Have you ever woken up and hit your snooze button in the morning, went back to sleep for a couple more minutes and then when that alarm goes off the second time you feel more tired than you did before that ten or fifteen minutes?
There’s an easy answer for why this is happening. When you snooze, you’re restarting your REM cycle all over again and because you’re only sleeping another couple of minutes you are at an earlier and possibly deeper part of the sleep cycle, making it even worse for you when that alarm wakes you up.
So, how can you avoid this? Well, over the course of a night you go through several different REM cycles, which last about 90 minutes each, give or take. There are “pauses”—breaks in dreaming and heavy sleep— between the end of one REM cycle and the beginning of the next. Waking up in these pauses is your best bet for waking up and feeling refreshed.
But how do you calculate when these pauses might be? Just Google sleep cycle calculator and a plethora of options will pop up. They’ll ask you what time you need to wake up and give you a variety of options of times you can go to sleep and wake up between cycles. Say you have to wake up at 8:30 in the morning, you put that into the calculator and it tells you that you should go to sleep at either 11:30, 1:00, or 2:30, because even if you have just a few hours of sleep waking up between cycles still leaves you better off.
Though, waking up between cycles will help, there’s a way to optimize your time sleeping. Many sleep studies have shown that it’s not the quantity but the quality of your sleep. If you sleep for eight hours but toss and turn for most of it, it’s like you haven’t slept at all compared to a good, solid six hours of rest.
Here’s some tips to get more out of your time asleep: Don’t drink anything with caffeine in it after dinner. The half-life for caffeine is about five to ten hours, depending on your gender, age, weight, etc. and no matter how tired you are that caffeine, even from a diet soda, is gonna keep you up.
Don’t drink anything with alcohol. The depressant nature of alcohol keeps you from having a healthy REM cycle. Alcoholics often report not having dreams which is an indicator of REM sleep. So you can sleep but without the ability to get into those deep sleep cycles you’re harming both your body and your brain.
For a couple hours before you go to sleep, stay away from bright screens. The bright light flips a hardwired switch in your body that equates bright lights with wakefulness and it you won’t be able to go to sleep. If you must work down to the quick, either dim your screen or check out a program called Flux, which gradually diminishes the brightness of your screen.
So, just be smart when you’re going to sleep. We are college kids and we require a good night’s sleep no matter what we may think. And just following these tips even gives you the opportunity to get a little bit more studying time in and still feel refreshed in the morning!