First Sleep, Second Day

First Sleep, Second Day

Yesterday I tried out the notion of first and second sleep, and I was curious whether I could follow up with it for a second day. Nope! I think I awoke sometime around 4AM, but slept through it. I woke up around 9AM. I’d gone to sleep around 11PM instead of 8PM, which probably made a difference.

I think it is my lack of a regular sleeping schedule that makes experiments like this hard to draw conclusions from, so I would have to really commit to a two-week trial. However, I suspect that in my case sleeping pattern isn’t as critical. Maintaining an unyielding discipline with regards to my habits matters more if I want to have a reliable sleep pattern, and the same can be applied to other “good for me” habits like going to the gym. The problem: I don’t think I really like having unchanging habits. I like change! If I can find a way to be maximally productive given the randomness of my wakefulness, that would be great.

1 Comment

  1. J Wynia 10 years ago

    Everything I’ve read about the 2 phase sleep that pre-dated artificial light was that people went to bed as soon as it got dark. I don’t think I’d go that far in re-creating it (since it gets dark here at like 5pm right now), but 11pm is probably pushing it quite a bit.