Sleep Habits

Questions and model answers

1. Is it important to you to go to bed and get up at the same time every day?

   No, and I've stopped pretending I'm going to. Weeknights are reasonably consistent — in bed by eleven, up at six thirty — and then Friday happens and the whole thing resets. What I have got better at is the wake-up rather than the bedtime. I get up at the same time even after a bad night, which feels punishing and is the only thing that has ever fixed the night after. The bit I still get wrong is thinking I can catch up at the weekend. I sleep ten hours on Saturday and feel worse on Sunday than if I'd just got up. My phone has been telling me that for about a year and I still do it.

2. Would you rather go to bed early and get up early, or stay up late and get up late?

   Early, and I have only recently worked out why. It is not that mornings are productive, because I am slow and stupid until about nine either way. It is that the early version puts the uncontrolled hours at the end of the day instead of the start. If I stay up late, the thing deciding my bedtime is whatever I happen to be doing at midnight, and that is never really a decision. If I get up early, the thing deciding it is an alarm I set the day before, when I was a marginally more sensible person than I am at midnight. So it is less about mornings and more about which version of me gets to choose.

3. Tell me about a time when you had trouble sleeping.

   The week before I moved apartments. Nothing was actually wrong — the move was organized, the paperwork was done — and I still lay there until three every night going through a list that never changed. What made it worse was knowing it was pointless, so on top of not sleeping I was annoyed at myself for not sleeping. The thing that eventually helped was getting up. I'd been lying there on principle, as if staying horizontal counted for something. Once I started getting up and reading in another room for twenty minutes, I fell asleep faster, which felt like cheating. I still don't really understand why. My guess is the bed had stopped being a place where sleep happened.

4. Do you think people with flexible schedules sleep better?

   You would expect so, and I think it mostly goes the other way. A flexible schedule removes the external thing that ends the day, and for most people nothing internal replaces it. Someone with a six o'clock alarm has a bedtime decided for them by arithmetic. Someone with no fixed start negotiates it every night against whatever else is on offer, and that negotiation is not a fair fight at midnight. Where flexibility genuinely helps is the mismatch, because people whose natural rhythm sits well outside office hours have been paying a tax on it for about a century. My brother writes at two in the morning and was miserable for the six years he spent on a nine-to-five.

The Korean translation, the expression breakdowns, the reusable frames and the common-mistake notes for these four questions are in the book. The recording and this transcript are free, here and on YouTube.