Here’s the data I have so far on tracking down my ideal sleep patterns.
- Too much caffeine is bad. Causes me to feel horrible in the morning, over sleep, etc.
- Too little caffeine is bad too. Causes me to wake up in the middle of the night with the inability to get back to sleep.
I think the reasons why are identical. My body feels lethargic when I start to go through withdraw symptoms.
If I have too much, the withdraw symptoms cause me to oversleep and feel horrible.
If I have too little, my natural sleeping patterns emerge and cause me to wake up after only 5-6 hours of sleep.
The problem is that in the past 5-6 hasn’t been enough.
It turns out that about 40mg is the right dosage so I have a digital scale and weigh my caffeine pills at 130mg every morning (they have internal buffer which needs to be accounted for).
Yet more problems emerge.
I require more sleep when I’m training (cycling, weight lifting) more often. Right now I require 8-9 hours of sleep.
So here is my next major hypothesis that I want to test.
…
Go down to ZERO caffeine.
Try to sleep 4-6 hours at night.
Sleep 30 minutes in the afternoon when the team is out to lunch.
Wear a heart rate monitor while I sleep to keep track of my resting heart rate (RHR). I think that it will show elevated RHR while my body is recovering.
In the past I’ve been able to do this… I was sleeping 5 hours at night and waking up feeling rested, but the problem is that in the afternoon I felt tired.
A nap would solve this.
So in theory my sleep would go down from 9 hours per night, to 6 hours per night.
A three hour savings – or 1.5 months extra a year of waking time. Amazing.
Tagged: fitness, quantifiedself, sleep