Mark Manson, what's your sleeping schedule?

[playmaker001]

I am going to be more productive and sleep less starting tomorrow. I was just wondering how many hours you sleep a day and what your schedule is like. I've been reading about different sleep patterns, like polyphasic sleep for instance, and I was curious about this.

[Tim]

I don't think Mark's sleeping schedule is necessarily one you can copy. He goes to bed from any time between 1-4 most nights and still never seems to need more than 8 hours sleep. Most people would be ruined by a schedule like that, but he's just set up that way.

You generally can't decide to sleep less hours if your body needs more sleep unless you don't mind doing some serious damage to it. Most adults need 6-8 hours, and to go to bed earlier in the night. It's true you hear of high level CEOs, Political Leaders and so on who train themselves to get by on ridiculously low levels of sleep. I think that some of that's a myth though, and I think a lot of them are wrecking themselves. Arianna Huffington, a perfect example of someone who you'd expect to sleep as little as possible, recently spoke out against trying to get by on unhealthy amounts of sleep.

You almost never seem to hear of athletes who get by on very little sleep. I think this is because they know that getting enough sleep is very important for their bodies, and they wouldn't be able to train and perform at a high level if they didn't.

I do believe you could get much less sleep on a Polyphasic schedule, but anyone I've read who's tried it said they eventually gave it up because it was messing too much with their social life. Steve Pavlina is the self-development blogger who is most well-known for writing about it. If you search his blog you can find plenty about it.

Or you could try biphasic sleep, which is where you have one main sleep at night of around 4 1/2 hours, and then a one and a half hour nap in the afternoon/evening. I almost cracked this for a while last year, and it was an interesting lifestyle. You get to stay up late every night, but also get up early in the mornings. The only difficult thing is ensuring you never miss that afternoon nap. Often you want to be doing things around that time of day. If you really focused on restructuring your days I think you could make it work. Steve also tried that for a while, and might still be doing it, I'm not sure. He blogged about it and there's a really good thread about it on his forums.

Honestly though, if you're sleeping in lots and just want to get more hours in the day, and be more awake and alert in them, what I would recommend instead are his articles on How to become an Early Riser and How to get up right away when your alarm goes off I've used them both in the past to create an early rising schedule, getting up at 6 AM for a while. I'm currently getting into the habit of waking up at 7 AM. As he says in the article, if you wake up at the same time every day, your body starts to tell you when to go to bed each night, because it knows how many hours of sleep you'll get if you go to sleep at that time. You can't ignore the signals though, or your body will become confused. When you feel tired, go to bed. I think this method is the most efficient way to find out how many hours of sleep your body needs, and then consistently give it that.

[Chaos]

My schedule is 5 hours each night and two hour nap. Each day except fridays where the 2 hour nap goes to 4 to 5 hour nap...

It's interesting because I'm more active in the evenings, specially when I hit the gym, and with a lot of energy, but during the day I'm a little tired at work, I'm still able to work without problems but I feel a little tired, so it's not a perfect balance.

[Tim]

Oh yeah, as Chaos alluded to, exercising daily should mean you need less sleep and you stay more alert through-out the day. Sounds like you have a bi-phasic schedule Chaos. Interesting.

[Mark]

Like Tim said, I'm in bed around 2-3 and up at 9-10 typically.

Exercise helps. Not drinking helps. Getting older has seemed to help as well.

I tried polyphasic sleeping once years ago and it was a disaster... made it like 48 hours and then gave up and slept for 15 hours straight. Sometimes I naturally fall into a biphasic sleeping pattern, particularly if I'm jet lagged, where I'll sleep 4-6 hours a night and then 2-3 hour naps in the afternoon. But I don't really plan it and it doesn't really stick.

I've really just started listening to my body instead of planning everything. This is true in the gym as well and my results there have been much better.

If there's anything freakish about me, it's that I don't seem to get hit as hard as most people by alcohol. I can go out and drink all night until 5AM and then be up and working again by 11AM. I think that's just come with experience though -- not something I'd exactly recommend, hahaha...

[playmaker001]

Thanks for all the helpful answers guys.

Through research I've learned that just like all other things in life, there's no magic way to feel just as rested with less sleep. I've decided that I'm just gonna have to go to bed earlier to get my eight hours of sleep. That, or 7 hours with an hour nap sometime after lunch. Something that fits my schedule perfectly.

Even when I went around Djing with a couple local big names this summer, I realized they are on top of their sleeping schedule. They would sleep almost all day and at first I thought they were lazy, but around 4-5 p.m. they would wake up and be productive as hell. And of course there schedule required them to work and DJ all throughout the night and into the early morn.


Now that i think about it, there is one of my friends who is an early bird and always seems to get up at 6 a.m no matter what. I would always be impressed by his discipline and just figured he needed less sleep than others and I was just lazy. Come to find out, people are always catching him taking naps throughout the day. So if you add it up, he's sleeping about as long as I am. Again, I think it comes down to me having to improve my organization skills and being more productive when I AM awake.

I know, Captain Obvious right..

[Jani]

People that sleep less than 8h live longer.

We still don't know what the function is for each sleep phase. So, we don't know how much we need to sleep.

The best method to feel rested after sleep is waking up on as much as possible natural way between sleep cycles.
There apps for your iphone that will wake up you during such periods depending on how much you move. I had the feeling it worked, but that could also be placebo. It sucked my battery up, so I stopped using them.
Simple math and experimentation will do the trick

[playmaker001]

@ Jani: What are you talking about?

[Jani]

A sleepcycle is the period where you go through all the different phases of sleep. You have 4 different phases that you can divide in the deep sleep and non-deep sleep. When you hack your sleep, you minimize the amount in the non-deep sleep.
Such cycle is between 90 and 120min long.

When you wake-up during such phases you all feel groggy and zombie-like. But when you wake-up between cycles you feel rested.

So, you just need to calculate when you should wake-up.
http://sleepyti.me/

The more natural you wake-up the better. So, your stress levels don't increase. When you wake up with an alarm clock your cortisol level increased, what also adds to that zombie feeling. Natural light is the best way because it increases a specific hormone that helps you feel energized, the name slips my mind. Bird sounds also helps.

All pretty standard info, it something you should know before you try to hack your sleep.
If you can't feel rested after 8h, don't try to sleep less. Focus first on improving your sleep and diet.

[Chaos]

The iPhone application is called Sleep Cycle (you're supposed to left it charging during the night Jani). It works really wel but only when you sleep more than 6 hours each night.

I've tried it for several weeks and it worked great but it didn't adjust when I switched to my normal sleeping patterns, basically I will get up tired (as always) anyway. I only awake completely after the shower.

[IdEngager]

From reading this thread, I realize I've been pretty much on a biphasic sleep pattern the last few months, and it's worked out pretty well for me. I end up sleeping around 4 1/2 hours at night, and generally take an hour-hour and a half nap after work. This works out well for me cause I've never really been a morning person, but getting to work early works out well for me since getting to work around 7 (I generally sleep around 1sh-6) beats a bit of traffic and I work with a lot of East Coasters who are 3 hours ahead, so they're actually working that time as well. I can get home at 4 or 5 and get my nap in and still have time to work out before dinner, then I have the late night to work on music or go to a gig or go out.

The absolute worst is waking up in the middle of a deep sleep cycle. I swear it makes me feel worse than actually having drank heavily the night before. Just sitting around in the morning barely being able to open your eyes cause you woke up at 6 hours, no bueno. Even on weekends when I have the chance to sleep in (I often have something to do early on weekends, so I'll keep a similar pattern to weekdays sometimes), I can rarely sleep in past 10:30 or so these days, so I try to get to bed at a respectable time to get close to 7-8 hours.

[Jani]

@ Chaos
I know but I'm not going to recharge my iPhone when I have still 40% of my battery.
Sleep Cycle is the most famous one, because Tim Ferris mentioned it in his book. You have also apps with dream sounds as a feature what Sleep Cycle dont has. Its pretty awesome, the app plays specific music when you're in the phases where you dream. So, you can control your dreams.

[SeXyBaCk]

I sleep six hours straight. Usually it's 1230 to 630. At weekends I move it back by 2-3 hours. I haven't been able to sleep during the day since I was 2 years old unless it was in an aeroplane and crossing timezones.

You have to accept there's an individual component to sleep. Some people really do need more, I'm glad I don't but I don't judge people who do. However, no one needs 12 hours every day, that's bull.

I think what helps most cutting down an hour or two is having very regular sleep patterns, easier said than done though. If you wake up feeling totally out of it it's probably because you woke up in the middle of a deep sleep phase and not the more typical rapid eye movement sleeping phase.

[Mark]

I had a friend who only needed 4 hours a night. I thought he was pulling some BS, but I stayed with him for 10 days once and we'd go to bed at 4AM and he'd be up by 8AM walking around, doing things every day. It was maddening.

I've somehow been able to go from needing 8-9 hours to only needing 7-8 hours, but like I said, I think that comes with being healthy (both nutrition and exercise) and being a bit older and more disciplined. When you're younger it's easy to lay in bed and roll over and sleep another 30 min. As I've gotten older, I seem to have naturally stopped doing that.

It helps to be excited about what you're waking up for as well. There have been times with my business or when I've been writing where I literally am angry I have to sleep because it interrupts the work I'm doing. In those cases, the moment I even slightly wake up, I'm hopping out of bed.

[IdEngager]

Being excited to wake up for something absolutely helps. A lot of times if I'm looking forward to something in the morning, I won't even need an alarm to wake up, I'll hop out of bed like half an hour before the alarm even goes off. I find it hard to go to bed too if I'm working on something late at night, but sometimes it's best to leave in the middle of something, so that you have a definite point to pick up on the next day.