So for example, last night somehow I managed to fall asleep at 9:30, I was expecting to be woken up by my alarm at 7:30, but I woke up at 5:30 instead and couldn't get back to sleep. I usually am able to fall asleep around 11 or 11:30, so I usually just barely get my 8 hours each night. It's frustrating though because I know my performance would improve even if I could get 9 hours each night? Any suggestions?
Maybe you need a different goal. What if your goal was to get all the sleep your body can use?
Instead of trying to sleep for 9 or 10 hours, go to bed early, say between 9:30 and 10:00 and then wake up without an alarm. If your body can wake up without an alarm, it is getting all the sleep it can use.
Cry us a river. Geez.
Your life must be so exciting - sleeping 10 hours each day. Busy man
{:>{_O)&T)%#&uh wrote:
Maybe you need a different goal. What if your goal was to get all the sleep your body can use?
Instead of trying to sleep for 9 or 10 hours, go to bed early, say between 9:30 and 10:00 and then wake up without an alarm. If your body can wake up without an alarm, it is getting all the sleep it can use.
If all I can get is 8.5 hours, am I recovering as someone who can get 10.5 each night?
don't sweat it, just watch a tv show or movie in the mornings or something
A couple of points:
(1) Like virtually everything in life, sleep has a sweet spot -- more isn't always better. E.g. this large-scale epidemiological study (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20621406) of 56,000 people found the lowest health risks in those sleeping 7-8 hours. Too little sleep is correlated with health risks, but so is too much. Of course, the location of that sweet spot varies from person to person, and if you're training seriously you should definitely expect to need more sleep than the average joe. But once you're getting enough sleep for your needs and your activity level, you don't need more.
(2) It's virtually impossible to judge sleep needs based on a single day, or even a single week. If you're used to going to bed at 11, then one day you fall asleep a few hours earlier but wake up early the next morning, that may just be that your body is only used to getting 7 or 8 hours a night. The single most important thing you can do is establish a regular sleep routine that you can stick to, and that leaves you enough time to get all the sleep you need.
For example, plan to spend 9.5 hours a night in bed every night, starting and finishing at the same time. For the first few weeks or months, you may have trouble falling asleep or staying asleep. That's okay -- just read until you're tired enough to fall asleep. After a few months, you'll be in a regular enough routine that you should have a sense of how long your body wants to stay asleep each night. For me, I find that 8.5 hours is as much as I can use -- and 8.5 hours every night is infinitely better than 6 hours some nights and 10 hours other nights.
What hold the phone said.
by the sounds of it if you managed to fall asleep at 9:30, you didn't need the full 10 hours if you woke up at 5:30 am.
You know your training is going well when you don't even need to force yourself to wake up on time while getting optimal sleep.