I’m starting an experiment today. The program is Everyman: 3 20 min naps at midday, the afternoon and the evening with core sleep gradually decreasing, hopefully to a small number of hours. I have early morning lectures and function well at night, so short of being nocturnal decreasing my core sleep looks the best way to be efficient. Will keep this tread updated with results.
Are you tracking your sleep with a Zeo or at least a cellphone accelerometer?
How are you benchmarking your mental state? Memory may take a serious hit, are you using something like Anki which records statistics on forgetting/memory performance? (Working memory and executive function are also issues, so I would suggest dual n-back.)
At the moment I’m tracking sleep with a pen and paper, just started with an Android app. Zeo was totally unknown to me. Thankyou, will investigate this.
My plan is to go by the metric that matters to me, university work. I get enough data there to notice something going wrong. Not the same detail as proper Anki-style benchmarking, however there is an extra variable in my case (resulting in high variance on the day/week scale), that would spoil such results.
I’m a big fan of the Zeo, I should mention. You may be better off with one of the cellphone apps (I think some are even free, while the cellphone-based Zeo is like $100, plus something like $20-40 in headband replacement a year depending on how fast you use them up).
(Working memory and executive function are also issues, so I would suggest dual n-back.)
What do you think are the best ways to measure mental performance? (The problem with dual n-back is that I’m constantly improving and I would like to have a somewhat constant benchmark.) Do you think tests that measure visual reaction time or the time you need to solve arithmetic problems are worthwhile?
If you haven’t plateaued on DNB yet, you could always try a suite of things like Gbrainy or Lumosity. (But needless to say, improving on DNB simply means that data is harder to interpret—if your scores drop, even after you think you’ve adapted, that’s significant data!)
Update. I’ve discovered I dont function nearly so well at night as I had anticipated. I was running with core sleep 4-8, after shifting this to 2-6 I can see an improvement.
Also notable features: I can shift the naps around a fair amount, but too much core sleep, or hitting the snooze button after waking from core sleep throws me off for a long time after. The amount of sleep in each session doesn’t seem as important in how I feel afterwards as how I wake up. Waking up in the middle of deep sleep going blurg and snoozing for 10 mins is followed by feeling awful. Being in light enough sleep that my phone screen turning back on before the alarm goes off is enough to wake me and then getting straight out of bed is followed by feeling really energetic.
It’s incredible how much sleep I’m able to get in the naps. Sometimes schedules mean I can only really afford 10⁄15 mins, and I feel myself waking up from real sleep after this.
I’m starting an experiment today. The program is Everyman: 3 20 min naps at midday, the afternoon and the evening with core sleep gradually decreasing, hopefully to a small number of hours. I have early morning lectures and function well at night, so short of being nocturnal decreasing my core sleep looks the best way to be efficient. Will keep this tread updated with results.
Are you tracking your sleep with a Zeo or at least a cellphone accelerometer?
How are you benchmarking your mental state? Memory may take a serious hit, are you using something like Anki which records statistics on forgetting/memory performance? (Working memory and executive function are also issues, so I would suggest dual n-back.)
At the moment I’m tracking sleep with a pen and paper, just started with an Android app. Zeo was totally unknown to me. Thankyou, will investigate this.
My plan is to go by the metric that matters to me, university work. I get enough data there to notice something going wrong. Not the same detail as proper Anki-style benchmarking, however there is an extra variable in my case (resulting in high variance on the day/week scale), that would spoil such results.
I’m a big fan of the Zeo, I should mention. You may be better off with one of the cellphone apps (I think some are even free, while the cellphone-based Zeo is like $100, plus something like $20-40 in headband replacement a year depending on how fast you use them up).
What do you think are the best ways to measure mental performance? (The problem with dual n-back is that I’m constantly improving and I would like to have a somewhat constant benchmark.) Do you think tests that measure visual reaction time or the time you need to solve arithmetic problems are worthwhile?
If you haven’t plateaued on DNB yet, you could always try a suite of things like Gbrainy or Lumosity. (But needless to say, improving on DNB simply means that data is harder to interpret—if your scores drop, even after you think you’ve adapted, that’s significant data!)
Update. I’ve discovered I dont function nearly so well at night as I had anticipated. I was running with core sleep 4-8, after shifting this to 2-6 I can see an improvement.
Also notable features: I can shift the naps around a fair amount, but too much core sleep, or hitting the snooze button after waking from core sleep throws me off for a long time after. The amount of sleep in each session doesn’t seem as important in how I feel afterwards as how I wake up. Waking up in the middle of deep sleep going blurg and snoozing for 10 mins is followed by feeling awful. Being in light enough sleep that my phone screen turning back on before the alarm goes off is enough to wake me and then getting straight out of bed is followed by feeling really energetic.
It’s incredible how much sleep I’m able to get in the naps. Sometimes schedules mean I can only really afford 10⁄15 mins, and I feel myself waking up from real sleep after this.