2019 Resolutions: On Needing 10 Hours of Sleep. (Patreon)

image: sly mask, work in progress.

Hello good humans, welcome to 2019!

In my last post we talked about how 2018 went. But now it's 2019 and it's time for new resolutions and new projects!

I'm not a Jan 1 kind of person. I might start trying out new resolutions/goals/habits in Nov or Dec when I think of them, or I might change things up mid-January, and really self-improvement is a year-round project. But I still find value in the New Years Resolution framing and annually scheduled self-reflection, even if I'm not picky about starting a thing on exactly Jan 1 and doing it in/for exactly the next year.

Ok, here's a fact about me: I need 10 hours of sleep a night. It's not a nice-to-have, it's not a luxury. I prefer 11. I'll do 12 every night if I let myself but at that point it's oversleeping and I feel a bit groggy. 11 hours of sleep is great, 10 is needed. 9 is livable for a week or two but I start to deteriorate. I lose my ability to do complex attention tasks like driving, cooking, shopping, phone calls, not getting lost crossing the street, etc. 

Give me a few nights of 8 hours or less and all non-sleep things, such as eating and all of human life, start to lose their appeal. Over an extended period of time, 8 hours is sleep deprivation torture and I'd rather die. 

The average adult sleeps less than 7 hours a night. 7-9 is recommended.

When I was in my teens I thought I'd grow out of it. Doesn't science say you need less sleep as you grow older? I had typical teen insomnia that would have me up late into the night and if I had to get up early for school I'd make up for it by crashing as soon as I got home from school and sleeping til dinner. 

One summer in my late teens I tried a 48 hour schedule, and would sleep 15 or 16 hours every other night, which seemed promising. Still wasn't good at the complex task thing on those hours, but it was livable, and on average I got to spend much more time awake. This schedule was impossible to keep once I had obligations again and I don't know if I'd do it again, but during this time I did lots of research on sleep and dreams and learned about polyphasic schedules and lucid dreaming.

I originally started lucid dreaming as a child because of nightmares, but didn't know it had a name or was considered unusual or that its existence was denied by science until relatively recently. But now it seemed like a good way to get some use out of my extensive sleeping hours.

One of the best side-effects of learning lucid dreaming techniques was learning techniques for going to sleep in general. I learned the difference between trying to go to sleep and just lying there expecting it to magically happen and being frustrated if it didn't. I learned to recognize when I was in light sleep, of the kind where most people would swear they'd been awake the whole time even if they'd been snoring. 

My teenage asshole snobbiness went from complaining loudly to anyone who'd listen how I was such an insomniac, it took me hours to fall asleep every night, to pride in that I was so skilled at sleep techniques that I could fall asleep whenever and wherever I wanted. As I got older and travelled a lot for work, I went from being one of those "oh I just can't sleep on planes no matter how tired I am" people to being a "hell yeah I can be asleep within 10 seconds in a middle seat with a baby right behind me" person. Even if it's not exactly true all the time.

A lot of the stories I tell myself about myself have changed in the past 10 years, but the unfortunate fact of needing 10 hours of sleep a night has not. 

If all I do is sleep and work, the schedule works out pretty well. If I have a flexible job, no commute, no social life, take minimal time to eat at my desk or grab a snack on the way home instead of cooking and cleaning and all that, no TV or facebook, then I can sleep 10 hours a night and still have time to overwork. 

And why sleep 7 hours a night when, let's be honest, I'd just have spent those extra hours working? (And, of course, not getting paid for that extra work any more than I was not being paid for my already existing overtime.)

In 2016 though, when I was really overextending myself to try to make my research group work and have funding and space and get paid and all that, plus some long stretches of travel and tons of stress, I really pushed my limits on sleep. I did not get my 10 hours. I was very productive. I did not have to worry about driving or cooking because I was walking distance to work and could eat out or run on chocolate and avocados for as long as necessary. I was too busy working all day every day to have time to think or reflect on what I was doing to myself. I was very optimistic about where the work was going and endlessly excited by it, despite the never-ending stress and frustration caused by the non-idea side of work.

One of the side-effects of when I wouldn't get my 10 hours was a bit of tinnitus in the morning. And as I kept pushing myself, it would last a little longer, and longer, and longer. But it would always go away eventually and I was too busy and stressed about work to have any brain left over to worry about a little ringing in my ears, as long as it was gone by the time I got home to my piano in the evenings. 

My passion for silence, I will note, is such that I disconnected my fridge just so that I wouldn't have to hear its droning while I played piano. Chocolate and avocados don't need refrigeration, and I could always get a cold beer just down the block.

I don't know at what point in 2016 my tinnitus became permanent, but it did. And in 2017, the Year Of Hell, it got gnarlier. I managed to finally move out of the city and to a nice quiet place where me and my piano could have peace and not work all day every day, and I'm not going to get into the tinnitus thing right now but suffice to say stress and sleep deprivation can cause permanent harm and I will never have peace and quiet again.

The point of all this is to give a little background on a couple resolutions. In 2018, finally having the Patreon thing going, I could get my sleep again and maybe even have a life besides work, with the screaming in my ears as a constant reminder that I do indeed have limits. One of my resolutions was to learn to listen to podcasts and audiobooks and music. In the past I was too much of a snob to listen to non-live music, and the idea of music as background noise has always been a bit repulsive to me. When people would ask what I like to listen to, my answer would be "silence."

With silence no longer an option, I thought more audio media would help my tinnitus not be so damned annoying all the time. I tried a few recommended podcasts and found them all pretty boring. I still couldn't make the music thing work, because I still don't know how to hear music without paying attention to it, and that makes it really difficult to do anything while music is on (yes I despise stores and restaurants that play music, this is one reason why I consider shopping to be a complex attention task that cannot be done without proper sleep).

Audiobooks seemed like a much better idea than podcasts, because I like books. I really like actually reading books and would never think of replacing real reading, but I could add bonus book time through listening, maybe.

But this is a resolution I failed in 2018. I was trying to not do Audible, when there's a perfectly good library and lots of cheap used audiobooks online. I'm also honestly tired of all the Audible advertising on every youtube video ever, and if that's not enough, there's the unsolicited emails from them wanting me too to be one of their many YouTube advertisers to keep spamming their name out into the universe. But playing physical CDs is inconvenient and going to the library is inconvenient and audiobooks are so slow that the extra time to deal with the audiobook is time in which I could just be actually reading an actual book at 4x the speed, so while I tried it, I didn't manage to make a habit of it.

This year I decided I'm not too proud to get an Audible subscription and I gotta admit it is pretty convenient. It's easier to integrate into the rest of my life because it's on my phone with me everywhere, and I can even listen at 2x speed so it's not quite so unbearably slower than reading. (Hey, maybe I should go for that advertising deal after all.)

Throw your audiobook recs my way! I always appreciate a great voice actor.

Uh yeah so long story short in 2019 I'm trying out some audiobook habits and also trying new sleep schedules. Using my knowledge of polyphasic sleep maybe I can sleep-hack my way down to 8 or 9 hours through use of naps. If normal humans can sleep-hack their way down to 2 hours a night through clever use of naps, can I hope to hack my way down to a normal average 7 without being too unhealthy? Now that I'm spending time cooking and exercising and having a social life, I could really use those extra 3 hours a day.

At the moment though I'd settle for getting 10 hours and feeling like I got 11. The next thing I'm going to try is doing a 9 hour sleep at night and then naps for a total of 10. I am very good at naps.

My food-related resolutions are to learn smoothie skills (with like protein and west coast health snob stuff in it) and to add a pile of ingredients to my cooking repertoire (sweet potatoes, tofu, coconut milk, brown rice, others). When I tried to drink this morning's smoothie it was just a gelatinous grey tube that slid down the glass to punch me in the mouth and then bounce back while exclaiming "Gloop!"

Ok now I'm gonna eat a snack and then listen a book while I take a walk.

Vi