How to wake up at a reasonable hour
NOTE: this page is wrong. it describes a method that kinda sorta worked for me but was swimming against the current so i kept failing nonetheless. fixing my lighting effortlessly fixed my sleep schedule in 1–3 days depending on which parts you look at. i hope to write about the new method soon.
My sleep schedule has often been quite bad. Here’s a method I’ve been using in March 2023 that has been working quite well for me.
Some warnings/caveats:
- I haven’t tested this with anyone else, so .
- I’ve only been using it with success for almost a month. Who knows if it will keep working for me in the long run.
- It assumes you can mostly maintain your existing schedule, no matter how dysfunctional. If you have something like DSPS where your sleep schedule keeps getting worse and worse over the course of a single week, this method will not (on its own) work.
- I am assuming that the problem is that you go to sleep too late and wake up too late. For example, sleeping at 3am and waking up at noon.
With that out of the way, here’s the basic plan:
- First, without changing your schedule at all, set up a
bunch of alarms on your phone for when you would normally do things
you already do. I have alarms for:
- wake up
- take mid-day medications
- take flax ground seeds
- take night time medications
- shut down computer
- brush teeth
- Keep going about your life as usual, not changing your schedule at all. Just get used to the idea of “do things when alarm rings” instead of “do things because it’s a certain time on the clock”. I recommend maybe a week or more at this stage. (I had already been doing this step for my medications for a long time, so when I used this method for my sleep schedule, I basically skipped this step.)
- Now, shift back the alarms by 5–10 minutes each day. Every time you shift back by a full hour, I recommend staying there for maybe a week just to make sure there is not even any minimal jet lag. (I think the sensitivity of shifting back varies a lot by person. I think I’m generally a lot more sensitive to jet lag than most people, so that’s why I’m recommending stopping and staying after each hour moved back.) You may also want to shift back everything except your morning wake-up alarm at first, so that you get more sleep (do this until you start waking up before the alarm, to figure out how much sleep your body wants).
- Keep going until you reach your desired wake up and/or sleep time.
Some notes:
- Depending on how long you stayed at steps (1) and (2), you may need to keep adjusting the spacings between the alarms throughout the other steps. For example, I’ve been aiming to get 9.5 hours of sleep, but I notice that when the “brush teeth” alarm rings, I’m still eating food most of the time. So decided to push my “shut down computer” to happen earlier while keeping the “brush teeth” alarm where it is, so that I get a longer warning.
- I recommend not setting any alarms during the daytime, as I think people’s schedules are quite variable during this time (e.g. on weekdays someone might be at school or work which requires eating lunch at a certain time, but on the weekends they might eat lunch whenever). However, at one point I did this anyway due to some medications I had to take. I think morning/nighttime tends to be more consistent for most people.
- I recommend not setting too many alarms, as that may make the alarms annoying. You don’t want the alarms to feel annoying because that makes you more likely to just reflexively turn them off without doing the thing the alarm is telling you to do.
- If you get stuck at a certain point (e.g. can wake up at 10am but
have trouble waking up even earlier), paradoxically it may be good to
first try waking up like an hour later (at 11am) a few times, then work
up from 11am again. The reasoning here is that you may not be getting
enough sleep, so going back by an hour gives you an extra hour of sleep,
which makes it easier to push forward again.
- The other trick for getting more sleep is to push back all your alarms except the morning wake-up one, so that you get gradually more and more sleep. You can do this until you start waking up before the morning wake-up alarm even rings.
- As of 2023-06-06, I feel this approach has been a kind of failure.
I’ve stopped at 10:40am as a wakeup time, even though I’d like to go to
around 9:30am or maybe even as early as 9:00am. Why is this?
- A bunch of things like hunger attacks keep happening like an hour before I want to sleep, which causes me to have to stay up eating more food (and it takes me a really long time to eat). (See 2023-10-01 update below for a preliminary fix.)
- I’ve been kinda just ignoring a lot of my nighttime alarms (I still take the medications, but the ones for tea and brushing teeth are so easy to ignore! It’s so tempting to just say “I don’t feel like getting up right now – I don’t even know if the tea is necessary for my health”).
- 2023-08-17 update: The way to get around ignoring alarms is to set them back to ring right around when you naturally do the thing, and then stay there for a few days so you start associating doing the thing with the ringing of the alarm. Then dial back the alarms gradually. However, I keep stopping around 10:30am and don’t want to shift back earlier and I think this is due to meal time coordination: 7pm-ish is when my family has dinner, and if I wake up at 10:30am that is roughly when I get hungry for dinner. If I wake up at 9:30am, I’d want dinner at 6pm and there won’t be food. This sort of dependence is hard to resolve.
- 2023-10-01 update: I kept failing to sleep on time again because of hunger attacks. Eventually I realized the problem was that I would typically eat the highest-calorie-easy-to-chew-and-swallow parts of my dinner first, and then was very slowly eating the low calorie/difficult to chew and swallow parts of my dinner right up until the point when I should go to sleep, which meant that I was again often hungry when I should be brushing my teeth, even though I’d been eating the whole time. So what I’ve done now is to set an alarm that says “stop eating dinner, just pack it in the fridge or toss it, and instead start eating a probar”. This seems to be working pretty well so far, although on one night I still had minor hunger attack symptoms despite eating the probar.
- 2023-11-21: it’s been working pretty well. I’ve been waking up at or before 10am now for several days, after sliding back to like 11:30am or so back in end of October. (Daylight savings ending also helped out.)
- 2023-11-24: i don’t know how to explain this well yet, but there’s a thing you have to do where you try to detect “strain” in when you do things. if an alarm feels “too off” you need to adjust the spacings between the alarms so that you can more effortlessly do things.
- 2023-12-19: I have been failing again. seems like there’s a kind of arms race where i keep having hunger attacks, weird night time awakenings, etc., that all push back my wakeup time. so i keep having to work really hard to wake up earlier and earlier, only to be pushed back to my “old” wakeup time again (this morning i woke up around 11:30…).