How can I hack my sleep schedule for 3 weeks?

April 24, 2013 6:07 PM

I have 2.5 weeks until my university final exams. I have a lot of review to do, but at the same time, I'm also learning quite a bit of new material in my classes so I need some extra hours in my day. Since I have no other urgent commitments in the next 2 weeks (such as midterm exams), I am willing to sacrifice on sleep. Normally I have a standard schedule: asleep from ~11:30 to ~7:30. I understand there are quite a bit of polyphasic sleep schedules, but I'm only looking for something temporary and those typically take a while and have a gruelling transition period. My schedule is occupied from 7am to about 5 pm.
posted by ptsampras14 to Health & Fitness (11 answers total)

Does your university have a review period? As someone who has trouble sleeping and knows the effects of lost sleep, I have to say I wouldn't recommend sacrificing sleep to study—I'd honestly rather skip class or work if I were you! Unless you have experience with less sleep and know that it doesn't affect you, I would be worried that you wouldn't be able to absorb and remember the material as well if you're sleep-deprived.
posted by three_red_balloons at 6:20 PM on April 24, 2013 [1 favorite]

I tried to do this kind of thing when I was a college student (especially in 1987-88, when I was taking lots of physics and math, with problem sets all due the same day), and my conclusion was that it can't be done. It's better to get a good night's sleep and study less than to skip sleep and spend more time studying. In my case, I found that my retention went down the tubes with fewer than 7 hours of sleep per day, so the extra time for studying was not actually productive.

What you can do is cut out caffeine in the afternoon and evening (helps you sleep), and if you drink, cut out alcohol entirely (it interferes with sleep). Perhaps get up half an hour earlier, which is the maximum amount of sleep I'd advise sacrificing.

Everyone has the same number of hours in the day, subject only to their individual need for sleep. You can't get extra hours. What you can do is use the hours you have effectively. Do you have distractions that end up consuming far more time than you intended (such as reading and responding to questions on AskMeFi)? If so, cut them out between now and the exams. Give yourself some down time, but make sure you're not procrastinating. Make this your home page, so that when you open a new browser window, you're confronted with it.

Good luck on the exams!
posted by brianogilvie at 6:31 PM on April 24, 2013 [8 favorites]

This is not meant to suggest you do anything illegal, but the only people I've ever seen "hack their sleep" during final exam periods like this were using definitely-not-caffeine stimulants at the time. I was in law school--if some other way had been reasonably possible, we really would have figured it out. The best you can really do is try to focus, and if that 7am-5pm is work, do whatever you can to take whatever days off you possibly can, or half days, or whatever, between now and then.
posted by Sequence at 6:43 PM on April 24, 2013

On the outset: I am with you right now on the schedule thing (two weeks of class, then finals, and then my 1st year comprehensive exams for my PhD). I spend 95% of my time with people who are all panicking about how much work we have to do in the next month and a half.

You have to sleep, dude. Sleep time is not a good margin to try to exploit in order to get more work done. There are pretty quickly diminishing returns to studying once you're talking about spending 18 hours a day working, especially at this long of a stretch. Like Sequence said, short of combining less sleep with abuse of pharmaceuticals, you're just not going to be more productive. (I mean, if you have to pull an all nighter to get a paper done the day before it's due, okay, that happens, but I'm talking generally here).

I'd think about how to order your day so that you get the most out of your productive hours. If you're cooking your own meals, do it during breaks, or maybe cook more than usual so that you can heat up leftovers for dinner the next day. Do laundry before you go to bed when you probably wouldn't get much work done anyway. Don't try to do work right up to the moment you go to sleep because you won't sleep as well; cut out caffeine after 3 or 4 in the afternoon in order to make sure you fall asleep quickly. (I find the way I can pull this off is to eat fruit if my energy starts flagging).

I also find my studying is more effective if I switch up what I'm doing every couple of hours.

I realize this is not the answer you're looking for, but the healthiest and most effective way I know to get through academic crunch times really isn't to hack your sleep, it's to hack the rest of your schedule so that you get as much as possible out of your usual waking hours.

Best of luck!
posted by dismas at 7:06 PM on April 24, 2013 [1 favorite]

In my own experience (college, 5+ years of grad school, currently a graduate assistant at a tutoring center), a good night's sleep absolutely trumps any amount of extra studying, especially close to test time. Lack of sleep does too much damage to my ability to analyze/study/think straight to be worth it. The various times I've tried to 'game' my sleep patterns or messed them up because of a work or school schedule, I've ended up just feeling foggy-brained all day and an insomniac at night.

If I were you, I'd work on ways to make your studying more efficient (I'm biased, but if your university has tutoring services, they'd be a great resource here) and focus on getting two weeks straight of awesome sleep. brianogilvie sums it up really well above with "What you can do is use the hours you have effectively". I think studying efficiently and sleeping well over the next few weeks will do so much more for your exam performance than any number of sleep-hacks ever could.

On preview, seeing Sequence's comment: I take one of these definitely-not-caffeine stimulants by prescription for ADHD. I take an extended-release version, but when I first started taking it I tried the immediate-release version for about a week, and it really didn't work for me. While it kept me awake, my mind was racing so much that I couldn't really do my schoolwork, because the thoughts were coming and going SO FAST I couldn't keep track. Which is all to say, there's no guarantee that if you can successfully hack your sleep, it'll actually help you get more work done or be able to think clearly during those extra hours of awake time. Again, you're better off using the time you have effectively rather than trying to mess with your healthy sleep patterns.

Finally, kick butt on your exams!
posted by augustimagination at 7:08 PM on April 24, 2013 [2 favorites]

There's a lot of research saying that sleep is part of the memorization cycle, so cutting into your sleep to learn more might not just make you less efficient at studying new material, but make you retain less of it anyway. If its just one night before a test it might work, but a two week review period requires the material to get past your short term memory.
posted by jacalata at 7:36 PM on April 24, 2013 [6 favorites]

Just yesterday I found myself attending a presentation by a sleep researcher. The audience, mostly grad students, asked many questions along these lines. Her answer as unequivocal: There's no way to 'cheat' sleep. Sleep deficits are cumulative, and you will pay for lost sleep with reduced cognitive ability. It is counter-intuitive, but the best thing you can do for your performance is to get 7-8 hours/night, sleeping and waking at the same time each day. Avoid caffeine in the afternoon and don't use sleeping pills (they can prevent you from going into REM sleep, which you need).
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 7:40 PM on April 24, 2013 [2 favorites]

I would also note that if you are reading these fairly unanimous answers, and thinking "oh, no, that doesn't apply to me as I am still very productive with minimal sleep," it might be worth trying to get an objective sense of that. I had a couple (ok, several) occasions to pull all-nighters and went through exams thinking I managed pretty well without sleep. However, when I consulted with classmates about their answers afterwards, and got the materials back from the prof, I truly realized how foggy my thinking had been at the time. You may not have complete insight into your cognitive shortcomings while suffering from sleep deprivation.
posted by Pomo at 11:27 PM on April 24, 2013 [3 favorites]

I wouldn't suggest sacrificing your sleep schedule either. But something you can do that'll also help your studying is, when you go to sleep, set a timer for four hours (the reason being, the average person goes into REM sleep mode twice in one eight-hour sleeping session, and you don't want to interrupt your REM sleep). When the four hour alarm goes off, get up and study some more, then go to sleep again for the second four hour sleep session. People tend to remember what they study for longer, and more clearly, when they study this way (at least I know I do). This is what I do anytime I need to cram for something, or gain some sort of expertise in a shorter than ideal period of time.

Also I find, for me, it's better to sleep for four hours total than, say, six hours, for the same reason (REM sleep cycles).
posted by ferdinandcc at 12:36 AM on April 25, 2013

Yeah, I'm going to join the chorus saying this is a bad idea. I remember a University of British Columbia professor (Stanley Coren, I think), who as an experiment deprived himself of sleep -- cutting back something like 15 minutes a night, cumulatively. As he cut back he started getting snappy and stupid and losing his short-term memory. I think he abandoned the experiment when he got down to about four hours of sleep a night, because the people around him were hassling him to stop because they were afraid he'd kill himself driving.

One interesting thing Coren found was that his mental impairment was invisible to him. He thought he was fine throughout the experiment, and it wasn't until he went back to a normal sleep schedule that he realized to his horror what a short-sighted jerk he'd been during it.

Sorry this isn't a more helpful answer. But I do think cutting back your sleep will have the opposite effect of what you intend.
posted by Susan PG at 7:33 AM on April 25, 2013

Steve Pavlina tried this for a few months. In short, I don't think it would work for your situation, because he wrote, "Adapting to polyphasic sleep took many days, and I felt like a zombie the first week." You don't have that week (or more) to spare.
posted by oceano at 1:31 PM on April 25, 2013