Read Online Better Than Before: Mastering the Habits of Our Everyday Lives by Gretchen Rubin - Free Book Online Page B

for good mental and physical health and a critical time for bodily repair and regulation. Lack of sleep negatively affects mood, memory, immune function, and pain sensitivity; it makes people more likely to fight with their partners; it contributes to weight gain.
    Lack of sleep also leads to dithering. Procrastination expert Piers Steel reports that being “too tired” is the most common reason people give for procrastination. One study estimated that for every hour of interrupted sleep during the previous night, people wasted 8.4 minutes in online puttering—checking email, Internet surfing, and the like. And while many people claim, “I’ve trained myself to get by with five hours” and say they don’t feel particularly sleepy, research shows that the chronically sleep deprived are quite impaired. Yet many adults routinely sleep less than seven hours.
    On a flight to San Francisco, I saw with my own eyes the evidence of people’s sleep deprivation. At midday, many passengers were fast asleep. Not dozing; completely zonked out.
    I mentioned this to a friend, and he bragged, “Oh, I always sleep on planes. I can fall asleep anywhere, anytime.”
    â€œMaybe you’re chronically underslept,” I suggested. It took all my strength not to launch into a lecture on the importance of sleep.
    â€œNo, I’m not,” he said. “I’ve learned to adjust to very little sleep.”
    â€œIf you sit still for ten minutes in a quiet room,” I asked, “can you fall asleep?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œAre you dragged out of a sound sleep by the alarm every morning?”
    â€œIs there any other way to wake up?”
    â€œDo you depend on caffeine and sugar to give you energy spikes?”
    â€œSure.”
    â€œDo you feel too tired at night to do anything but watch TV or surf the Internet?”
    â€œWhat else would I do?”
    â€œDo you binge-sleep on the weekends by sleeping in very late or taking lots of naps?”
    â€œOf course.”
    Hmmmm.
    He didn’t mind being sleep deprived, but I needed my seven hours, and I fought to protect my sleep time against any encroachment. Or so I thought, until I decided to use the UP band’s sleep-tracking function. (Or try to use it—some nights I forgot to press the button to start the sleep tracker. Finally, instead of trying to “remember,” I piggybacked this new habit onto my old habit of setting my alarm.)
    To my dismay, the UP band revealed that even an avowed sleep nut like me often stayed up too late. I’d fallen into a classic failure-to-monitor trap: because I felt smug about my good sleep habits, I remembered the nights when I went to bed at 9:45, but overlooked the nights when I stayed up until 11:30 or later.
    Once monitoring showed that I wasn’t getting enough sleep, I decided to give myself a specific bedtime. Every night, if I was home, I’d aim to be in bed by 10:30.
    Now, every night at 10:30, I tell myself, “It’s my bedtime,” and if I’m still up at 11:00, I say, “It’s thirty minutes past my bedtime.” Using a clear rule, instead of “feeling sleepy,” helps because too often I get into that restless, wired-but-tired state that tricks me into thinking that I’m not ready for bed, when I’m actually exhausted.
    In addition to tracking these health habits, I wanted to deploy the Strategy of Monitoring in the important area of time . I know that if I don’t measure certain values in my life, I neglect them. I decided to track how much time I spent reading; reading is both my cubicle and my playground, and it’s my favorite thing to do—if I’m honest with myself, it’s practically the only pastime I really enjoy. I’m not a very well-rounded person.
    For the last few years, however, it seemed as though I never did any reading. Objectively this couldn’t be true. I checked books out of the