As suggested by Jessica, this seems like a good idea: How to Become an Early Riser (Part II).
I don’t care about getting up early, per se. I care about being able to fall asleep when I need to and being up and aware at a consistent time. Given the value of evenings for social events and speaking to friends back home, I think I will aim for rising at 9am, with the hope that I will end up normally going to be around 2am.
Perhaps I will finally be able to knock this off my 43Things list.
Unrelated, but scary: There will be virtually nothing left to fish from the seas by the middle of the century if current trends continue, according to a major scientific study.
See: Worm, Boris et al. “Impacts of Biodiversity Loss on Ocean Ecosystem Services.” Science. 3 November 2006: Vol. 314. no. 5800, pp. 787 – 790. (Oxford Full Text)
Not so much luck with waking at 9:00 today, but I am ill and this is probably not the best time to initiate a new regime.
This post refers to the perception of risk and climate change.
I find his pattern & advice quite troubling. For a start, if that fellow is rising at 5 and not usually sleeping until 10 or 11 then (as far as I understand it) he is not getting enough sleep. The average for the UK is slightly over 8 hours – noticeably more than that fellow’s 6 to 7 hours. There is also evidence to suggest that insufficient sleep is harmful, reducing people’s performance at work, causing car accidents & having negative health effects including reduced immune function and depression.
While some of the stuff in that article is plausible (albeit obvious) it is mixed in with stuff that is dubious and unsupported. Given that, you might be better off taking advice from a reputable source. There is a factsheet published by the Royal College of Psychiatrists at (link) which might interest you. There is also some information at the website of the Sleep Research Centre (link) which includes links to a number of refereed papers.
References: see (link) for a breakdown of what Brits spend theitr time on, and link) for risks of sleep deprivation.
Sarah,
Thanks for the information. I converted the raw URLs you posted into links, so as to be cleaner looking and more convenient.
I was a bit concerned about this fellow’s qualifications myself, but I remain willing to accept the possibility that always getting up at the same time would be beneficial.
Overfishing, Tragedy of the Commons and Resource Depletion
Sarah would be quite horrified if she’d followed the link to Steve’s discussion of polyphasic sleep. For about five months he was sleeping just 2 hours per day.
Thanks for the early riser link!