105 hours: Sleep dilemmas

I use a set of tactics and principles to manage my time. I call it 105 hours.

It helps me allocate the 105 hours I have in the week.

Sometimes I get to go to sleep by bedtime. Sometimes... I don't.

Board game night

"Cool, I'll be there after 9:00 pm", my best friend says. I joke, as usual, that technically that means he can arrive any time after 9:00 pm, say midnight, but as usual, he refuses to provide an end boundary to his ETA.

Tonight is board game night – once a month, we'll order pizza and play board games or video games until late at night.

Pizza arrives, and we're catching up on each other's lives and deciding what we'll play after dinner when his phone rings: it's his "sleeper," an alarm that fires on his bedtime, 9:30 pm.

We all smile. Of course he won't go to sleep anywhere near 9:30 pm today – he just arrived! Last board game night, he left at 2:00 am.

All of us in the group know 9:30 pm is more like an inspirational bedtime for him, not a realistic one. It's more of a constant reminder of how late he is to bed every night than anything else.

Like a nightly reminder of his sleep procrastination.

Now here is the problem: having gone to bed late today, at what time should my friend wake up the following day?

Sleep dilemmas

I go to sleep every day at 11:00 pm and am ready to start my day with a run at 8:00 am.

Why 11 pm to 8 am? Why not earlier, like 10 pm to 7 am or 9 pm to 6 am instead? Isn't being an early riser a path to virtue? Early to rise makes you healthy, wealthy, and wise, doesn't it?

Perhaps that will change in the future, but the problem with waking up early and needing to sleep early is that, every once in a while, my social events go late into the night – dinner with family, a board game with friends, going out for a night out on a date or a concert. Then bam, I'm home 11:00 pm or later.

When we have a routine of sleeping and waking up every day at the same time and are forced to sleep late, we enter what I call the sleep dilemma:

1. Sleeping less and waking up at the same time tomorrow
2. Sleeping the necessary amount and starting the next day late

Most people I know choose #1 – sleeping less and waking up at the usual time, which makes us sleep-deprived for the rest of the day.

Often, they have no flexibility about when to start their days, so they don't even have a choice.

I believe the correct answer to the sleep dilemma is #2 – sleeping the necessary amount and starting the next day late.

I keep a conservatively late regular sleeping time and a flexible morning schedule to avoid sleep deprivation.

I want to have the flexibility to participate in social activities late into the night, like concerts and board game nights, with higher chances of avoiding sleep dilemmas.

Don't be sleep deprived

Let me be as direct as I can about this very critical topic:

It's a fool's game and a foolish decision to sleep fewer than 7-8 hours a day just to wake up early.

Waking up early is only good if it comes after sleeping early.

Virtually everybody who says they need fewer hours of sleep than others needs just as many hours as everybody else.

They are fooling themselves and are instead going through life both sleep deprived and being less effective than they could be.

Here's Gretchen Rubin in the habits book Better than Before talking about sleep deprivation:

One study estimated that for every hour of interrupted sleep during the previous night, people wasted 8.4 minutes in online puttering—checking email, Internet surfing, and the like. And while many people claim, “I’ve trained myself to get by with five hours” and say they don’t feel particularly sleepy, research shows that the chronically sleep-deprived are quite impaired. Yet many adults routinely sleep less than seven hours.
On a flight to San Francisco, I saw with my own eyes the evidence of people’s sleep deprivation. At midday, many passengers were fast asleep. Not dozing; completely zonked out.
I mentioned this to a friend, and he bragged, “Oh, I always sleep on planes. I can fall asleep anywhere, anytime.” “Maybe you’re chronically underslept,” I suggested. It took all my strength not to launch into a lecture on the importance of sleep. “No, I’m not,” he said. “I’ve learned to adjust to very little sleep.”

Rubin, Gretchen. Better Than Before: What I Learned About Making and Breaking Habits--to Sleep More, Quit Sugar, Procrastinate Less, and Generally Build a Happier Life (p. 52). Crown/Archetype. Kindle Edition.

If you search for the word "deprivation" in Matthew Walker's book Why We Sleep, you'll get 246 matches. That's how frequently the terms sleep and deprivation come up together.

Or instead, search for "accidents" in the same book, where you'll have 26 matches. Here's one of them:

Drowsy driving is the cause of hundreds of thousands of traffic accidents and fatalities each year. And here, it is not only the life of the sleep-deprived individuals that is at risk, but the lives of those around them. Tragically, one person dies in a traffic accident every hour in the United States due to a fatigue-related error.

Walker, Matthew. Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams (p. 5). Scribner. Kindle Edition.

That's right, one person dies in a traffic accident every hour in the United States due to a fatigue-related error.

To me, being proud of sleep deprivation is like being proud of being drunk during the day or any other similar self-inflicted impairment.

If you need a bit more encouragement to get the necessary sleep, here's another summary of two chapters' worth of negative outcomes caused by sleep deprivation in the book Why We Sleep:

What is that compelling evidence? In the following two chapters, we will learn precisely why and how sleep loss inflicts such devastating effects on the brain, linking it to numerous neurological and psychiatric conditions (e.g., Alzheimer’s disease, anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder, suicide, stroke, and chronic pain), and on every physiological system of the body, further contributing to countless disorders and disease (e.g., cancer, diabetes, heart attacks, infertility, weight gain, obesity, and immune deficiency). No facet of the human body is spared the crippling, noxious harm of sleep loss. We are, as you will see, socially, organizationally, economically, physically, behaviorally, nutritionally, linguistically, cognitively, and emotionally dependent upon sleep.
This chapter deals with the dire and sometimes deadly consequences of inadequate sleep on the brain.

Walker, Matthew. Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams (p. 133). Scribner. Kindle Edition.

As I said: adjusting on little sleep is a fool's game.

But Dui, I really don't have time to sleep!

Hey, I'm not talking about parents of newborns, people with jobs incredibly demanding on their time, or others who have no choice in the dilemma.

Sometimes, we have to be sleep deprived; there's no choice.

No choice, no dilemma.

One of my favorite people in the world is a waiter at a restaurant I go to. Let's call him Bob.

Mondays through Fridays, Bob wakes up at 5:00 am. At 6:00 am, he's ready to leave home for the long commute to his factory worker job. The job is demanding, and his salary barely covers rent and utilities, but at least it's stable.

Tuesdays through Saturdays, Bob waits tables at the restaurant. He starts at the beginning of the evening, 7:00 pm, and stays at least until midnight. He's home by 1:00 am when all goes well. Bob works Sundays at the restaurant too, but only at lunchtime.

From Tuesday to Saturday, five days a week, Bob goes to bed at 1:00 am and wakes up at 5:00 am.

Bob's alternatives are either not waiting tables, which he can't afford to do, or finding a higher-paying day job, which he's not qualified for. He also has no time or money to acquire those qualifications.

Is Bob sleep deprived when I meet him at the restaurant? You bet.

Could he do anything differently? I can't think of anything.

Most of us with demanding jobs, though, are not Bob.

Sometimes, when I really don't have a choice but to sleep late and wake up early, I just try not to worry .. mostly in vain.

The best approach for me is to define a consistent bedtime and, to the extent possible, to have routines and personal activities that rarely force me into sleep dilemmas in the first place.