Controlling your sleep

Nine years ago, I worked for a week or so in a city in the southern part of Sweden. I stayed at a colleagues house, where I slept in the basement. If there was a window in the room, it didn’t let in any light. So it was pitch black until I switched on the light.

My colleague had dug out an old alarm clock, of the kind with red digits and the option of waking either to the radio or to an absolutely horrible electronic alarm signal.

As I slept in the basement, I got no reception at all, so I was stuck with the horrible alarm signal. And it was so horrible that I, before going to sleep on the first night, thought to myself that I had to wake up before the alarm would go off.

The first morning I woke up by myself, and as I turned to see what time it was, I realized that I had woken up about a minute before the time I had set the alarm clock to go off.

I don’t know if I dismissed it as a coincidence, but every morning the rest of the days I spent there, I woke up just in time to switch off the alarm clock.

I have used this technique—if you can call it that; it’s more like a feature of your brain—hundreds of times since, and I find it superior to using alarm clocks.

I remember, even longer ago, a friend who experimented with aligning his sleep to his sleep cycles.

He said that you could check what your sleep cycle is by staying awake, and measuring the time between the first and second “yawn periods”. First you get tired, and yawn a lot, then comes a period where you get less tired and don’t yawn, and then you get tired again. This is your sleep cycle, he said.

So what you should do, he explained, is make sure you sleep in multiples of your sleep cycle, and you’ll wake up feeling fresh. (The funny thing is that he very often overslept and came late to work.)

So how do you do this? Well, it seems as if the only thing you need to do is to “mentally commit” yourself to waking up at a particular time.

At first, I believed that you had to know what time it was when you set your inner alarm clock, so that your unconscious, or whatever, would be able to calculate the sleep cycle, or something, when you told it you want to wake up at six thirty. I also believed that I had to repeat, mentally, to myself: wake up at six thirty, wake up at six thirty.

But it seems you don’t need to know what time it is, and that it requires no mantra-like repetition. You only need to decide what time to wake up, and then something in your brain services that request and makes sure that you do.

I think, however, that you need to practice a bit, if not for anything else, so to convince you that it works. I think it’s best to practice by setting an alarm clock, and then deciding to wake up just before it goes off. Then you can get rid of the alarm clock.

For me, this works amazingly well. I can set myself to awake awfully early in the morning, and it very often makes me awake very shortly before the time I had decided, usually a minute or less—and if it has ever failed, it can only be once or twice.

Also, it seems I can get by with less sleep than when using an alarm clock. I don’t know if this really is because your sleep cycle adjusts itself, but I’m less tired sleeping, on average, six hours per night, than when I sleep eight hours but abort my sleep by external means.

As I intended to blog about this, I had set the alarm in my cellphone at five thirty, and decided to awake just in time to switch it off—and I didn’t know what time it was when I got to bed. This morning I awoke (by myself), got up, and as I closed the bedroom door, the alarm went off in my hand, so I could just tap the Yes-button twice to switch it off. So I woke up ten seconds to five thirty, or so.