In honor of the stupidity that is Daylight Savings Time, I’ll write about sleep.

First, this watch seems pretty interesting. It is based on the idea that if you’re never going to get enough hours of sleep a night anyway, then you are best to get a full number of sleep cycles, rather than a fractional one. So it tracks your sleep cycle and wakes you up when you’re most awake.

This reminds me of my general annoyance with the whole concept of sleep and the inefficiency it causes. Sleep has got to be one of the worst vestigial devices still left in humans, although not as bad as the appendix.

Years ago, I came across a blog in which the person was trying out the concept of polyphasic sleep, which is basically napping frequently for short periods each time. The idea was to save total amount of time slept, I guess, or to make sleep more efficient. I guess it worked out well enough to cause a whole bunch of fanatical people to try it.

Admittedly, that was a bit out there, but there were some other good advice based on what this person tried. One of the more useful was on how to wake up on time and how to shift sleep schedule around.

Basically you should only go to bed when you’re tired and want to sleep. Otherwise, you just won’t fall asleep and the time is wasted. What that means is it’s quite easy to push your sleep schedule later. Pulling your sleep schedule earlier is much harder since we’ve established that you can’t go to bed earlier. But it can be done by controlling the other end, by forcing yourself to wake up at the desired time. That is hard to do. But it has to be done. The idea is by the next day you will be tired earlier and will go to bed earlier. Actually the first day after deprived sleep is not that bad, so what is needed is simply a little bit of discipline in waking up.

So that brings us to waking up on time. The advice I remember, and that I have verified, is you must train yourself like a beast to have a Pavlovian wake up routine. Hear the alarm, and you must get up and do something that absolutely prevents yourself from falling asleep again and do the same thing every day. Snooze buttons just don’t work, because that allows you to fall back to sleep, and then you’ll be trained in that routine of automatically falling back to sleep when you hear the alarm, which is totally the wrong thing. Once the routine is established, it will be very easy to keep it because no cognitive process or will power is involved. It is simply an automatic response. Do this for long enough and you will wake up at exactly the right time even before the alarm sounds.

The difficulty is to establish this automatic response in the first place, especially if one is already trained in some god-awful snooze button routine. The trick is to change the stimulus — a different alarm sound, a different alarm position, a different alarm dynamic, a different sleep position — basically anything that is different. But it has to be a novel configuration for which one is not already conditioned in. Then one must try very hard in the first few days not to get conditioned into sleeping through that. Then it will work pretty well. Routine is the key. It is much easier to keep the same conditioned routine every day than is to disrupt it in the middle, with something one is previously too well conditioned in.

One of the more interesting corollaries is if you are lax and generally not careful about this process, you can condition yourself to do crazy things “in sleep”, akin to sleep-walking, all in the name of turning off the alarm. The brain is a strange object.