day 30
July 9, 2006
This is my last daily post of my sleep experience! In the next day or so I’ll post a ‘one-month-reflection’, and then give a day 45 and day 60 update.
Again this morning I awoke without an alarm. Again I didn’t check the time, but guess it would have been about a half-hour before the full 4.5 hr core sleep was up. Again I decided to go back to sleep. So this makes 3 out of 6 days in which I awoke early before the alarm when I *could* have gotten up. I’ll end the mini-experiment here (to extend the core by a half-hour and see if I would awaken on my own). I was initially going to try it through next Friday, but I’ve achieved the knowledge I was looking for: a) I know that somewhere around half the time I go through a sleep phase light enough to awake from and get up; b) I know that I can ‘help’ that happen by drinking more liquids than usual close to core-sleep-time; c) I know I do not like looking at a clock to check the time; d) I know that I enjoy the core-sleep time-frame enough — given that I’ll be getting up soon anyway — that I’ll tend to choose to go back to bed.
Regarding that last point, it’s occurred to me that one of the reasons I enjoy going back to bed is that I don’t spend much ‘conscious’ time in bed. I really enjoying crawling into bed for the core, knowing I don’t have to get up in 20 minutes. That’s not at all to say that I’m dissatisfied with the naps; quite the opposite — I look forward to them as little rechargers. My enjoyment of the beginning of the core is rather an enjoyment of the difference of the experience. Given my overall very successful napping, I’ve gotten good at dropping into some stage of sleep pretty quickly during the core sleep, so I don’t tend to hang out in that realm of enjoying the beginning of the core that long. So what I’ve found is that by awaking early, before I have to get up, I get an extra dose of that relaxed enjoyment of being in bed for an extended block of time — before I doze off again.
As I posted before, as part of this mini-experiment (seeing if I’d awaken on my own), I switched to a 4.5 hr core sleep from a 4 hr core. I also decided to skip the 3am nap which even at 4 hrs was often being pushed way back. That’s been fine. I’ve tended to sleep deeply during the 7am nap, but that was true even before. One nice thing about skipping the 3am nap is that I haven’t really lost out on much time due to the increase.
Now that I know I’m not going to try to get out of bed earlier, I have to decide whether to stay at 4.5 hrs for the core or go back down to 4. For now I’ll stay at 4.5 hrs for another week, to give the body a chance to fully acclimatize before trying something new.
