sleep

I generally have pretty good sleep habits but I would put myself decidedly in the camp of being a "night person" versus a "morning person."  I rarely suffer from insomnia but I do at times not sleep at well at night or find myself staying up late or waking up extremely groggy.

So I ran a little experiment as I'm apt to do. The prescription was pretty easy based on my recent analysis of some of the more prominent sleep research.

• Turn your phone/tablet of at a reasonable hour
• Get up at the same time every day (weekends included)

To augment this I also removed scads of stuff from my phone. Games. Most of the news sources that I check every now and again. I don't really have any social media apps but I would have removed those too.

And I also started to systemically read at night (I'm reading Infinite Jest which is the sort of book the requires systematic reading to get though).

My phone turn off time was reasonable. 10pm. And I allowed myself to read from 10-11.

The result were fairly drastic. If I followed these rules I woke up at 6am easily. Not tired and full of energy. There was almost no transition time. I also can rarely make it to 11pm. My body naturally tells me to go to sleep and the transition from being awake to wanting to sleep is also quite quick. It can occur over the course of maybe 3 minutes. If I broke any of these rules, I would stay up late. I did this in order to fully test out the effect. It really was night and day (haha) in terms of the result. 

One suspects then that most insomnia and sleep problems (and it certainly seems like 100% of the population has these problems) then phones and so forth are probably the key driver.