If only there was more time in the day I would… I hear it all the time from people; their massive amounts of productiveness they would unleash on the world given just a few more hours a day. College students have tried to make this a reality with the all night “cram sessions” where they end up just not sleeping. Instead they stay up all night reading the same sentence 20 times because their brain can’t focus and they lose their spot on the page.

This is not a good method to study; in fact research at Harvard has shown that you will actually end up remembering less. Participants were separated into three different groups after being shown images that they were told to memorize. One of the groups was tested on the memorization after 20 minutes, the other after 12 hours and the last after 24 hours. You would expect that the ones who were tested just 20 minutes later would do best, but the exact opposite was true. The participants who slept on it and had 24 hours for the information to fester in their brain did the best on the test, while those who only had 20 minutes did the worst.

So step one is to make sure you get some sleep. However a lot of people complain of being more tired when they wake up after these abbreviated sleep periods. truncated  sleep schedules are nothing new to those serving in the military. However that groggy haze that you wind up in is not good when dealing with life and death situations, so science was put to work to figure out what we can do about this.

What scientists discovered was that the problem tends to have little to do with the amount of sleep and more to do with the number of complete sleep cycles your body goes through. A sleep cycle is on average 90 minutes and breaks down into 5 distinct phases of brain wave patterns. For the first 65 minutes you experience normal, or non-REM (rapid eye movement) sleep; the next 20 minutes are REM sleep (in which dreaming occurs) and 5 minutes of normal sleep. Going through these phases multiple times explains why some people experience many dreams in one night. At the end of each of these phases your body goes into an almost awake state before either waking up, or going back into another cycle. Waking up in the middle of these cycles (especially while in REM sleep) can make you feel groggy because your body will still be flooded with chemicals that help immobilize you in your sleep and your brain is trying to piece together what has occurred.

So the trick learned from these experiments is to sleep in multiples of 90- for example, after 3 hours,  4 ½ hours, 6 hours, 7 ½ hours or 9 hours, but not after  4 hours, 5 hours, or 7 hours.

 

In the military our sleep was regimented around this and worked pretty well. The only hard part is gauging when you actually fall asleep, if you plan 4 ½ hours to sleep but then lay in bed for 30 minutes before falling asleep you will not be able to complete your sleep cycle. It takes a little work- setting up a routine before falling asleep is the best way to train your body on when it is sleep time.

Until science figure out Orexin A– we will just have to stick with this and our coffee.

To take it to the next level read about the Uberman Sleep Cycle.