If you listen to the advice of the experts, you can spend a third of your life sleeping. If the average life expectancy is 78 years (a number chosen for convenience), and ignoring the first 15 as unproductive due to youth, that’s 21 full years down the spout. Even a 1% saving in sleep required gets you almost 1840 hours more productivity over your lifetime – that’s equivalent to almost 46 forty-hour working weeks, or a full year (not counting annual leave). A 5% saving gets you an extra FIVE YEARS of effort.

Sleep Management is one of the great skills that very few talk about. It’s something that comes naturally to some people and not at all to others. But any improvement yields big results on a cumulative basis. It can also yield huge benefits in the short-term, when you really have to hit a deadline, regardless of whether it’s self-imposed or the result of external factors.

My sleep regime (or lack thereof) is – depending on your point of view – either notorious or legendary amongst my family and friends (including my players in the latter group). When I was much younger, I once put in 7 days continuous effort in campaign and game prep (no sleep whatsoever) and then GM’d for 18 straight hours on the 8th sleepless day. And, at the end of it, the game was concluded not because I was running out of steam, but because my players were. Admittedly, I then slept for 23 hours straight.

I doubt I could do that these days, but the mere fact that this was humanly possible without resorting to illegal substances – or even over-the-counter medications – means that I know a thing or two about sleep, and the lack of it, that I’ve learned the hard way. As little as ten years ago. I would routinely go without sleep once or twice a fortnight on non-successive nights. Sure, I had to sleep a little longer when I did hit the hay – an extra two hours, say – and I did lose perhaps an hour to stay-awake measures and another to sleep-deprived inefficiency – but that’s still an extra four hours of productivity when it mattered.

In this article, I’m going to share some of the lessons that I’ve learned over the years, including some quite recent ones. In some cases, this is backed up by modern medical science, in others it seems to contradict that science, or even not to have been tested experimentally. Which means that YMMV when applying any of these techniques. These are patterns and tips & tricks that work for me, or that I have personally observed as applying to me. They may apply differently to you.

I should state up front that I am not a medical professional, and this should be taken into consideration when assessing the advice and techniques contained in this article.

I strongly recommend that you do not operate heavy machinery or motor vehicles in a sleep-deprived state.

Apply common sense and a safety-first attitude when considering any of the techniques provided before you start, and if you suffer any ill- or unexpected effects, stop and consult your doctor.

Alertness Levels

Something that needs to be clarified up-front is the difference between alertness and being able to function in a low-intensity situation like GMing or performing game prep. Alertness is something that enables quick responses to changing situations and is what you need to operate motor vehicles and the like. Functionality is not enough for such purposes; though it can seem sufficient under ordinary circumstances, responsiveness to any sudden changes in the situation is compromised. The goal of these techniques is to restore sufficient wakefulness for low-intensity purposes; any improvement in alertness levels is strictly limited, short-term, and unreliable.

You can be in a fit state to function creatively without being fully rested if you have to. Your thinking may be slowed, it may take longer and more double-checking may be needed to eliminate errors, but the whole point of a low-intensity situation is that you are able to take as much time as you need to. Only when tiredness reaches the point of exhaustion, bringing a person to a state of confusion where thinking itself is fuzzy and difficult does it become impossible to perform at this level.

This establishes two end-points in an entire range of “tiredness”, from being sufficiently rested to be fully alert to having just enough functionality to get you home and into bed without falling asleep en route. The techniques that will be discussed range in effectiveness from:

• Methods sufficient to get you past the point of exhaustion and back into a state somewhere in the yellow-green zone for a medium-short period (say, 3-4 hours) despite being in the Red Zone; to
• Methods of sustaining a reasonable level of alertness for a protracted medium term of a week or two on reduced sleep; to
• Methods of reducing sleep requirements by a more modest degree over a longer term period.

How Much Is Enough Sleep?

This is an impossible question to answer definitively. There are so many influencing factors – individual metabolism, diet, general health, comfort, long-term exhaustion, activity levels in the preceding wakeful period… there are simply too many variables and not all of them can be adequately quantified.

Nevertheless, collective human experience can be applied to achieve a statistical foundation that will broadly apply to everyone.

How Alert is Alert?

It must also be stated that individual capabilities vary considerably. Some people can be more creative when almost flat on their backs from exhaustion than others seem to achieve at the best of times. Cognition and Reasoning vary tremendously from individual to individual. The more you have, the more you can sacrifice to tiredness while retaining an acceptable degree of capability.

But impairment from lack of sleep is also something that varies from individual to individual. So even that general statement, rubbery and qualified and vague as it is, can’t be relied on as a broad statement, only as a trend or probability, something that’s likely to be more true than not, more often than not.

Objective measurements tend to come in three or four subcategories – physical activity capacity, reflexes and responsiveness, logic & memory, and analytic capacity & problem-solving. There are no agreed standards for what levels of each define which levels of alertness, leaving only subjective statements and personal experiences as general guidelines.

That said, great strides have been made in the understanding of brain activity during sleep, and most sleep research has stepped over these vague but real-world-functional measures directly to definitions based on the easily-measurable and quantifiable measurements of such brain activity, which is then related back to the real world by correlating subjective effects and statements with measured brain activity.

The Sleep Cycle

Sleep can be broken into two parts: a 30-minute part and a 60-minute part. These two form a repeating cycle while you sleep, from the moment you actually fall asleep. The 30-minute part is light sleep, the 60-minute part is deep sleep. The 30-minute section can restore alertness temporarily without impacting actual tiredness. The benefits are superficial typically short-term, relative to getting sufficient deep sleep to actually recover.

One question that has not yet been adequately answered is the degree of individual variation in these time-frames. Some people under some circumstances might require only a 15-minute period of light sleep before entering deep sleep, some people might have a deep-sleep span of 50 minutes instead of the full hour, or 70 minutes. What’s more, without brain-activity sensors, it would take many years of consistent documentation of sleep patterns for the individual to determine their own sleep cycle. Since most of us don’t have access to such equipment, the best that we can do is assume that we’re average, and then adjust based on subjective experience and experimentation.

The wake-up window

If you are awoken from deep sleep, you feel tired all day. It follows that the 30-minute part of the next sleep-cycle defines the “window” within which you want to awaken. Some studies have found that the effects of waking from deep sleep are equivalent to foregoing an entire sleep cycle.

This effect grows progressively smaller with each completed sleep cycle. Interrupting the first deep-sleep phase in a night’s sleep? You might as well not have gone to sleep at all. Breaking the second deep-sleep phase of the night is almost as bad. Breaking the third is bad, and the worst result that might actually be considered tolerable – though you will suffer for it all day, and will tend to need an extra sleep cycle the next night. Breaking the fourth is somewhat better, and is experienced frequently by those who – for one reason or another – complain about not having gotten enough sleep, the next day, and being somewhat irritable as a result. Breaking the fifth is a fairly mild outcome, and if the person hasn’t accumulated a sleep deficit prior, can actually be overcome for the full day (or at least most of it) using normal morning wake-up routines. Breaking the sixth is prone to inducing a sensation of oversleeping – it feels the same as having broken the third or fourth cycle.

Furthermore, breaking a deep-sleep has a greater effect at the start of that deep-sleep phase than doing so toward the end of the phase, in my experience.

Determining when your wake-up window will fall is a critical element in Sleep Management. It can actually be better to delay going to bed for twenty or thirty minutes, no matter how tired you feel.

The drowsing offset

You can’t simply state that you want to wake up some multiple of 90 minutes after you go to bed, plus a margin, however, because very few of us go to sleep the instant our heads hit the pillow. Instead, there is a period of drowsiness that precedes our actually falling asleep. This can be restful in and of itself, but we can’t assume that it will be adequate in any way for purposes of rest. What we actually want is to wake up O + n . {90} + M minutes after we go to bed, where

• O is an offset equal to the length of “drowsy time” before we go to sleep, in minutes;
• n is the number of sleep cycles we experience in a night’s sleep; and
• M is the margin we allow for us to come out of deep sleep, i.e. how far into the subsequent light-sleep phase we want to be when we actually wake up to maximize the chances of waking in the light-sleep period.

The problem is that it’s impossible to anticipate how long O will be on any given night. If you’re not tired enough, or are under stress, or worried about something, or have a problem that you are trying to solve, or are uncomfortable, or aren’t breathing properly, or any of a hundred other things, it might be quite lengthy.

You can show, mathematically, that O and M should total 30 minutes by thinking of the Offset as “eating into” the 30-minute light-sleep awakening window. You can also show, mathematically, that with no Offset, M should be 15 minutes to maximize the probability of avoiding the deep-sleep zones on either`side of the Window, and that therefore the perfect M is 15 plus the offset.

You can make an allowance for your subjective impression of how long you usually toss and turn, but such impressions are extremely unreliable. I achieve best results assuming an offset of 5-to-10 minutes and a 10-minute margin.

Tip#1

If you aren’t asleep in ten-to-fifteen minutes, get up and do something for ten-to-twenty minutes before trying again, resetting alarm clocks appropriately, so that you reset the Offset. If you don’t, you risk crowding your wake-up point into the following deep-sleep phase and feeling more tired all day than you would getting one sleep-cycle less.

Seven-point-five hours plus adjustments: A full night’s sleep (5 cycles)

The traditional advice is that you should try for a full eight hours of sleep. Understanding how the sleep cycle works in the real world, with an offset at the start and a 30-minute window at the end, this begins to make sense. However, aiming for a full eight hours means that your wakeup point is crowding the next deep-sleep phase dangerously close, especially if you have a low offset on any given night. That’s because 7.5 hours plus a full 30-minute window totals eight hours; the offset, by delaying the start-point of the window, also leaves a margin of the same size at the end of the eight hours.

If we could be assured of a fifteen-minute offset each and every time, this would be ideal; as it is, for a full night’s sleep, I target 7 hrs 50 minutes.

If I’m extremely tired and want to crowd an extra sleep cycle into the night, the target would be 9 hrs 20 minutes. I’ll come back to this sleep-target later in the article – it is actually significant.

Six hours plus adjustments: Alertness (4 cycles)

Take another look at the Alertness Level graph. If you assume that it represents total recovery from however tired you were to being fully rested, and that this requires 5 sleep cycles, you can estimate the effectiveness of a shorter period of rest. Four-fifths of the way up is therefore an approximation of how rested you will be after 4 cycles. The result is roughly 1/4 of the way up from “Rested, Alert”.

Another way to look at it is in terms of wake-time. If we fit a full night’s sleep into a natural 24-hour cycle, and a full night’s sleep is approximately 8 hours, that leaves about 16 productive hours. In fact, we can usually work on for hours longer than that, but this is still a useful rough indicator; 4/5ths of 16 is 12.8 hours. So, as a rough indicator, going without one cycle of sleep leaves you roughly as tired after approximately 13 hours as you would normally be at your usual bedtime.

If you can normally work – on occasion – two hours beyond your usual bedtime without excessive tiredness, and another hour with some diminishment due to fatigue, adding 13 hours gets you to a full 16-hour working day on one sleep-cycle less. Plus, of course, you get to work for that extra sleep-cycle, a further 90 minutes of productive time.

What this shows is that it’s possible to work 17.5 hours every second day without noticeable ill effect. In a seven-day week, even reserving one for catching up on lost sleep, that’s still 4.5 extra hours every week, or roughly – wait for it – 5.85 extra working weeks a year.

And it’s even possible to use this pattern in a more extensive way, because it never takes as much additional sleep to recover from a lack of sleep as the total amount you are short. Two additional sleep cycles once a week can make up for four or five missed cycles during the week, especially if the loss is diffuse. You could forgo one cycle each for five nights in succession, and then make up the shortfall with one extra cycle on each of the remaining two days, or both on the 6th day of the cycle. That’s a time saving of 1.5 x 5 = 7.5 hours a week, less three, giving 4.5 hours per week, once again, which we have already established as sustainable; it’s just a different way of organizing the sleeping patterns.

But that’s to fully rested condition each week; there’s absolutely no reason why you can’t forgo an extra sleep cycle on top of those, each week, and make up the shortfall once a month or so. In fact, spread out this way, you can gain 3 extra sleep-cycles a month, for another 4.5 hours a month on top of what has already been saved from the sandman – carrying the total saved to more than seven extra 40-hour working weeks a year (or more than eight 35-hour weeks, if you prefer!)

Four-point-five hours plus adjustments: A half-night (3 cycles)

This gets you just above half-way between “Wakeful” and “Rested, Alert”. This is the minimum amount of sleep you should have before being safe to operate machinery – for a while. Using the waking-time analysis shows that you are about as tired after 9.5 hours as you would be after 16 hours effort on a full night’s sleep. Adding the three extra hours on top of that gets 12.5 hours, plus the 4.5 hours or so of sleep, gets a total of 16.5 hours. This is 3.5 hours short of a full 24-hour cycle, which is rather a large shortfall, and more than that 3 extra hours, which indicates that this is not sustainable long-term.

However, if a way can be found to re-energize you enough to get you through that extra 3.5 hours – and I offer a number of such techniques later in the article – then this is definitely sustainable in the short-term, and perhaps even the medium term. If that’s the case, then there should be examples of people using this sort of cycle out there somewhere.

The 8-on-4-off, 4-on-4-off, 6-and-1/3-for-30 patterns

And, in fact, there are. Fishing boats and naval vessels in wartime use this sort of pattern all the time. In fact, there are a number of variations. The best known of these is probably the heel-and-toe watch where people work four-hours-on and then have four hours off.

8-on-4-off
I’ve only ever heard of this pattern being employed in emergency situations of sustained duration in an acutely short-handed situation, or when cramming for major exams. Even though the proportions are exactly the same as a normal night’s sleep, the four-hours-off phase is insufficient for 3 complete cycles. In essence, this is 2 sleep-cycles twice a day, leaving those who experience it one sleep-cycle short per day. Now, that’s already been shown to be sustainable, but this pattern of sleep cycles has three substantial flaws:

1. It makes no allowance for recovery time, and so accumulates sleep debt;
2. It incurs at least twice as much overhead because you have to go to sleep twice as often; and
3. It almost certainly involves waking from a state of deep sleep, inducing a condition known as Sleep Inertia.

As best I can determine, this pattern was proposed as viable following the determination that astronauts had trouble sleeping for a full eight hours in zero gravity, and consequently suffered varying degrees of impairment as missions progressed in duration. In fact, it appears to be a simplified interpretation of Segmented Sleep (see below) shown to be effective during NASA experimentation based on this problem. This was recommended to me while I was attending University as a method of maximizing study time when under pressure, the suggestion being made that it was much easier and more effective to study for 90 minutes and then take 30 off, repeat four times, then sleep for four hours, than it was to sustain study for a longer time span. The theory seems to have been that this accumulated enough study for the brain to be able to process what was learned during the shortened sleep period, like backing up a hard drive more frequently.

It didn’t work for me at the time, and I can’t recommend it as a technique for the reasons listed above. If things are really that bad, there are more effective approaches.

4-on-4-off
Heel-and-toe watches were often stood in the World Wars. I don’t know about other times. They are reportedly at their most effective when the “on” part of the cycle involves high stress and intensity of activity, which one would expect to encounter during wartime, because people could not sustain their attention levels to the required degree for longer periods. The “four hours on” thus becomes the operational parameter used to determine the sleeping patterns required. If there were three shifts of staff for each position, a 4-on-8-off pattern would be possible, though I suspect that people would have trouble falling asleep only four hours after waking; this would then become a 4-on-8-off-4-on-8-sleep pattern, which is something close to normality. The unanswered question would be whether eight hours of non-sleep recreation would sufficiently restore attention levels for this approach to work; personally, I would have my doubts.

However, in a military situation during wartime, three shifts is a luxury that can’t be tolerated. That extra shift can accommodate an extra gunner, or fire control officer, or pilot, or whatever. Which brings us back to the basic 4-on-4-off heel-and-toe pattern.

This suffers from all three of the flaws listed in the previous section. 4 hours of sleep might be better than none, but that’s about all it has going for it.

6-and-1/3-for-30
I had never heard of this approach until I saw it on a documentary – I forget which one, it was something that I caught the tail-end of by accident. A week or two later, I saw it tested on Mythbusters in the segment ”. Essentially, it is a 20-minute nap every six hours for 30 hours straight, which is reportedly enough to be twice as good as no sleep at all during a similar timespan. This brutal schedule is routinely employed on Crab fishing vessels by the crew since it totals only 5.26% time lost to sleep over that 30-hour shift.

Astonishingly, as you will see if you follow the link above, the myth that these regular power naps were twice as good as sleeplessness was confirmed by the experiment performed by the Mythbusters team – fully rested, the two subjects scored 100 out 100, fully sleep-deprived, they scored 27/100 and 34/100 respectively, and (after recovering) employing the power-nap method the scores were 64/100 and 81/100, respectively. However, to say that they didn’t feel alert at the time is an understatement, and since confidence is such a large element of successful GMing, I would reject this approach – unless you really, really, need it.

Polyphasic Sleep – exotic Patterns
Of course, these are just a few of the wild and sometimes wacky sleep patterns we humans have experimented with. In fact, there are a whole slew of proposals, each of which has its supporters and adherents, as a read of the rather fascinating Wikipedia page on Polyphasic Sleep will show.

Do they work? That’s a very big question. Let’s just say that they might work for some individuals under some circumstances at some times of the year and leave that surprisingly complicated question at that, okay?

In actual fact, I employed a 3-cycle sleep pattern for many years. It IS sustainable over quite a long period, provided that you accept that inevitably your body will revolt and you WILL sleep 12 hours or so, whether you want to or not. The trumpet of doom won’t wake you, when that happens. On the other hand, once you realize that this is inevitable, you can actually schedule it in advance – say, once every 2 or 3 weeks, you let yourself sleep “until you can’t sleep no more”.

There is a second price to pay: such a lengthy sleep will inevitably throw your body clock out. This can be incredibly useful if you need to achieve this effect – for example, transitioning from an unemployed state to an employed state – but it can be a real pain at other times. In effect, this costs about 6 hours of extra sleep every 3 weeks – but gains you an average of 3 hours a day extra, 7 days a week, the rest of that time, for a net gain of about 18 hours a week. That’s roughly 936 hours extra productivity a year – or more than 23 extra 40-hour working weeks in the year.

It also takes time to get used to, and you can lose that adjustment in a single week of holidays.

Even then, you will eventually need to revert for a solid month or so to a normal 8-hour cycle or suffer long-term effects. You therefore have to ask yourself if it’s worth it? At the time, my answer would have been ‘yes’. At my current stage of life, where my sleep is disrupted by medical issues (unrelated to this practice), it is no longer sustainable, so the answer is ‘no’.

Three hours plus adjustments: The minimum? (2 cycles)

While heel-and-toe and other 4-off methods might theoretically represent 4 hours of sleep, or 2.5 cycles, in practice that could only be achieved if the handover and transition from “on” to “off” was instantaneous. Since it can’t be, what we’re really talking about when discussing such a sleep pattern is a 2-cycle sleeping pattern.

Now, two cycles, three times a day – which is to say, 4-on-4-off – in theory actually gets you one more sleep cycle than you would normally get in a standard 16-on-8-off 24-hour day. That’s probably a small concession, given the disrupted sleep cycle, the potentially-lengthy overheads three times a day, the mental fatigue from periods of intense concentration, etc.

But how about if we take all that high-impact concentration and stress out of the picture? Would it then be possible to cope on a single two-cycle sleep period a day and then put in a full day’s work, or something approaching it?

The answer is yes – with caveats.

This is working an extra 4.5 hours past your normal bedtime in a day, then getting back up at your usual hour the next morning. If you map that out on the restedness graph, you will find that it gets you exactly to the “Wakeful” mark – enough to write or plot or GM, at least for a while, but not enough that you should operate machinery. Using the “proportion of 16 hours” calculation, you wake up as tired as you would be after putting in a ten-hour regular day. That leaves 6.5 hours of regular day before you’re as tired as you normally are when you go to bed, another 2 hours of capacity beyond that, and one final hour of extremely-diminished capacity. But it does mean that over a 48-hour period, you get 30 hours of work done.

Whereas, operating normally you would only get… 32 hours of work capacity?

What this does is sacrifice two hours of activity capacity on the second day to get an extra four-and-a-half hours of work done on the first day. And it does pretty much mandate that you will need an extra sleep cycle on the third day.

In the long term, then, this is actually less efficient than getting enough sleep, and much less efficient than managing to sneak an extra sleep cycle every second day. It’s what you do when you have a deadline that you absolutely have to hit.

My experience is that 3 hours after your usual bedtime you start to zone out, and need to refresh yourself. When you do so, you actually gain more than the 1.5 hours remaining – you usually gain another 3 hours of alert time, if not more. And you can repeat the refreshing process a number of times. You can’t stave off sleep indefinitely, but you can come close to it – for a while.

And that makes this sleep pattern pretty much worthless.

One-point-five plus adjustments: Worse than nothing? (1 cycle)

And if 2 cycles a day is worthless, 1 cycle is doubly so. You wake up in a state equivalent to half-way between “wakeful” and “minimum function” and feel more tired than if you had actually gone without sleep. At best, you awaken as tired as you would normally be three hours before your normal bedtime. This puts you solidly in the red, “Sleep-deprived” zone – so ineffective the next day that you might as well be asleep. And falling asleep is something that you will have to fight against repeatedly, all the next day. You will have periods in which you completely zone out, or actually doze off. Forget it.

No Sleep At All: Not the worst case

Which brings me to the final configuration: No Sleep At All. There are ways of repeatedly restoring you to almost full alertness – say, to a bit above the “rested” mark – at the price of accelerating progress towards the “Minimum Function” mark each time. This also builds up your total sleep deprivation, meaning that when you do finally sleep, you will need extra cycles, probably for a couple of days, to recover.

These methods don’t work as well after 1-2 cycles of sleep, for some reason.

Broken Cycles

Let’s assume for a minute that circumstances require you to get as much sleep as you can, but to wake up in the morning with an incomplete deep-sleep cycle, which will make you feel tired all day – defeating the purpose of the “as much sleep as you can get” notion. This sort of thing happens when you know that tomorrow is going to be a late night, but you have a fixed wake-up time that can’t be altered – which makes it more common an event than you might think.

Recovery from a broken sleep cycle begins with the next complete sleep cycle. However, the second sleep cycle is often deeper and more regenerative than the first. Given these facts, it becomes clear that the plan for being as rested as possible is to have your third sleep cycle be the one that is broken, not the last one of the night.

To determine what time to set your alarm to in order to break your sleep at the right time, count forwards from your expected time of going to sleep by three hours; that’s the earliest point in time. Then count backwards from the wakeup time required by an hour-and-a-half, plus twenty minute waking margin in the middle. That’s the latest point in time. If the two are more than 90 minutes apart, move your “latest” point back another sleep cycle, so that the pattern is cycle-cycle-broken cycle-break-cycle-cycle. You will be far more alert the next day and into the following evening than you would be with a cycle-cycle-cycle-cycle-broken-cycle pattern, even though you have lost 20 minutes sleep in the middle of the night.

That leaves only the question of what to do in that twenty minutes. I recommend (1) use the bathroom; (2) 10 minutes light reading; (3) drink half a glass of water (not too cold); (4) go back to bed. It will probably take you longer to go back to sleep than it did when you first retired for the night; these steps are intended to help you relax and overcome this problem.

Staying Awake

It’s not easy going without sleep for a night. It can be done, and almost all of us have had to do so from time to time for whatever reason, but most people try to avoid it. When I was younger, and the sleep that I did get was of much higher quality, I was a bit of an anomaly because I did this regularly, squeezing extra hours of creativity into the day. Even now, I sometimes get so wrapped up in the creative process that I lose track of time and discover that it’s way past the time I should be in bed.

When you set your own schedule, as I can now do, that’s not a big deal – the worst that might happen is that I sleep through something that I wanted to watch on TV; but when you’re part of the majority with “daytime obligations” – work, appointments, whatever – that can quite often mean that there’s not enough time to actually sleep before you have to get your normal day underway. I used to be part of that majority, and evolved a number of techniques that have gotten me through the day that follows.

The Gray Zone

My experience is that at some point, tiredness will lead you to zone out. If you can get through that period, you will be rejuvenated and able to carry on until your usual bedtime rolls around again – and a couple of nights of normal sleep is all that you then need to recharge your batteries. Alternatively, an extra sleep cycle when you do hit the sack can be enough. So a lot of these techniques can be considered “Gray Zone” survival techniques, where the goal is simply to refresh yourself for long enough to get through the period where you are in danger of dropping off.

None of these techniques will do better than restoring you to “Rested, Alert” status, and you will travel back down the tiredness scale more quickly; if you get through the gray zone before again reaching the orange status between wakeful and minimum functionality, your tiredness will stabilize at the new level. If not, you need to apply one of the Gray Zone survival tricks, successive use of the same technique gives diminishing returns.

Depending on just how exhausted you are, employing one Gray Zone technique may not be enough. Eventually, you will run out of steam. You need to time it so that this happens at your normal bedtime, or exactly one sleep cycle sooner, or your body clock will get out of sync and you’ll have trouble getting enough sleep for a few nights. When that happens, often the best solution is another sleepless night. One of the most effective ways to reset your internal body clock is, in fact, the all-nighter that gets you to bed at the right time.

Adrenalin Rush

Excitement can go a long way. I don’t recommend thrill-seeking as a way of staying awake, but playing a video-game with a lot of action can serve the same function in a more socially-acceptable way. The big problem with the Adrenalin Rush as a Gray Zone survival technique is that it wears off very, very quickly. So this usually needs to be combined with another technique, one that lasts longer. In effect, you are buying time for that slower treatment to kick in and get you through the rest of the Gray Zone.

The Beverage Refreshment

Coffee and Tea can go a long way, especially if they are taken with a reasonable level of sweetener. Drink them black, because warm milk has a soporific effect that can undermine the whole point of the exercise. Use cold water if you need to adjust the temperature of the beverage.

These need to be stronger than you normally take the beverage, because your body is accustomed to that normal level of stimulation. I’ve gotten into the habit of making my usual tea and coffee about half normal strength – a level teaspoon of instant coffee instead of a heaped one, for example – so that I have that margin for a stronger cup when I need it.

Cold drinks which contain caffeine can also be effective when the environment is especially hot or cold, but I find they are less so than ordinary coffee, simply because much of their kick comes from sugar content – and the sugar rush wears off almost as quickly as Adrenalin.

Thermal Impact

The more comfortable the temperature, the easier it is to go to sleep. It follows that – within reasonable limits – thermal discomfort can help keep the Gray Zone at bay. However, heat is less effective in this capacity than cold.

This has given rise to my current “favorite” technique, the Thermal Shock Shower. I take a shower and get the water to a comfortable temperature. I then turn the heat up gradually until it is as hot as I can stand – a value that changes depending on conditions and mindset – and hold it there for a minute. Then I turn the hot water off (or at least way down) with a single movement, and leave it cold for as long as I can stand it, then turn the hot water straight back up to where it was until I’m no longer cold. This “shock treatment” is good for between two and four hours at something better than “rested, alert” status.

The Cold-Water Splash

Splashing cold water on the face and hands, or on the back of the neck, has been a treatment for tiredness for many, many years. That’s because it works, at least for a while.

Food and Sleep

The larger the meal, the more tired you feel. When you’re already heading for the gray zone, this can push you over the edge.

For many years, I did not have a refrigerator. Since I was unable to preserve food, and because it was more economical, I got used to eating one large meal a day – and existing on nothing but tea and coffee the rest of the time. That one big meal, four to six hours before bedtime, got me through the day.

What you eat also has a big effect, second only to the total quantity of food. Some sugar is good for a quick boost, but too much leads to too big a crash when the sugar rush wears off. Too much carbohydrate can also be problematic; it takes energy to actually digest such food, and even though there is a net energy gain at the end, the short-term effects when in the Gray Zone can overwhelm your system. A light breakfast cereal – one that doesn’t contain too much sugar – with ice-cold milk can be very effective at buying you an extra hour or so to get through the Gray Zone, especially if combined with a beverage.

The Walk Restorative

This works best in winter, or late at night in summer. Walk up to the nearest corner and back, or around the block. Dress appropriately for the conditions, of course. It doesn’t have to be a long walk, but most creative activities are carried out sitting down – getting the blood circulating (in combination with a little thermal shock if possible) can be very restorative.

You aren’t walking enough to consider it exercise, except of the very lightest variety. You don’t want to trigger a massive adrenalin rush because that is usually accompanied by a wave of exhaustion when it ends. It’s nothing more than stretching your legs. But it works.

For many years, this was my favorite technique. Physical disability means that even a walk this long is a struggle, and that makes this too strenuous an activity to get me through the Gray Zone except on my very best days.

Light Exercise

This ups the ante on the restorative walk. The idea is to perform just enough exercise to get the heart-rate up and the adrenalin flowing when you find yourself starting to drop off, then return to whatever you were doing. Repeat as necessary. Sixty seconds of jumping jacks, or jogging on the spot, or whatever, can work wonders.

There are a couple of caveats, however; if there is any gap between the end of the exercise and resuming work, your body can take this as a signal to crash. Plan your exercises accordingly. And, number two, it’s very easy to go too far, exercise too hard or for too long. Stop as soon as you feel more alert!

Any sort of exercise that is carried out sitting down, with the possible exception of an exercise bike, is usually less effective than one that involves moving around.

Shampoo Your Hair

Why this works, I’m not entirely sure, but a vigorous shampooing – even of clean hair – can be unexpectedly restorative. I have a number of plausible theories to explain the phenomenon, but wouldn’t bet on any of them being correct, or even being part of the story.

We’re used to not going to bed when our hair is wet. That’s one. Another is that most heat loss occurs through the scalp, and that oily/greasy hair retains more of that heat, inducing greater drowsiness. A third is that the “vigor” of the shampooing is enough physical activity to qualify as light exercise, or is sufficiently stimulating in it’s own right. The truth could be any or all of these, or none of them. All I know is that it works, especially if combined with a shave (for the men) and the Thermal Shock Shower described earlier (which should follow the shampooing for maximum effect).

The Power Nap

A power nap is a short sleep period that doesn’t last long enough to enter the deep-sleep phase. Fifteen or twenty minutes shut-eye can keep you going when all else fails.

Power Nap success hinges on three factors. First, you need to be comfortable, especially in terms of the temperature, so that you can fall asleep quickly. Second, you need to shut out external factors that carry an awareness of the time – travel masks to shut out light are cheap on the internet (my current ones cost just 45 cents Australian). And last, you need a bullet-proof way to wake yourself up – a kitchen timer can work because it can be quickly set to twenty or thirty minutes, but if you sleep through it, you’re toast.

The bathtub snooze

I used to use this technique regularly, but my current bathtub is too small. You need a tub of exactly the right size – one that lets you lie down comfortably but with Zero chance of your head slipping below the waterline when the tub is filled to chest height. Run the water hot and just relax. You can doze off if you like – the whole point of the bathtub size is making sure that it’s safe to do so. The water will cool while you sleep, becoming just uncomfortable enough to wake you at the end of a single sleep cycle (at worst) or a power nap, in effect combining the Thermal Shock technique with a power nap. This technique can be good for six to eight hours of further activity, the best of any of the techniques given here; it was the unavailability of this tool that led me to come up with the Thermal Shock shower.

The impact of illness

I don’t recommend using any of these techniques when you’re unwell in any way. Illness makes us feel tired because your body is diverting resources to fighting off the bug, forcing it not to do so will only make matters worse. What’s more, one of the impacts of sleep deprivation is a weakening of the immune system, which is a double-whammy when you’re already under the weather.

Injuries, on the other hand, can be quite useful; pain is a known stimulus. However, it’s also a distraction; what good is it to gain thirty percent more activity time if you are only 50% effective throughout the day? It follows that this is walking a knife-edge between side-benefit on the one hand and negative impact on the other.

It follows that if you are injured, you can try and take advantage of the fact, spinning an existing negative into a positive, however minor; if you aren’t, don’t court an injury, the risk is not worth the reward.

I have a back condition that gives me moderate to severe pain almost continuously; I’ve experienced just one completely pain-free day in three-and-a-half years (and I dread such, because it’s an invitation to overdoing things, making the subsequent day agony). To deal with this pain, I have prescribed surgical-grade painkillers. Because excessive activity makes the condition worse, and at least some part of that worsening is permanent, I avoid these painkillers as much as possible; pain serves as an early warning when I’m pushing my limits. Secondary considerations are that painkillers can be addictive, and that the body builds up a tolerance to them; when I do need to take one, I don’t want it to be ineffective. So I save them for when I really, really need them.

Still, I don’t think this is what they have in mind when they talk about suffering for your art.

Combinations and effectiveness

Some of these techniques are good for a quick pick-up, but don’t last very long. Others are less effective at restoring flagging energies but can produce a longer-lasting effect. But their greatest levels of effectiveness are only realized when they are implemented in combinations, and can’t actually be predicted by their effects in isolation.

While I have no evidence to offer on the point, I suggest that each person will respond differently to both effects in isolation and effects in combination. One point that definitely makes a difference is timing – I try to establish a rhythm or routine. One technique “each hour on the hour”, as it were, is more effective than implementing them at set intervals.

The Pattern of Habits

The human mind loves to construct habits, patterns, and routines. We are wired to do so by evolution because these all enable essential activities to be done by “autopilot” leaving cranial capability available for the unexpected, like noticing the sabretooth lurking in the brush up ahead. In terms of the way our minds process visual signals, this is the basis of all optical illusions, and also relates directly to the flaws in humans as witnesses.

This propensity can be turned to our advantage.

The Wake-up Routine

Having a distinctive wakeup routine for the mornings enables us to repeat that routine later in the day when tired, fooling the mind into waking up again – at least for a while, for example.

My habit is not to lie in bed, but to get up as soon as I awake. I shower and brush teeth, grab the coffee cup and start making a coffee on my way back to the bedroom to get dressed, starting the power-up procedure on my laptop/computer on the way, complete the coffee-making procedure when dressed for the day, and then visit the various websites that I need to check daily in a routine sequence. Only when all these steps are complete, in this fixed sequence, do I start my activities for the day.

The Sleep-ready Habit

In my experience, there are actually two different habits that tell the mind to prepare to shut down for the day. The first is that we get used to shutting down for the day a certain number of hours past our major meal of the day; the mind can sometimes be fooled by replacing that meal with the first of two much smaller, lighter, meals. This habit can also be tricked if we develop a habit of always finishing our meals with a particular beverage, with dessert, or with a specific activity; by skipping that activity, the brain is fooled (for a while) into thinking that the meal is not yet finished, and therefore the clock to bed-time has not yet started counting down.

The second is that we develop shut-down routines. Avoiding these doesn’t help keep you awake, but failure to carry them out can make it harder to actually fall asleep when we do go to bed, and that can in turn play hob with getting the expected amount of sleep, impacting on our wakefulness the next day. That means that whenever you DO call it a day, it’s important to finish your day in the exact same way that you usually do.

Side-tip: Jet lag
I’m lucky, in that I don’t suffer very much from jet-lag, despite not sleeping very much when traveling by plane. It’s just like staying up late, and the same tricks can work. By combining the wake-up techniques with an appropriate time-shift on the sleep-ready routines, it’s not that difficult to manage what jet-lag I experience. That said, my international travel is relatively limited in terms of destination, so I can’t guarantee results. A better and more effective technique is to start to shift your bedtime to what you want it to be in the new time-zone before you travel.

The influence of daylight

For untold millennia, humans were adjusted to a day-night cycle regulated by the sun. Even the invention of fire didn’t change that very much, because away from the fire, it was still dark. Things only started to change with the electric light bulb, when – for the first time – it became possible to bathe the environment in light, shutting out the night.

A lot of people think that we’re still ruled by the influence of this day-night cycle, and that our sleep-ready countdown is actually based on the onset of twilight rather than the eating of the main meal. My experience is that there is an influence, but that the meal is the larger factor, simply because after a heavy meal we’re always a little sluggish and tired. However, this is very much an urban perspective, and I’ve lived long enough in the country to recognize that the degree of impact of this influence varies with where you live.

The way I see it, when it’s dark out and you are surrounded by light, it creates an isolated environment around you. It doesn’t matter how dark it is outside, so long as it isn’t dark where you are; this just hides the environment from your perception.

That said, this pattern, too, can be manipulated to benefit our alertness when tired. My current residence starts to get dark inside relatively early in the day – there’s a wall between it and the afternoon sun – and that can trigger “twilight” in the subconscious. Being aware of this, I turn my lights in the work-room on at about 3 PM each day, replacing the fading light with a subjectively-equal degree of illumination. As a result, I don’t actually experience twilight, and my body continues to tick over in “daylight” until I’m ready for it not to do so. I can trigger “twilight” just by going to my kitchen without having turned the lights on, engaging the secondary habit of “sleep is X hours away”; this is because there is a street light just across the street outside of the kitchen window that provides some light but not full illumination.

In my old apartment, the situation was quite different. It had very good natural afternoon light until quite late in the day, and the kitchen was effectively in the same room as the work-room/living room. Again, I turned the living room light on just before twilight began to fall – about 5 PM in winter, about 6:30PM in summer – but to trigger “twilight” when I wanted it, I used a lower wattage of light bulb in the bedrooms. There was also a lot less illumination from outside.

I’ve also found that a pair of mild sunglasses can be used to trigger “twilight” even during daylight hours.

Designing a “twilight trigger” depends on your individual circumstances, and careful attention to developing the pattern that you want to experience. Complicating things is that sunset moves each day, and the amount of change depends on your latitude, altitude, and surroundings. Nor are the benefits all that clear-cut; they certainly aren’t enough on their own, but by making other stay-awake techniques that little bit more effective, there can be big yields in return for the effort.

The vagaries of body clocks

I’ve heard and read a lot of nonsense about body clocks over the years. I discovered way back in the early 80s that everyone has their own body clock, their own preferences for when they want to sleep. I learned the hard way that if I need to routinely get up early in the morning, I need more sleep the night before; I am a natural night owl. This factor alone is worth an extra sleep cycle per day.

This same phenomenon means that some people adapt to working a night shift more readily than others.

My preferred cycle is to awaken between 10 and 11 AM; that permits me to get by on 4 sleep cycles in complete comfort, and when I was younger, I could routinely get along on three cycles every second day. For every 2 sleep cycles or part thereof that I move this wake-up point back in time on a regular basis, I need to add one cycle to the total amount of sleep per night. Let’s see how that works:

• Wake at 10 AM – get up after 3-4 sleep cycles of 90 mins each – bed at 4 AM / 5:30 AM alternating.
• Wake between 8:30 and 10 AM – get up after 4-5 sleep cycles – bed at 1 AM / 2:30 AM alternating.
• Wake between 7 and 8:30 AM (start work at 9AM) – get up after 5-6 sleep cycles – bed at 11:30 PM / 1 AM alternating.
• Wake between 5:30 and 7 AM (start work at 8AM) – get up after 5-6 sleep cycles – bed at 10 PM / 11:30 AM alternating, and an extra sleep cycle on the weekends to make up for not-quite-enough sleep during the week.

Let’s interpret that another way: how many non-sleeping hours are in my day, and how many are left after 3 hrs/day on maintenance (eating, traveling, hygiene, etc) & travel and 8 hrs a day work?

• Wake at 10 AM: 18 and 19.5 hrs, alternating; 7 to 8.5 hrs, alternating.
• Wake at 8:30 AM (start work at 10AM): 16.5 to 18 hrs, alternating; 5.5 to 6 hrs, alternating.
• Wake at 7 AM (start work at 9 AM): 15 hrs to 16.5 hrs, alternating; 4 to 5.5 hrs, alternating.
• Wake at 5:30 AM (start work at 8 AM): 13.5 hrs to 15 hrs, alternating; 2.5 to 4 hrs, alternating, and less 1.5 hrs per week.

Project out that difference over a 50-week working year: ideal, 2712.5 hrs non-working awake time; worst-case, 1062.5 hrs. Productive time lost per year just by getting up earlier: 1,650 hours. One thousand, six hundred and fifty hours.

Now, everyone is different. My mother’s an early bird, for example, and – for that matter – so is my father. I have a friend who follows the same basic pattern as I do – but who needs between 1 and 2 extra sleep cycles a night. Unless you just happen to get lucky, as I did back in 1981, it can easily take six months or more of diligent efforts to find the setting your body clock prefers. The benefits of doing so can repay that effort – unless you are already at, or close to, your optimum window.

Voluntary Waking

One benefit of finding your ideal body clock setting – for me at least – comes in the form of voluntary waking. If I know, going to bed, that I need to wake up at a certain time, and I set my alarm clock accordingly, I will usually wake up just before the alarm goes off. It’s not quite reliable enough to discard the alarm completely, but it has been enough to save my bacon a number of times when there’s been a power failure of some sort and the alarm fails to function.

Oversleeping The Mark

As a general rule of thumb, if you need an extra sleep cycle, you are better off going to bed early and getting up at your usual time. This enables you to step straight back into your usual routines without upsetting your body clock. Quite often, tacking an extra sleep cycle onto the end of your night’s sleep will confuse those internal cycles and you will not only wake up tired for several days after, but will encounter difficulties getting to sleep when you want to.

Too late To Sleep

There are profound implications in that fact for sleep management. When it becomes too late in your personal “day” for you to get the amount of sleep that you need and still wake up at something approaching your usual hour, you have only a very limited margin before it becomes less tiring in the medium term to stay up. Failure to do so will often result in that terrible situation in which you are so tired when you go to bed that you have trouble going to sleep. When this happens, it can result in as much as an entire sleep cycle going to waste, and the near certainty that when you wake up you will still be tired and have a disrupted body clock.

The impact of Age

As we age, our sleep requirements go up (as a general rule of thumb). As you age still further, your capacity for deep sleep changes, and you need more frequent sleep in the course of the day. Instead of 90 minutes, you might find that you get 30 minutes of deep sleep in a cycle that’s anywhere from 60-90 minutes in total. The result is that you tend to repeatedly power-nap during the day, whether you want to or not, because the total minutes of deep sleep don’t actually change, they just come in smaller servings. Again, everyone is different, and there are multiple parameters that vary from individual to individual – degree of impact, degree of responsiveness to changing sleep patterns to accommodate the impact, age at which different degrees of impact take effect, and general health and fitness, to name just a few.

What this adds up to is that what works for you in one decade of your life might not work as well a decade or two later, or might be more effective – and that this assessment will no longer apply a decade or two after that.

Manipulating The Patterns

Once you recognize the patterns that apply to you and how they impact your need for sleep, you can start to manipulate these patterns to your advantage. I’ve already touched on various aspects of this practice, but there is still more to the art of effective sleep management.

On the timing of meals

Meal management is also a part of sleep management. The size and timing of meals plays a big part in dictating when we feel ready for sleep, which in turn is a big part of sleep management. I’ve already touched on the impact that the main meal has, but you can actually add to that effect by manipulating the size and timing of the other meals of the day.

Choosing what and how much to eat when you are actually hungry is the worst possible time to make such a decision. It’s far better for weight management to make such decisions before you reach that point. Similarly, it’s far easier for sleep management to make your timing decisions by counting back from when you want to sleep. You get used to eating your main meal so many hours before you go to sleep, and also get used to eating lunch so many hours before the main meal.

These decisions and needs are also affected by the waking time relative to your body clock, because you consume far fewer calories when you sleep. When I can follow my optimum body clock, I rarely eat lunch, and if I do, I subtract those calories from what I consume in my main meal of the day; but if I’ve already been up and around for 5 additional hours because I’ve had to get up for work, I need a substantial lunch, and because I’m sleeping more, a lighter main meal.

The Use of Naps

Naps throw body clocks into a state of confusion, because they are the same as both going to sleep and waking up. It’s what happens afterwards that “resynchs” the body clock and gives the act context – if you go into deep sleep then it’s a “going to sleep” event, if you go right back to work (or better yet, swing into a repetition of your morning routine) then it’s a waking-up event.

One of the big questions in sleep research is just how much deep sleep you actually need, and how effectively naps can be used to make up the rest of your daily sleep requirement.

To be honest, I haven’t used naps often enough to be able to offer much advice here. The few occasions when I have done so suggest:

1. that the body has 90-minute “alert cycles” that are the waking equivalent of sleep cycles – an hour of intense ability preceded by 30 minutes of more superficial capabilities;
2. that it’s easier and more effective to go to sleep in that half-hour window than it is in the hour; and
3. that a nap restarts the clock on these cycles.

But I would not, and cannot, swear to any of these impressions.

It’s clear that power naps work. So does a siesta that contains a full sleep cycle. Beyond that, and the personal observations given above, I can’t offer any guidance on using naps.

Glasses

If you wear prescription glasses – I do – clean them when you first start feeling tired. It’s astonishing how much harder the mind has to work compensating for blurry vision.

If you don’t do this in time, your eyes will start having difficulty focusing. It can take as much as thirty minutes for them to recover from eyestrain, and that’s if you catch it early – you can do long-term damage to your vision. If you are experiencing eyestrain but for deadline reasons have to keep working, try using a larger font until the very last step in the writing process. But often you will be better served taking a break and focusing on something at a different optical distance.

Personal experience also says that working on any form of digital artwork involves much greater optical concentration, and is more prone to triggering these problems, especially if you are using a small screen. Take that into account.

Sleep Triggers

When you are really tired, there are a few things that help make you drowsy, and therefore encourage you to drowse off when you are tired. I try to avoid these, or to at least plan around them.

Warmth & comfort
The number one triggers are warmth and comfort; both are bad, and in combination, they are worse. Your first instinct when tired is to put your feet up and relax; and if the room is a comfortable temperature, this can be a recipe for sleep-management disaster.

As soon as I feel like getting comfortable and relaxing for a few minutes, I turn my heater off (in winter) – summer is more problematic – and get a drink that is inclined in the direction of discomfort – a hot drink in summer, a cold drink in winter – and then hold out for ten or fifteen minutes. Or maybe I’ll go for a two-or-three minute walk if it’s substantially cooler outside than in the warm environment inside (again turning the heater off).

Water
So long as it is neither hot nor cold, water is a known soporific. If it is at a temperature extreme that is still safe for consumption, it has a reduced effect, but can still have that function, especially if it moves your body temperature a little more towards comfort.

Warm Dairy Products
Warm milk is another soporific which has assumed almost mythological status, but it really works. Whether that is true of low-fat milks or any of the 99-other variations on dairy product, I don’t know. To play it safe, avoid any hot foods with a creamy sauce when tired!

Exercise
While exercise can trigger an adrenalin response that wakes you up, when that wears off, you can slide into a lethargic state that leaves you more prone to involuntary sleep.

Planning

All these effects can be mitigated with a little advance planning. Have your water in the form of a mild coffee and accompany it with a biscuit for the sugar rush, or have an ice-cold soft drink. Immediately precede your exercise period with a snack that will provide both short-term and longer-term energy, and so on.

Tea actually has more caffeine than weak instant coffee. A LOT more. But it seems to be metabolized more quickly. Plan accordingly.

Supplements & Substitutes
There have been rare occasions when I have resorted to (legal) over-the-counter medications like caffeine pills or Energy Drinks. While these can get you past a bump in the sleep-management road, they suffer from a number of problems – they are not as effective as the other techniques offered in this article, and you have serious problems trying to turn them off when they are no longer needed. Finally, protracted use can cause long-term health issues, and that’s without taking the addiction potential into account. With due care and planning, these can supplement your armory, but save them for last resorts.

The drawbacks are amplified with anything stronger. I don’t recommend it except on specific medical advice – and even then, I would get a second opinion.

There is one other type of supplement that deserves a mention here: Multivitamins. It might be my imagination, but I have noticed an increase in drowsiness 15-30 minutes after consuming a dose, sometimes preceded by a short-term increase in alertness. I can only put this effect down to the product supplying some “urgent” need of the body, causing a short-term regenerative effect but increasing physical comfort and well-being not long afterwards – if it really exists at all.

Side-effects

You may be alert, but there are still consequences to not having an ideal amount of sleep. These side-effects are not dangerous unless perpetuated over the long-term without a recovery period – more on that in a little bit – but they are still worth noting. Always have some plan for compensating or protecting against these problems.

Health

This is a big-ticket item. Insufficient sleep is known to weaken the immune system, and being alert and active for longer periods than usual places additional demands on some of the bodily systems, depending on exactly what activities you pursue. You may require a slightly different diet, for example. Monitor your health closely, take extra precautions against colds and influenza, and be sensible about your health.

Memory

When tired, memory functions are diminished in clarity, in function, and in speed of recall. In other words, expect your memory to be a little more fuzzy, for you to be unable to remember some things, and for it to take longer to remember what you can recall.

Less obviously, this also affects recall of any events that transpire while your capacities are diminished by tiredness, even when attempting to recall them after sufficient sleep. It’s as though the mental filing clerks get sloppy at every aspect of their job, including filing new memories away.

Reasoning

It’s called “woolly thinking” for a reason. Your cognitive abilities are impacted by tiredness; thinking takes longer, and is more prone to error. Whenever thinking seriously about something, always build at least one reality check into the process if you are tired. And triple-check any decisions that will have a significant effect on your life if your capacities are in any way diminished. And don’t be surprised if you make some downright silly decisions.

Alertness & Reactions

Reactions will be slower and less precise, more prone to over- or under-reaction. This doesn’t matter too much if all you have to do is roll a dice, but can be dangerous if you’re driving.

This is equally true of emotional and psychological reactions, something that is often overlooked. That’s why humans tend to grow short-tempered when tired, but that is only the most overt response; all emotional reactions tend to be exaggerated. Laughter can be triggered over things that we normally would not find humorous, sadness and melancholy and depression are all also less controllable.

Any pre-existing psychological conditions may also be triggered more easily, amplified, or experienced for a longer duration.

Mistakes

All of this adds up to a greater propensity for making mistakes when tired. Every aspect of cognition is impaired to some degree, and that degree increases as you grow more tired. If you have to make major decisions in these conditions, make them early in the day when you are least-affected.

Dealing with, and preparing for, mistakes is at least as important an aspect of sleep management as any other.

Recovery

There is a big difference between successful sleep management and sleep deprivation. The goal of the first is to keep you functional on no more sleep than you need without causing the second.

Ultimately, there is no better cure for insufficient sleep than sleeping, and human beings are too variable for long-term sleep management without a safety valve.

The Quality of Sleep

How well you actually sleep at night has a major impact. Any sort of injury or health problem impacts directly on this element, entirely aside from the fact that we heal faster while sleeping than awake, simply because the body can devote more resources to the problem it is`trying to overcome.

I suffer from four long-term conditions, each of which impacts on the quality of sleep that I enjoy, and this is a major factor in my inability to get by on reduced sleep relative to my younger life. The degree of impact can be minor when only one of these conditions is ‘acting up’ to massive (when all four are causing trouble at the same time). The near-certainty is that one or more will be a factor on any given night.

What’s more, insufficient sleep and poor-quality sleep are aggravating factors in at least two of these problems. So one problem can trigger another the next day, which in turn impacts the quality of sleep the following night. The upshot is that I need one more sleep cycle now, most nights, compared to – say – a decade ago.

The limits of Endurance

Everyone has a different tolerance for sleep shortage. As far as I can determine, this capacity in the long-term has absolutely no relation to the short-term ability to function on less sleep.

No matter how carefully you manage your sleep, the combination of variables means that you will slowly erode your capacity, and eventually – usually without warning – you will reach your limits of endurance. All sorts of other factors impact on that capacity – everything from quality of sleep to stress to what you ate the day before.

When you reach that limit, no matter what you do, your body will override your desires and sleep. This might involve simply falling asleep, or it might involve sleeping through alarms. It can be almost impossible to wake someone up when they reach the point of exhaustion.

Plan your recovery

The sensible thing to do is therefore not to let things get to this point in the first place. Every two, three, or four weeks (depending on your personal capacities), designate one night when you will go to bed one cycle early and let yourself sleep until you awaken naturally. This WILL throw your body clock out of sync, so it’s best to make this a Friday night so that you can return to something approaching your normal schedule on the Sunday, ready for work the next week.

Slumberland

When I foreshadowed this article, in a sidebar within Bullet To The Point: The Secrets of Stylish Narrative Part 2, I ended with “You will be more creative, more productive, more healthy, and more happy if you get enough sleep.” This remains true, but no matter how necessary and beneficial sleep is, it remains “unproductive time”. Any reduction in that overhead for the maintenance of physical and mental health and efficiency yields big benefits in the amount of productive work that you get done. By a rough estimate, Sleep Management has given me more than a decade of extra productive time over the course of my lifetime – time spent, in part, on improving my work-life balance, and, in part on my campaigns and my craft as a GM.

Are you a better GM now than you were a decade ago? How much better would you be if you had been able to dedicate that decade almost exclusively to improving your skills and creativity?

Sleepland is a nice place to visit, but its not somewhere to linger any longer than necessary. Life, as they say, is too short.