Better Sleep - Timings

I used to go to sleep at 1am on a regular basis and wake up at 8:30. That would leave me with an average of 7 hours of sleep. Not awful, but surely not good. Not counting the days when I had to wake up at 7 for one or the other reason.

During the past year I always went to bed at (or before) 21:30.

That would not mean that I would fall asleep right away at 21:30 obviously, sometimes I won’t even fall asleep by 22, but most surely I will be before 23. The average is more closer to 22 though.

I have an alarm for 7 since I’m trying to wake up without rushing.¹ Usually though, I find myself waking up without needing it at around 6:30 (after more than 8 hours of sleep).

Some nights when I fall asleep earlier I manage to get close to 9 hours which is fine every once in a while, but too much sleep is not great either.

An interesting change with this routine is that during the weekdays I have the same sleeping schedule as during the weekends. There was a time when I woke up at 10 or even 11 on Saturdays and Sundays. I’m glad it is no more.

I realize this is hard if you’re used to go to sleep at midnight as I used do, but you do not need to start so drastically as I did. You can add 30 minutes to your sleep time and that’s going to do wonders already. If you’re not ready to make the big jump, try making smaller ones.

TLDR: Go to sleep earlier.

[When I started the rough draft of this article I though it would end up being a single short piece on what were the changes I went through to sleep better. There weren’t really that many I thought. It ended up being way longer than expected so I’ve split it into multiple entries.]