My child wakes me up every 90 minutes to 2 hours, and I sleep cumulative 5 hours per day. I find this awful sleep regimen affecting my health in many ways:<p>1. My memory is shoddy at best. It's bad enough that Google and Wikipedia have made my mind lazy, but with lack of sleep, it's worse. For some reason, pronouns (names, places, and co-workers) are very difficult to remember.<p>2. I eat a poor diet. Since I wake up at odd hours of the night, I eat more convenience foods to fill up my wrenched stomach.<p>3. I like to exercise, but it's damn hard to do on such little sleep.<p>4. I love my wife dearly, but spousal bickering is the worst at 4am.<p>Based on my personal research, I recommend the author considers alternatives to cutting sleep.<p>As an aside, I live in Minnesota, where it dark for extended periods of time during the winter. Vitamin D deficiency and seasonal affective disorder are REAL. I do not look forward to combined SAD and lack of sleep this winter.
> <i>"but now that i'm currently uninsured (i may do a follow-up post on finding cheap health insurance packages), i'm beginning to care more about my physical and mental health."</i><p>This one really scared me. The author wants to work on his health for <i>money reasons</i>? I know that money is virtue in California, but isn't this taking it a little to extremes?<p>I find the idea to screw up your health because you're "insured anyway", well, disturbing. Not sure I'd take sleeping advice from someone with this attitude.
I really liked this overview!<p>For the academic inclined, there is some awesome body of work done by the Affective Computing group at Media Lab: <a href="http://affect.media.mit.edu/projects.php?id=3162" rel="nofollow">http://affect.media.mit.edu/projects.php?id=3162</a><p>As for myself, one of the next gadgets on my buying list is the zeo personal sleep coach (AFAIK there are no affordable consumer-level competitors at the moment): <a href="http://www.myzeo.com/sleep/" rel="nofollow">http://www.myzeo.com/sleep/</a><p>Would love to hear from people with hands on experience with it.
>"definitely do not take hormonal supplements just to fall asleep."<p>I'm going to partially disagree with the author here.<p>I take 3-5mg of oral melatonin every night, and have for years. My basic research, which includes talking to my and my girlfriend's physician, has concluded that there's no harm in taking it as a supplement. Unlike pharmaceuticals, melatonin doesn't knock you out, it creates a very natural sensation of, well, being sleepy. But you can take it in the middle of the day and not have it affect you at all with respect to drowsiness (though I wouldn't recommend warping your hormone pattern like that).<p>Read up on using it as a supplement. It has long list of benefits/possible benefits, and very few possible side effects. Oh, and it will help you fall asleep.<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melatonin" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melatonin</a>
For those of you who have a hard time getting up after long hours, I've learned that though alarms that cause me to panic do successfully wake me up, majority of the time I snooze it and go back to sleep or because it interrupted my REM, I end up having a groggy day. I suggest one of those gradual alarms that build up, really great results in how I feel throughout the day regardless of sleep hours.<p>Also from personal experience, sleeping more than 9 hours really can have adverse effects to your day short term as well as your body long term.
> assuming that you will still have a balanced social life, i have not found any conclusive research that proves it is harmful to sleep at an irregular hour.<p>Well, depending on what you mean by that. For example, go to sleep with the sun shining on you, and I guarantee you you will have worse sleep from lack of melatonin secretion!<p>In a related point, while researching links between melatonin & depression for <a href="http://www.gwern.net/Melatonin#fn5" rel="nofollow">http://www.gwern.net/Melatonin#fn5</a> I noticed that Lewy et al 2006's SAD sufferers had normal total amounts of sleep, but they all seem to suffer delays or advances in their sleep schedule compared to normal people, which is suggestive...
> be exposed to the sun: only reliable way to generate vitamin D in your body (helps bone mineralization)<p>I think sunlight exposure may be important for a healthy mental state as well. A few years ago I adopted a schedule of sleeping around 10AM and waking up around 6PM. I maintained a reasonable level of sun exposure in the morning, but I would usually wake up shortly after sunset leaving me without sun for the first half of my day. I found that after a few days of this I would wake up every day disappointed that I'd woken up in darkness again. Around this same time period I had no problems waking up at 3PM every day, even though I didn't always go outside while it was still light.
I personally have found, research or no, that shifting my sleep schedule later has deleterious effects on my state of being the following day. I do not sleep less time (I wake later- my internal clock is very reliable about extracting 8:30-9:00hrs of sleep when alarm clocks don't intervene). This holds whether or not I am keeping a regular sleep schedule, have curtains, when I last ate food, etc.<p>I find I am most effective when I begin sleep at ~11PM.
When ever I am "in the zone", I keep working.<p>I have a siesta + short sleep routine:<p>My long sleep session is usually crashing soon after I get home. On top of that, I get 2-3 hours either between classes or right before my first class.