By Avantika Choudhary
3rd Year, B.Tech (CSE)

Nine alarms, fifty-two repelling thoughts, and a poor mom’s whining later when you finally find yourself in front of the bathroom mirror, do you wonder how your sleep never charged you up?
Well, another way to confirm this is the thought, “Maybe, if I got just five more minutes…”
Feeling that the quantity of your sleep wasn’t sufficient brings us to question its quality.

There are two ways for me to go about this one. The harsh one requires me to talk about discipline, while the pensive one requires me to dwell on what you hear from Ram Dev Baba on the television. I’ll play safe and take the middle ground.

Engineering and a perfect 8-hour sleep schedule don’t go together in the same sentence. I agree. But what is the closest you can get to achieving daily goals, feeling healthier, and, well, somehow gaining your parent’s lost respect in you?

With the number of sleeping myths circulating, it is hard to find one thing to believe. Fallacies such as “adults sleep more with age” or “your body gets used to less sleep” have us thinking it is okay to mess your sleep cycles up. What you read here is an analysis coming from a lot of research and self-experience.

Looking at it through the lens of logic and reason
No matter how impossible it sounds to sleep before midnight, your body tells a different story.

“The 90-minute phase before midnight is one of the most powerful phases of sleep, because it’s the period when the body is replenished,”says Dr. Ramlakhan, a sleep expert and author of Tired But Wired. Loosely translated, this means it is not just healthier but easier to fall asleep between 10 P.M to 12 midnight. The body works on regenerating itself and fixing bugs during this phase. When you deny yourself of that, you deny yourself health. But how can sleeping at 10 P.M ever be possible with the mountain-load of assignments, unfinished conversations,
and late-night parties?

Well, you must learn to prioritize. How? There are always two distinct voices in our heads: one is the voice of reason and the other of subversion. When these voices go against each other, the one that wins is always the one you feed. If you’ve been nourishing the thoughts that go against what you truly believe in, imagine how big and mighty it must look against the fragile voice of reason. You can change that by simply observing the quiet voice that always knows what is right for you. Every time you listen to it, it gets stronger. And before you know it, you will have disciplined yourself into doing what you know is right for you.

“But what about the calm and quiet that I feel only at night?” and “I’m highly productive post-midnight.” are a few questions I predict would arise. While this is simply a matter of choice, a higher percentage of the world population stays awake till late at night. Not dwelling on the ill effects of staying out of tune with nature, mornings are the only time you may find yourself free of notifications and distractions and have a mind void of thoughts. Since our brains haven’t started munching on any new piece of information, a night of good 7-hour sleep can leave us feeling highly productive.

You don’t have to start right away. Even if you successfully go to bed 30 minutes earlier than your current schedule, it is a win. What matters more here is consistency. Sleep is a fundamental need. You can go up to weeks without food. But, three days of improper sleep will make you hallucinate. The growth hormone released by the pituitary gland doesn’t just heal your body but also your mind. The primary fix for good mental health is sleep! Imagine being at a stage when your life is more in your control and lesser in the hands of the subversive mind. Waking up late has left us with very little time for ourselves. Imagine doing everything that you wanted to do in just a couple of hours and still have an entire day ahead of you. Elevating, right?

Looking at it through a spiritual lens
Waking up before sunrise, or during the “Brahma Muhuruta” is practiced by yogis who preach it to be a time of the divine. The scientific angle is the “master clock” (biological clock) in the brain that synchronizes all the body clocks.

Remember how we always somehow woke up 5 minutes earlier than the alarm clock when we had an important match or a flight to catch? Almost every organism on earth has a biological clock, but we humans use it the least. Practice this: choose a specific time, say 7:08 A.M, and visualize waking up at 7:08 A.M right before dozing off. Think about it more than once and don’t doubt it. If not right on the dot, your bio-clock will wake you up right on time. The last pressing thoughts in your head before you drift off circle in your mind for your entire sleep duration. Our mothers weren’t all wrong when they kept nagging us to keep the phone down before sleep. Consuming disturbing content can bring down your energy levels the following morning. Replace that with setting an intention for the next day. When a purpose is driving your resolution, it is easier to get out of bed.

To summarize it all, there is no greater force stronger than your willpower. It is your urgency of wanting to make things right that will decide the sequence of events. I’ve been going to sleep by 11 P.M for more than two years now. Waking up early has helped me connect not just with nature but with myself. And that is all I want for you.