"Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise"
- Benjamin Franklin
I had a hard week. It was hard for me to get up in the morning. And I felt tired during the day. There was something wrong with my timetable, with my sleep cycle and coffee was not helping. It was scheduled in my timetable that I'm going to sleep every night from 12 am to 6 am, that is, 6 hours. However, this week I slept on average 7 hours and 14 minutes per day(excluding the 20 minutes naps that I have on some days). And I am continuously oversleeping during the weekend. There is a crisis, a sleep crisis and since sleeping is one of the most productive activity in our daily life, so I need to address the problem.
Why do we need to sleep? Does it really make sense that we spend one-third of our lives sleeping? While male lions sleep on average for 20 hours a day and giraffes for 4 hours, how much do we really need to sleep? The answers to these questions are still being studied by scientists. Joe Hanson at "It's Okay To Be Smart" has an interesting video on the subject.
I'm going to tackle the sleep crisis from my personal experience but I'm sure that most of the readers of this blog post are sleep deprived. In the modern world, working more is often assumed to imply greater efficiency. But that's not the case. And I'm not talking of a work-life balance, your work should be part of your life. That will be for another post on existentialism... For today, I want to concentrate on sleep. The more we work, the better the result. And if we are sleeping, then our business competitors(or any competitor) might overtake us. That's the assumption. However, we tend to be more productive and happier if we sleep well. So how to find the compromise?
While, some people, such as Margaret Thatcher, are able to sleep less than the average adult, most people have a circadian rhythm that requires at least seven hours of sleep. And since, we usually sleep in cycles of 90 minutes, 7 hours and 30 minutes seems good to me. If I could sleep 6 hours at night and then nap for 90 minutes in the evening, it would have been perfect. Unfortunately, the timetable of my faculty does not allow me to do so everyday. Thus, I'm going to sleep now from 10.30 pm to 6 am. Everyday, including weekends, except maybe when I'm travelling .Another important thing about having a good sleep is to have a good night and morning routine.
From 7.30 pm, I'm going to stop working. It means, no more study, no more homework, no more Facebooking, etc. I'm going to write for about one hour, either in my diary or in my book. Then, I'll spend the last two hours in bed reading until I fall asleep at 10.30 pm. At 6 am, I wake up without snoozing my alarm. The day always starts with meditation and then exercise. My morning is not going to change, I'm just advancing my night routine by 90 minutes and eliminating the nap. I've made myself a timetable, like the one made by Benjamin Franklin. But of course, it is just an idealised version. I will still use Google calendar to plan my days. For the readers who are now thinking that they have wasted their time reading my new timetable, then I want you to ask yourself these questions. Am I tired right now? Do I want to sleep more? Did I just read a blog post about how simple it is to sleep more?
PS: I don't know how to write "EXERCISE"