Tip #428: Reset Your Rhythm
Odd as it might seem, the human sleep/wake cycle is not 24 hours long. It’s not even slightly longer than that, for the number nerds out there who know the “true length” of a day. It’s a full hour longer. That’s right – if you were to sleep and wake according only to your body’s natural cues, you would complete a cycle once every 25 hours. This means that, every day, you would wake up and go to sleep an hour later than you did the previous day. Obviously our real schedules can’t and don’t work like that, so let’s learn to deal with it.
The most common way to beat the natural rhythm is to create a powerful artificial one. This means getting up and going to bed at about the same time every day, so your internal clock will eventually learn to keep time by this method and to ignore your natural impulses. It sounds awful, and it probably is. But not creating a strong rhythm for yourself is the reason you find yourself sleeping late on weekends and then being exhausted come Monday morning. Your body is trying to revert to its natural state, meaning that it will want to do everything later and later.
If you need, try a full reset. I suggest you do this on a weekend to 1) handle a day of probable out-of-whackness and 2) accept the fact that you have to get up early on weekends if you want it to work. Stay up for an entire night (so you don’t have any trouble sleeping) and all of the next day, then go to bed when you want and wake up to a strong alarm eight hours later. Go to bed and get up at that same time every day from then on, because it takes a full month for your body to learn a rhythm. If you stick with it, you can banish morning exhaustion from your life.
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