TLDR: I managed to fix my terrible sleep pattern by creating the right habits.
I’ve been there, up until a month ago actually.
I’ve tried a whole slew of things to fix my sleeping pattern over the past couple of years. F.lux, conservative use of melatonin, and cutting down on caffeine all helped but none of them really fixed the problem.
What I found was that I’d often stay up late in order to get more done, and it would feel like I was getting more done (where in actual fact I was just gaining more hours now in exchange for losing more hours in the future). Alongside this my pattern was so hectic that any attempt to sleep at a “normal” time was thwarted by a lack of tiredness, I could use melatonin to ‘reset’ this, but it’d rarely stay that way.
The first thing that helped was sitting down and working out hour by hour how much time I actually have in a week; this prevented me from thinking I could gain more time by staying up later. The second thing was forming good habits around my sleep. Habit’s typically follow a trigger-routine-reward pattern and require fairly quick feedback. As a result building a habit where the routine is sleeping for eight hours is quite hard.
Instead I appended two patterns either side of the time I wished to sleep, the first with the goal of making it easier for me to sleep, and the second with the goal of making it easier for me to get up.
The pre-sleep pattern followed:
Cue: ‘Hey it’s 10:30pm’
Routine:Turning off technology->Reading->Meditation
Reward: Mug of hot-chocolate
While the post-sleep pattern followed:
Cue: Alarm goes off,
Routine: Get out of bed.
Reward: Breakfast.
Since doing this I’ve been awake at 8 am every morning with little trouble, and the existence of those habits has made easy to add other habits into my routine. Breakfast, for example, is now a cue to go out running on days when I don’t have lectures (this is very surprising for me, I’ve received several comments along the lines of “Who are you and what have you done with the real you” since I began doing this).
Just occurred to me that I could put TAPs I want to install into Anki! Like the cue could be the thing on the front of the card, and the routine+reward can be the text on the back.
TLDR: I managed to fix my terrible sleep pattern by creating the right habits.
I’ve been there, up until a month ago actually.
I’ve tried a whole slew of things to fix my sleeping pattern over the past couple of years. F.lux, conservative use of melatonin, and cutting down on caffeine all helped but none of them really fixed the problem.
What I found was that I’d often stay up late in order to get more done, and it would feel like I was getting more done (where in actual fact I was just gaining more hours now in exchange for losing more hours in the future). Alongside this my pattern was so hectic that any attempt to sleep at a “normal” time was thwarted by a lack of tiredness, I could use melatonin to ‘reset’ this, but it’d rarely stay that way.
The first thing that helped was sitting down and working out hour by hour how much time I actually have in a week; this prevented me from thinking I could gain more time by staying up later. The second thing was forming good habits around my sleep. Habit’s typically follow a trigger-routine-reward pattern and require fairly quick feedback. As a result building a habit where the routine is sleeping for eight hours is quite hard.
Instead I appended two patterns either side of the time I wished to sleep, the first with the goal of making it easier for me to sleep, and the second with the goal of making it easier for me to get up.
The pre-sleep pattern followed:
Cue: ‘Hey it’s 10:30pm’
Routine:Turning off technology->Reading->Meditation
Reward: Mug of hot-chocolate
While the post-sleep pattern followed:
Cue: Alarm goes off,
Routine: Get out of bed.
Reward: Breakfast.
Since doing this I’ve been awake at 8 am every morning with little trouble, and the existence of those habits has made easy to add other habits into my routine. Breakfast, for example, is now a cue to go out running on days when I don’t have lectures (this is very surprising for me, I’ve received several comments along the lines of “Who are you and what have you done with the real you” since I began doing this).
I hope you find this useful.
Just occurred to me that I could put TAPs I want to install into Anki! Like the cue could be the thing on the front of the card, and the routine+reward can be the text on the back.