My relationship with sleep has always been a bitter-sweet one, ever since my school days I had a hard time waking up and even worse going to bed. The cause and correlation between the two is pretty easy to spot, but that wasn’t the case for a self-involved teenager. So what ended up happening for a few years was having a hard time waking up, going to school and as soon as I would finish my lunch head for a quick nap. Of course, without alarms the nap quick cannot be, this would lead me to sleep hours on end messing up my sleep schedule. Quick forward a few years and after a few failed attempts I got better understating my sleep needs and how to control the monkey brain.
The problem #
I nailed down my problem to staying up past my “natural bedtime” and oversleeping. This was due to multiple reasons, the main one was using the phone in bed. I went to bed at roughly the same time every night, but I would stay up for 30 mins to 1h on my phone, which it’s all fun until you lose precious sleep time and end up being a zombie the next day.
Solution part 1 #
Not using the phone in bed. Easy enough! Not quite, I use my phone as my alarm, so I had to find myself a clock, some of the requirements I had for it:
- easy to set up: I need to change my wake-up time every so often, I want it to be easy to change alarm times or to turn them off without fidgeting too much
- no “smartness”, meaning no Wi-Fi enabled devices I want dumb-ish
- battery powered, freedom of movement it’s a nice bonus
After a few searches, I came across the Youpin Qingping Cleargrass a (sub brand or company) from Xiaomi.
Overall a solid product, with only a major downside for me, using the “Mainland China” servers for the app since it doesn’t seem to be supported by the international version, making initial loading times longer than one might expect. On the plus side, a nice bonus, it also has temperature and humidity sensors.
The rule #
After getting the alarm, the rule has been “No phone in the bedroom”, which helped a lot towards my goal, but I wasn’t getting the result I’ve hoped for.
Solution part 2 #
At the time, I had the Apple Watch and I started using it to monitor my sleep and I found out I felt more rested after 8:30h - 8:45h of sleep, which for me, it’s difficult but not impossible to implement, I just have to go to sleep earlier. :)
Conclusion (for now) #
The steps I took to improve the length and the quality of my sleep are big and did achieve the goal I set for myself, but I’m still falling short of an excellent night of sleep, which might depend more on the diet, stress level, season and of course caffeine consumption. I’ll try recording more data and see if I can find other easy things to implement.