Day 3 - 60 min
Sleep Cycling
You’ve heard of REM cycles, yes?
These are 90-120 minute cycles that you experience when you’re asleep.
REM refers to Rapid Eye Movement, which is when you’re in your deepest sleep and, well, your eyeballs move around a lot (you’re likely dreaming and “looking” at your dream).
In Chinese medicine, each organ gets a cycle at the same time the day.
Think of it like a washing machine cycle for your organs.
That’s why, if you tax your liver, say, by drinking alcohol, you often wake up during the liver’s hour between 1 and 3am.
For ideal wakefulness, that get-up-and-go feeling when you wake up, you want to wake up at the end of one of these sleep cycles.
When you wake up in the middle of a REM cycle, oof, you’re going to feel MORE tired than if you’d gotten less sleep but woken up at the end of the REM cycle.
Now, there are apps you can download to figure all this out for you, but here’s the thing:
You have GOT to train your brain to learn how to fall asleep.
So that’s what you’re going to do tonight:
What time do you want to wake up in the morning? Let’s say 7am.
Count backwards in 90 minute cycles. So you could go to sleep at 5:30am or 4am or 2:30am or 1am or 11:30pm or 10pm, etc.
11:30pm seems reasonable. That’ll get you 7 and a half hours of sleep.
It takes some time to fall asleep, though. You know this. Go through your evening ritual: brush your teeth, wash your face, lock the doors, plug your phone in somewhere away from your bed.
Give yourself a half hour so you’re in bed, lights off, phone away, drifting off to sleep, around 11:00pm.
Now here’s the mind trick:
You’re going to count in 90 minute increments up to when you want to wake up.
Over and over again.
Chant to yourself:
11:30pm
1am
2:30am
4am
5:30am
7am
Over and over again.
Fall asleep.
Wake up at 7am.
Notice I didn’t tell you to set an alarm.
Didn’t need one, didja?
(But maybe set one just in case the first few nights.)