About a year ago, I started on a project where I logged detailed statistics on all my regular activities like sleep, eating, exercise, work, etc. I was unsure of what exactly to do with it, but the primary goals was to track improvement, detect negative trends, and infer useful information.
My golden motive was to figure out what altered my erratic wake-up schedule. I have a lot of trouble getting up in the morning most of the time, and it’s one of my long term goals to rise early and effortlessly. I pulled up the spreadsheets last night and tried to see if I can find some correlation between my sleep length and any other factors.
Contrary to what most people think, I found very little correlation between the time I went to bed, and the time I woke up. There’s some correlation between the time I had to get to class or work, which is expected, but nothing that would point to any ‘aha’ moment. There was no evidence showing that exercise affected how much I slept (though there was a surprising correlation between how much I ran in the evening and how good I felt before sleeping).
But one thing really surprised me. When I examined all the days when I had my last meal before 10PM, it was almost always followed by an early rise. Some more examination showed that there was some clear correlation between when I last ate, and when I woke up, regardless of what time I fell asleep.
I decided to try it out for a few days – No food or coffee after 9PM. Period. And I was amazed at the results – regardless of what time I slept, I had no trouble waking up at all. Today was the ultimate test – I had a critical class in the morning at 8:30 AM and I was up till 2:30 AM finishing up an assignment, though I hadn’t eaten after 8PM. I was tempted to get a snack before I slept (I’m in a university – you get food all the time around here), but I refused.
Sure enough, I was up at 7:30AM fresh as a daisy. In fact, after a good breakfast, I found it was actually quite easy to go about and didn’t feel sleepy at all through the rest of the afternoon.
So I encourage you to give this a try – avoid food intake beyond a certain point, and see if it helps being able to wake up early in the morning.
haha .. nice … but I think your waking up early could be because you feel damn hungry not having had anything to eat for a long period. Perhaps you have already the article at http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/article687916.ece where they claim you can reset your sleep cycle by fasting for almost half a day.
This is an interesting finding. Even though i don’t find it difficult to wake early ( I can wake up 4am ) but some times when i go to bed late i wake up late. so i thought that its direct correlation between time to go to bed. To suffice my curiosity can you please publish your data or send me.
Interesting correlation,although I can’t think of a reason!