Sleep Patterns
Observation: It's not how much sleep I get that matters, it's when I wake up.
So, I noticed this about the past two nights. Yesterday I had the day off, so I was up until about 2:30am the night before, just screwing around. Last night I did pretty much the same. Now usually, I go to sleep at about 10:30pm on most weeknights, and I wake up at around 7:30am to go to work. That's a solid 9 hours of sleep, yet when wake up every morning, I always feel tired, without fail. The past two mornings I've waken up at around 10-10:30am. That's about 7 hours of sleep, yet I feel totally rested.
I remember seeing an episode of 60 minutes or something when I was in high school that followed a school district's study of teenager's sleep patterns and how it affected learning. They found that most teenagers liked to go to sleep at around 12-1am and wake up around 9-10am. So instead of doing the usual school hours of 8-3, they did 10-5 at one school as a test, and they grade point avearage of the entire school went up. That's pretty compelling. Yet knowing this, we still have school hours around the country that keep teenagers out of sync from their natural sleep patterns.
Looking at the way that most of American society models it's work hours, do you think that we could see productivity rise if work hours shifted to flow around human behavior patterns rather than the other way around? Why do we all wake up early for work and force ourselves to go to bed before we are ready just to fit a job schedule, when it affects our ability to function? There needs to be an effort to rectify the demands of the rat race with actual human behavior in order to allow us to do our best. And it might not be that we to do less work, but that we just need to be able do it when we are ready.