Originally posted by: Jester22
I always love these topics. =)
I usually get 7-9 hours per night. But, like some, I also find myself more tired during the day when I?ve had more sleep (9 hours) than less (6 hours). It?s really odd. But then again, I?ve always considered myself having some kind of ?sleeping issue?. I?m constantly tired throughout the day; maybe it?s my diet? oh well, too tired to care.
My goal will have to be what you achieved, SacrosanctFiend. =)
The trick is to get the right amount of sleep. It's like eating; eat too much and you get fat and feel sick because you're so stuffed, eat too little and you become anorexic. Eat the right amount and everything works out just fine. The secret to that trick is to go to bed early and then wake up without an alarm. After about a week, you will naturally start waking up early once your body has gotten enough sleep. When I go to bed at 9:00pm consistently, I wake up between 4:00am and 5:00am and feel great.
The difficulty to this trick lies in two things: doing it the first week and doing it consistently. The first week is the most difficult because you're so incredibly bored lying awake in bed for hours on end. The first week I did it, it took me 3-4 hours a night to fall asleep. I hated it, but now, 4 weeks later, it's just habit to get in bed early and go to sleep. The other hard part is doing it consistently - if you go to bed one or two nights in a row early, it doesn't do anything for you. You have to do it consistently. You can have a late night or two a week, but more than that and it throws off your body's routine. You have to make sure you go to bed early every night. You have to really make an effort; for me it's easy to get sucked into surfing the net and all of a sudden it's 1:30am. That situation stinks, so you have to keep on it.
And yeah, diet does help a lot, but it's not the bottom line for sleep - simply going to sleep early is. I improved my diet dramatically and had a lot more energy, but I was too tired to do much of anything. Early bedtime + great diet = feel awesome all the time. The trap is that once you feel so good, you think that staying up late or eating crappy won't bother you, but it does, then all of a sudden you're back in the cycle.
The bottom line is energy. If you don't have it, it's hard to care about getting it; if you can bootstrap yourself for that first extremely difficult week, it gets so much easier and more fun, it's not even funny.