If you are awake at 4 am, and have to be at work at 7, should you even try to get back to sleep or should you try to do something with your time?
My cutoff is three hours. If I sleep for less than three hours, it’s worse than no sleep, at least in the morning
What about 3 hours early in the night, say 11pm to 2am?
If you’re just shifting the scenario, same answer.
For example, I used to save money when I had to fly by using an airport over an hour drive away and being willing to take the first flight. That meant getting up about 2-3am. That’s not even worth trying. I slept at my destination
Sleep cycles are usually around 90mins, so you could theoretically get 2 of those in before 7am. Or, you could try doing something calming for 90mins, and only get one cycle in. Yoga, reading a book etc.
Sleep, dude. You can’t sleep at work. Or can you?
In a pinch I could, by pretending to be in a zoom meeting.
When I was younger, I’d try to power through. Now that I’m older, I recognize that my day is always better when I try to get some sleep.
When I was younger, not sleeping was the result of bad choices. Lately it’s because of insomnia. I don’t know if that makes any difference, but I guess it’s worth noting.
PSA: 24 hours of sleep deprivation is similar to having a BAC (Blood Alcohol Count) of 0.10%. That’s over the legal limit in most places. If you have to go to work, don’t drive.
Check out the phases of the sleep cycle. IIRC a full cycle is around 90 mins so in those 3 hours you can potentially hit 2 cycles and not feel groggy.
With all the benefits of sleep (and the problems from lack of sleep) it would be better to sleep
awake at 4 am, and have to be at work at 7
This is just my life. I could probably stay in bed until 5.30 at the latest, but then I’d be in a rush, and might get fucked by traffic.
If I’m fully awake I only give up when I’ve got less than 90 minutes left before I get up. That is long enough for a full rem cycle.
If not, then I am thankful for the flexibility I have at work. I can usually go to work early and subsequently leave early too.
sleep.
my tip: put your phone on silent and place it in another room to prevent you from reflexively taking it while you struggle to fall asleep. just make sure to have the alarm volume be high enough for you to wake up.
Close your eyes and rest, meditate…
If you absolutely must get up, do exercise, chores, etc until your back on schedule
Definitely sleep if tired, or try to but my commute is short.
I’m so glad my work works on the basis of as long as you do your 8 hours a day, come in when you like (to a point as unfortunately it isn’t a 24 hour business. So when I wake up at 4 I just go to work knowing that I’ll get there at half 4 meaning I finish at half 12 and have the whole afternoon to do things I actually want to do!
there’s usually signs for me to help decide:
- yawning, teary-eyed: I need to top-off sleep
- eyes tired of being closed and/ or mind already wandering: time to get up
- if not those, I can always stay in bed longer and chill
