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[UpRiverGreg]

I was taught at a younger age that its best to wake up in between sleep cycles, and that sleep cycles typically last 90 minutes. Because of this I have always tried to sleep in intervals of 90 minutes, usually making my nights sleep either 6, 7.5 or 9 hours. It may be just placebo, but I do think that I generally tend to feel better with 7.5hrs of sleep than I do with 8.

[UpRiverMatt]

Personally, I find I need to just try different amounts of time out to see how I feel, and I’ve noticed that through experimentation I like to get around 8 hours in bed, about 7.5 hours asleep. Less than that I find makes me tired and/or irritable, and more than that usually makes me feel groggy. If I ever find that I’ve skimped on sleep for whatever reason, I make it up with a 20 minute nap, or I try to go to bed early – preferably right when I start getting tired. Then, I go back to the 8 hours.

I’ve tried the 90 minute cycle thing out and it does seem to help, but I can’t be sure so I go back to intuition. I’ve also tried sleep apps that wake me up right when it thinks I’m at the end of a cycle to reduce grogginess and it might have helped a bit, but I prefer to have a really consistent wake time. At the end of the day (or night?), I try to keep it consistent and do what feels best from experience, and that seems to be about 8 hours in the ol sack 11pm to 7am these days.

[UpRiverSpencer]

Hmm. Yeah, I agree with Matt especially about the regularity and schedule of your sleep. Another thing I’d say is I’ve personally found great benefit in checking out what my sleep chronotype was. In fact, I’ve recommended to lots of people that they all look into it and most of them have reported good results back.

If you really want to find some sort of sweet spot for your sleep routine, I’d also recommend some sort of biofeedback tool. That could be as technological (and freakin expensive) as an Oura Ring, or could be as low tech and intuitive as a sleep journal where you log your bedtime, and hours and look for trends. Try and keep most things controlled and the same, and week after week, change a single variable to see how it affects you. Consider warm or cold before bed, what time you sleep and what time you wake, do you meditate before bed or watch a relaxing video to calm down, pray, eat or fast? The possibilities are endless but using some sort of biofeedback can help a lot!

Hope that helps d00d 🙂

[UpRiverSpencer]

Lately also, ive been experimenting with longer and shorter times. I know that Dave Asprey says 6h2m is ideal for him, but that seems kind of short. I guess that’s what his Oura ring tracks. Thats actually kind of important to note, if that’s true, as te Oura software differentiates between “time in bed” and “time sleeping.” Ppl go to bed for an 8 hour window and don’t realize that they actually end up sleeping considerably less than that… Just for reference I usually have a “in bed time” of 8.5 hours and a sleep time of only 6 ish :/… Guess I have some shit to fix lol.

On the note of oura (maybe i’ll start its own thread of this topic), what key stats do you guys track, and how helpful and accurate do you find the “readiness” tab?

Thanks!

[UpRiverMatt]

Yeah I used to have much less efficient sleeps but now I’m doing really well, probably because I’m constantly sleep deprived XD. I’ll be getting up in 6 hours or so lol. I’ve been hitting high 80s% and low 90s%.

I find the readiness tab is accurate to how I feel. I know before I get up where I’ll be roughly it seems. Recently it’s been really low, like high 50s to low 70s probably directly related to the lack of sleep and higher stress from grinding more on some projects, including the 50 page carnivore article to be posted pretty soon ;). The HRV should be higher than it is recently at the mid 50s, I’m looking to get back into the high 70s at least, preferably 90s. Resting HR I’m looking to get back down to the low 40s when it is now 50 to mid 50s. Eating close to bed and not winding down both ruin these measurements for me so that’s good feedback.

I’d like to use the tags more and then check out the cloud desktop data and do some correlation and causation analysis for more insight.

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