Completed my first 30 days trial!

[vMike]

Yep! Just completed my first 30 days trial, waking up at 7am.
Was pretty hard first couple days as I couldn't sleep at night, and felt very sleepy at daytime, but I was really determined to make it work. Couple times I only slept like a couple hours per night.

Waking up at 7am might not be a big deal for most people who have jobs or studies to attend to in the morning, but I work from home, so don't have any external reason to wake up in the morning.

I had long periods of weeks at a time when I used to sleep during daytime and be awake at night. Was feeling like zombie, not being able to do anything productive most of the time and slept like 10-12 hours per day. Tried changing that many times, but after a while I'd just go back to the regular "schedule".

So now I've been waking up at 7 and sleeping about 6.5 hours on average, it feels good

However I'm still a bit worried that I might just roll back to the previous habits if I stop monitoring my sleep for a while. Today I didn't have my alarm set, so woke up at 7.30.

So a question for those who did similar trials, do you see that after the 30 days it comes natural to you to wake up at the new time? What if you had to stay awake late one night, would you get back to waking up at 7am immediately after it?

[NickHaslem]

This is exactly what I am about to embark on myself because I am in the same situation. I'd be interested to hear more about how you managed to work in last afternoons, early night time if you were really tired or didn't get much sleep. How has your productivity changed? I'm going to blog about my experience as well so I can get a good indication of how it changed my performance and vitality. Did you do blog about it at all? If not please share what you thought was hard/easy and what I should look out for.

Nick

[vMike]

Hey Nick, first day I woke up at 21.00 (yes 9pm.), so was awake the whole night and day and then went to sleep at about 23.00 and woke up at 7.00. I watched tv and movies a lot to not fall asleep earlier.

Also didn't drink any coffee the whole time as Steve suggests, but I rarely do anyway.

At first felt very sleepy in the mornings and had to put considerable effort to not fall asleep, but only after 3-5 days into it I was already feeling ok waking up early. There were days in the middle where I stayed up till late not being able to sleep till 3-5 am. due to some circumstances, but still I woke up at 7, few times though I decided to get a few more hours of sleep.

I also skipped 4 poker nights with friends during that time to not hurt the trial, had to make up some new reason every time We usually play till 2-4am once a week.

Basically just following this.

[NickHaslem]

Thanks for the input Mike and link to the article. I'm going to do this 30-day challenge hand in hand with a yoga one which will involve doing that once a day as well.

I think they will help each other out.

p.s I have a few poker sites haha. One is pokershark.com.au << shameless plug hehe

Thanks again,

Nick

[highvoltage]

In short, no. If you make a drastic change in sleep schedule like you did (and I did), it'll take more than 30 days to permanently adjust.

I did this trial last month (1 Dec. - 30 Dec.) where I woke up at 6 AM every day. Since I finished, I haven't been setting my alarm and my wakeup time has slowly drifted later and later. This morning I didn't wake until 08:30

So to answer your question, I think you have to actively keep up with your sleep schedule for more than 30 days in order to truly make it a natural habit. I used to be a night owl to the core (up 'till the sunrise, sleep until the afternoon and all that), so shifting to be a morning person will definitely take more than 30 days work for me.

I've been slipping on my wakeup times of late, but waking up at 8:30 AM is still _definitely_ an improvement over 8:30 PM. So I'm still not far from where I want to be, but I need to push myself to get back to 6 AM, which I'll start doing next Monday (12th Jan) when my Spring semester starts at the uni.