A Modest Proposal for Preventing a Surfeit or Deficiency of Sleep From Being a Burden, and for Making It Beneficial To Me

Abstract

For the most part, I sleep fairly well at night, insofar as that I don't often wake up, and I can usually get to sleep quickly as well. However, as far as I can remember, I have never ever been happy to get up.  Whether I'm forced to get up after 5 hours, or reluctantly drag myself into the world after accidentally sleeping 11 hours, I always feel rather terrible; this feeling is what leads me to sleeping for too long, which only makes things worse.  I'm only ever driven out of bed by the alarm, or by shame, and it takes shame a lot longer to penetrate the fog on my consciousness.  It's possible that, for whatever reason, this is just my lot in life; however, I think I can throw some science at this problem over the next semester and find the exact right amount of sleep for me.

Methods

For this initial study, I have to assume that the quality of my sleep is determined entirely by the length of time that I spend on it.  This is probably false, but it does appear that there is an optimal time, and that the further my sleeping time is from that optimum, the worse I feel.  I feel confident that I can find that optimum length of time by an initial scan of the parameter space, followed by a finer-grained narrowing to optimize the metrics I plan to use.  In basic outline, I will attempt to sleep for a given amount of time each night, and in the morning (as soon as possible) assess how I feel and record my observations.

So, assuming that there is an optimal amount of sleep for me, it should be between too little and too much, so if I start on one end of the range and go to the other, I should run across the optimal value.  10 hours per night should suffice for too much, and 5 or 4 are definitely not enough, so that's my range.  For the initial data run I will change my sleep time in intervals of one hour, and once I find a promising range I will scan that range in intervals of 30 or 15 minutes, depending on the exact result and how much time I have.

Because I can't remember running across the correct interval randomly, I have to assume that if it exists, it's in a very narrow range. Furthermore, the random influences of stress, my school schedule, life with a dog, and my dubious technique of sleeping with my mouth wide open (leading to eXtreme dehydration) certainly change the exact amount of unconsciousness I can get in in a given time.  I cannot affect these influences in any practical way, but because they are part of my normal sleep environment anyway, I wouldn't want to.  The best I can do is to take a lot of data points and hope that these effects average out, so for each time interval, I will sleep that amount for 5 weeknights, and then sleep normally on the weekend nights (Friday and Saturday) to eliminate any effects from sleep deprivation.  While the accumulation of sleep deprivation could skew my results on any particular night, this is the most like how I would actually sleep once I find the best amount of time, so sleeping the same for many nights in a row makes the most sense.

Metrics

I have two metrics that I will keep track of, one subjective and one objective.  The subjective measure will be my assessment of how terrible I feel, from 1 (very terrible) to 10 (not at all terrible).  Since the whole point of this experiment is to minimize my personal terribleness, this seems at first like the only necessary metric; however, because it is highly subjective, I also feel the need for a more concrete, numeric metric that is at least somewhat correlated to how terrible I feel.

Let's do this

The objective metric will be the number of times I hit the snooze alarm before I finally get up in the morning.  I expect this to range from 0 to 3, by which point I will start being late for school, so that will usually propel me out of bed.  My snooze alarm has been somewhat harmful to me over the years, because it goes for 10 minutes; this is unfortunately just long enough for me to get all the way back to sleep, so when it wakes me up again I feel even worse than the last time, so it would be great to get away from it.

I will also keep track of how many days in the week I got a significant amount of exercise.  This may have the beneficial side effect of getting me some more exercise, For Science!

Data

I will record my observations daily in this data sheet on Google Docs.  If I've set it up correctly, anyone should be able to view but not edit it.  I will also put together a schedule on a different sheet, so that I can work the experiment in around Spring Break, which will be the main disruption to the process.  I plan to start the first full week of school, so the experiment will begin at 10:00 PM the night of Sunday, January 9.  If anyone has any suggestions for other methods, metrics, or controls, please mention them in the comments before the start of the experiment.