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Locaha comments on Group rationality diary, 12/25/12 - Less Wrong Discussion
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In retrospection, this method can't be universal. Someone pointed out that:
Some people can force themselves to awake, sleep deprivation or not.
Some people oversleep.
Group 1 doesn't use alarm clocks. Group 2 must use them.
I've seen that suggested a few times before; a related suggestion that I found more compelling was related to a particular old-style alarm clock. At the time it was set for the clock would make a small click, then a few seconds later, a loud buzz. The owner of the clock could tell how well-rested he was by whether the click or the buzz woke him up.
I don't think your division quite divides reality at the joints- I can get up to an alarm even if my day will be ruined by lack of sleep, but I generally will sleep long periods if I don't have an alarm set. (If by 'oversleep' you mean 'not take alarms seriously,' then why argue that group 2 must use them, when they don't use them well?)
See here.
I agree in the general case but not the particular. Staying in bed for ten to eleven hours persists even when I've done so for months, and other tests of sleep deprivation suggest I'm fully rested. Blackout curtains seem to be a significant contributor; it's less pronounced when I use the sun as a gentle alarm.
Yes, probably. In Italy roller shutters on windows are ubiquitous, and keeping them shut all the way down will make it much easier to me to sleep until noon or even later; whereas if I go somewhere with no shutters at all it's pretty hard for me to stay asleep long after dawn (though I'll feel sleepy again in the afternoon). (But personally, no matter how dark my room is, it would be nearly impossible to sleep nine hours more than three nights in a row or so.)
Piotr Wozniak would argue that people who oversleep were sleep-deprived to begin with -- you couldn't sleep 11 hours a day arbitrarily long, eventually you will have fully paid back your sleep debt, and from that point on you'll only sleep about 7 or 8 hours a day. (My experience mostly agrees, though in my case at least physical energy seems to matter more than mental energy in determining whether I'll fall asleep.)
This clashes with my experience. I generally get >8 hours of sleep, and I will oversleep like mad if I don't have some special reason to get up. (it takes me a while to get to sleep though. How does this affect things?)
I notice that I only have a proper day if I get up when I'm first awake. I'd be interested to know how the causality goes on that.
Also some people can't fall asleep easily. I'd like a sleep cycle where I go to bed at 9 PM and wake up at 6 AM, but more often than not going to bed at 9 PM leaves me lying awake for an hour, after which I get bored and get back up.
Why? For adults, 9 hours a day is generally a lot (though YMMV). Do you usually have trouble waking up at 6?
I often feel more alert when I do manage to wake and stay up early in the morning, but I tend to oversleep most of the time. My recent attempts at getting a sleep cycle going where I wake up early and sleep only 8 hours a night have ended up with me oversleeping, so either I really need the 9 hours of sleep or my brain really wants to sleep through the early morning.
I like to use a sunrise alarm, that fades up a light over half an hour, so I can have daylight start whenever I want year round.
I also find that if I set my washing machine to start a load at 5am (to take advantage of cheaper electricity), I will wake up while it's running, although it isn't loud. The idea is that the fainter sensations inform the body it's time to wake itself up, instead of bludgeoning it awake with a bell. I only do the latter when it's really important to be up in time for something.
I might try using one of these instead of what I currently use (a cheap radio alarm set to static white noise); I've noticed that sunlight on my face seems to be a strong factor in consistently waking me up.
Have you ever fallen asleep in the sun? ie. does this apply to just mornings after a good sleep, or does sunlight block sleep for you?
I'm not sure if sunlight blocks sleep completely, because it's also correlated with warmth which does help with sleeping. It's probably more to do with circadian rhythm.
For two years in college, my bed and window were positioned just so, that sunlight would target my pillow at around 10-11 am, and I found I consistently woke up around then in the absence of an alarm, independent of how long I slept (within reason.) These days I still seem to have a harder time waking up if it's overcast rather than sunny. But to answer your question, I can't recall any instances when I fell asleep in the sun; I might even have a habit of closing the blinds to sleep, if it's still light out.
I tried a sunrise alarm - it didn't seem to help / work well. (My brain kept wondering whether the alarm would go off. Possible I could've done better with more habituation.)
Similar stuff has happened to me (not with sunrise alarms, though -- never tried one). The solution is setting a loud, reliable, ‘back-up’ alarm at the latest time at which you could possibly get up in time.
I've also discovered an alternate solution: try challenging yourself to wake up before the alarm goes off. Works even better if you tricked yourself into thinking the alarm was ever actually turned on.