I got myself to wake up at 3.30am.

Ever since I gave up polyphasic sleeping, I’ve been monogamously in bed with a monophasic sleep schedule. The stark difference in creative productivity and general comfort was just too much to pass up — you can really feel your mind not whirring along smoothly and lightly on compromised sleep.

Recently though, I’d been training myself to sleep and wake up earlier by about 4-5 hours, in order to attend an online panel for 50inTech hosted in Paris.

The event started at 4.30am, but from experience I knew I’d need extra time to faff about in bed, do the morning routine, and have a hot cuppa going in order to seem at least somewhat put together for the panel.

It was about diversity and inclusion in tech, so you know, a somewhat sensitive topic. I needed to be fresh, or at least fresh enough not to get fresh with anyone. Preparation and impulse control wasn’t perfect, but we #survived and no one’s sent me any complaints yet.

I had about 2 weeks to complete the transition, and started shifting the schedule up — first by 15min increments, then 30min.

The first few days went pretty well, and I was able to wake up way ahead of schedule. Sleep quality definitely suffered, as the stress of the shift fractured sleep somewhat and had me blearily waking up to find that it was 2am before dozing back off.

Hit a bit of a wall getting past the 5am mark — I could wake up all right, but there was this heavy, nauseous feeling that kept me from actually getting out of bed. This was probably just plain sleep deprivation, since going to bed early didn’t actually mean I fell asleep early.

One dubious bonus of having to fight past the 5am mark was that I got to wake up in the middle of dreams, and accordingly remembered more of them. I say dubious because most of my dreams range from unsavoury to mildly unpleasant.

Afternoon naps became necessary to push my schedule earlier, since there was just no way to get quality sleep earlier than ~10pm. You’d probably need proper blackout curtains for that, and cooperative noise levels. Cooler temperatures wouldn’t have hurt either, in my case.

One thing that helped a fair bit was daytime exercise. Unavoidable afternoon naps tended to make it harder to sleep at the appointed nighttime, so physical exhaustion helped with conking out earlier.

I got hungry earlier too, which was a surprise, though it probably shouldn’t have been. As I recall from reading, sleep and hunger schedules are fairly closely tied together — but somehow it just slipped my mind that moving one up required moving the other as well. I had to go through some rather hungry mornings, but it wasn’t too bad; I’d gotten used to the pangs from my strict intermittent fasting days.

Conclusion

Main takeaway from the experience was how surprisingly not-hard all this was to execute.

It used to seem like such a challenging drag to crawl out of bed even half an hour earlier, and now in just a few weeks I’ve managed to rise regularly in the dark before the birds are up.

Would credit purpose and novelty for the ease of success here — specific goal on a specific date, bit of excitement in breaking routine… as COVID continues to make going anywhere frictious, a temporal travel scratched the itch somewhat.

Sleep well, fellow somnolent slobs.