on end.

- Before I got to the point where I wake up consistently in the morning without needing an alarm clock, I also found Sleepyti.me useful. It purports to help you set your alarm clock in tune with your sleep cycle, so that it will go off at a point when you're sleeping lightly and less likely to sleep through it. I'm not sure how solid the science behind it is (if nothing else, it's working off a theoretical average sleep cycle with no individual tuning), but it did seem to help.