DRMacIver's Notebook
Moving the consistency bubble around
Moving the consistency bubble around
Note: This is a post where I am thinking out loud about a problem I’m trying to solve. I expect I will find out the solution I outline in here doesn’t work or needs modification.
Something I have found is that, much to my regret, my life is much better when I am a morning person. It is also very hard for me to reliably be a morning person.
In theory, this is a simple matter. If I set my alarm to go off early every day, I’ll get up early every day.lol. lmao. This is what all of the good sleep hygiene advice suggests after all.
There’s just one problem: I don’t want to do this.
Well, OK. Why not?
Part of this is that I wake up feeling like death a lot of mornings. This isn’t as common as it was when I was still dependent on caffeine (a significant part of my problem with mornings when on caffeine is that I wake up with massive caffeine withdrawal). This both makes me very unwilling to get out of bed, but also means that I actually need the extra sleep or I’ll be kinda useless all day.
Why do I wake up feeling like shit in the morning?
Well, one reason is that my sleep onset time isn’t consistent. If I wake up at 7AM (which I usually do right now because of the dawn chorus), I’ll be fine if I got to sleep before midnight and feel exhausted if I got to sleep around 2AM.
So, in order to wake up in the morning, I need to make my bed time consistent.rofl
Obviously I’m not going to do that. I could try, but it’s the sort of habit change where it’s too easy to disrupt,For example it might get to late and I might realise I’ve not written a notebook post today… and then disruptions compound. I would like to go to bed before 11 more consistently than I currently do, and that would be a good thing to change, but I think if I make getting up in the morning reliant on going to bed before 11 I’ll end up failing at both. This is compounded because often the reason my bedtime is inconsistent is that some mornings I wake up late. So in order to get to sleep on time I need to wake up on time, and in order to wake up on time I have to get to sleep on time…
This is a common problem with anything with a feedback loop in it: Moving any part of the system requires moving every part of the system. This is hard, and as soon as one part fails it all comes tumbling down. The only way out is to break the feedback loop.
So the question is:
- How do I get up reliably in the morning without having to go to bed reliably in the evening?
- If I do that, how do I avoid feeling like shit during the day?
Previously, I’ve had a pretty good answer to that: Caffeine! I would wake up, take a caffeine pill, and then go back to sleep until it kicked in and I felt motivated to get out of bed. This worked pretty well. But… I’m not using caffeine any more.
One option would be to just well you gotta and force myself out of bed knowing that I’ll feel shit on doing so, but I don’t think that’s going to work. If there’s a genuine thing that I gotta do in the morning, that’s one thingWhen this was the case I have in fact managed to consistently be a morning person., and force myself out of bed anyway. But morning David is not going to be amenable to this plan, because among other reasons I don’t like feeling like shit.
I think that the most reliable solution here is to try to address the “feel like shit” part on days where I fail to get enough sleep, and I think the solution to that is just… have a nap if I need to. That way I’m not making a decision about whether or not to feel like shit today, I’m just making a decision about whether to get out of bed, and the nap is there as a safety net if I need it.
If I build into the schedule of the day that I have a nap some time late morning / early afternoon, but get up and shower consistently each morning, this adds consistency into the system and removes the negative feedback against it by creating an alternative safer place for inconsistency to arrive. I can expand or contract the amount of napping available, while trying to keep my normal wake up time consistent. I don’t know if this is going to work, but I think it’s plausible. This changes the sleep system into one where the parameter I want to control (inconsistency of when I sleep) is moved into trying to minimise nap time, and where destabilising will tend not to result in the whole thing spiralling out of control, because the variance is kept in a separate container that can be isolated from the rest of the sleep schedule.