Our editor did a self-experiment and slept in for 30 days in a row. He has never been so rested in his entire professional life – but he is still dissatisfied.
I’ve been working for Utopia since November, and when I started my new job, I had something in mind: instead of struggling to get out of bed every morning and shuffling like a zombie towards my desk five minutes before work starts – fortunately none in my home office far away – from now on I wanted to go to bed early and start the day well rested.
What does “slept in” even mean?
To find out how much sleep I need, I used the week of vacation left over from my previous job. Without any commitments, I always stayed in bed until I really felt well rested. I wrote down how much I slept, averaged it out, and voila: apparently my body needs almost nine hours of sleep a day to be optimally rested.
This realization surprised me, since before that I had always slept between seven and eight hours and never had the feeling that I wasn’t rested. I struggled to get out of bed every morning, but after ten minutes my tiredness was gone and I haven’t needed coffee or tea for years.
The self-experiment
In order to reach my goal of sleeping nine hours a day, I now had to go to bed an hour and a half earlier – at least on weekdays. On the weekends, I did go to bed late at night and stayed in bed longer. However, I didn’t stubbornly nail myself to the nine hours. Sometimes I would be wide awake after seven or eight hours and it would have been impossible to go back to sleep. In most cases, however, I used the nine hours.
Although I’m proud of myself for having really gone through a whole month and feeling really fit physically and mentally since then, I’m not sure if I want to continue with it. Because my quality of life seems to have suffered more than benefited from it.
Sleep in every day: the advantages
Without a doubt, sleeping a whopping nine hours every day has improved my well-being in many ways. It just feels good to get up completely rested early in the morning and to start the day deeply relaxed without stress at breakfast and in the bathroom. This is a stark contrast to the early morning hours (or minutes) of my entire previous working life.
Back then, if I had to work at 8 a.m., I would set my alarm for 7:30 a.m. In fact, I often didn’t get up until 7:50 a.m. I had to go full throttle to get myself halfway freshened up in the remaining ten minutes, prepare myself a healthy breakfast and still be at my workplace on time.
It was probably the mixture of not getting enough sleep and early morning stress that caused me to wake up every morning with a slightly racing heart. Maybe it was the adrenaline rush that woke me up and made caffeine obsolete. I can say without exaggeration:
The ten minutes between bed and desk was the aspect of my everyday life that I hated the most!
The fact that I have now banished this ordeal from my life by sleeping longer is worth a lot. But the positive effects don’t stop there:
- Overall, I’ve felt physically and mentally fresh for most of the past month.
- Even when I’ve had a stressful day, the nine hours of sleep left me rested and emotionally balanced the next morning.
- In addition, I rarely had to struggle with dry eyes, which often become a burden when I work long hours on the screen.
Sleeping in every day: The problem
But despite these noticeably positive effects on my well-being, sleeping late also brings with it a crucial problem: I have to sacrifice an hour and a half for it every day. It’s these one and a half hours that make life really worth living for me!
To break it down arithmetically: out of 24 hours, I need 8 for work and 9 for sleep. Another hour goes by going to bed and getting up on it. This includes morning and evening hygiene, but also lying in bed before falling asleep and after waking up.
1.5 hours are spent cooking, eating and washing up (unfortunately our dishwasher is broken). I devote another 1.5 hours to maintaining my health, for example through walks in the fresh air, physical training and meditation. Another hour is needed to deal with other tasks that just happen in life. Be it managing my finances, getting Christmas presents or replacing my lights in the apartment, because I have learned that LED bulbs consume only a tenth of the electricity compared to conventional incandescent bulbs.
So I only have two hours of real free time a day. But that’s just not enough to spend as much time with my girlfriend as it takes for a good relationship on the one hand, and to pursue my hobbies to a satisfactory extent on the other.
There are also friends and family contacts. I’ve managed to maintain them adequately over the past 30 days. Still, since I’ve been sleeping more, I feel under constant time pressure to somehow juggle all aspects of my life while the hat keeps getting smaller. It’s a bit like inflation: the days are the same length, but suddenly they’re worth less.
My dilemma: self-optimization vs. joie de vivre
What is the point of sacrificing so much time for sleep? Who says I’ll get my invested hours back at the end of my life? Sleeping in makes me feel incredibly resilient, but also emotionally empty, immovable as a rock, but just as lifeless.
And just as the ravages of time gnaw at every rock, no matter how mighty, the floods continue to wear it away until nothing is left of it, so I will not be in this world forever. So maybe I should jump back into the waves of life instead of trying to resist them. Just stay awake longer, enjoy the one and a half additional hours to the fullest, until the alarm clock hits me again the next morning.
Just like on my last beach vacation, when I faced the waves with a big chest, was repeatedly overwhelmed by the powerful surges of water and had the time of my life.
Read more on Techzle.com:
- Always late to bed: How to deal with bedtime procrastination
- Cold showers in the self-test: It was so difficult for me and that’s what made it happen
- The best sleeping position: how to find it