Hmmm. I think this is probably true for a lot of people, but not for me!
While I don’t have direct, conscious control of when exactly I fall asleep, in my experience, it’s felt like I have much more control over that than when I get up!
My father actually suggested setting a dedicated wake-up time in order to force bedtime a long time ago. I have tried it now and then–including Steve Pavlina’s exercise of “practicing” getting up when the alarm goes off over and over. Nope.
When I wake up feeling like I haven’t gotten nearly enough sleep, I often have a strong fear that if I don’t go back to sleep, the rest of the day is going to be crap. Sometimes that is a justified fear. I am not rational enough when I wake up to prioritize an long term goal over the anticipated pain.
Urgent things and some social obligations can “force” me to get up earlier, but unless I also make a systematic effort to sleep earlier, I just end up chronically sleep deprived. This is partly because being sleep deprived greatly diminishes my ability to make good decisions, like making arrangements to go to sleep earlier. So earlier wake up does not force earlier sleep for me.
Anyway, all this is only ancillary to the discussion–I have trouble getting up, but unlike @bee I don’t have trouble getting enough sleep if left alone.
This is what I ended up doing with my bedtime goal. I used a technique called “pre-mortem” analysis to come up with the primary impactful factors, which for me were:
Getting distracted by endless “time-waster” activities, primarily reddit and internet browsing
Staying out too late with friends for too many days in a row.
I’ve basically set up my habits using a tally marker to make it as easy as possible to follow my “get to bed by HOUR” goal. Right now I’m emphasizing making it a success spiral, so it only gets upped in difficulty each week. It’s not a quantitative measure, so it’s either I get a point or I don’t.
what about getting get-up time from sleep as android directly?
I think getting the how much i sleep time is not bad but there is to count also oversleeping and sleep as android is not so good about taking account of oversleeping, it say after some days the hour of sleep you need to recover and you can recover it in one oversleep session (like if you didn’t sleep 3 hour, the previous day, if the day after you sleep instead of 6hours/9hours you could for the app recover your not sleep time) but it will not going to work for all people, if you are not doing it a bit every night or just turn to sleep your 6/7/8 hours can help better.
so i think actually the best thing is getting always to bed to a set hour and get up to a set hour every day, developing such habit, i think is much better than just get how much hour you sleep.
Any kind of iPhone app integration? You guys always make all the fun stuff for the Android phone! I bought one a couple of years ago to work with TagTime but then I had to give it to someone. I may just have to get a new one…
To add a thought that hasn’t really been addressed here, it’s commonly acknowledged that phone/computer screens too close to bed are a Bad Thing. So as someone who wants to Beemind going to bed early(-ier) (previousattempts, have just un-archived the latter), how do I actually deal with submitting the data points without shining nasty LCD blue lights into my eyes?
Other than “just use the app anyway”, the obvious solution is “submit data for the previous night in the morning”. Have many people tried this? Does it cause problems with weaseliness? What about eep notifications? It seems like you’d be a day out of sync with everything. Is there some Terrifyingly Advanced setting to work around this?
The optimal solution, as is very often the case, is autodata, or one of those physical do button things. Does anyone have suggestions in that vein too?
@dutchie I’ve done both of these things. My Garmin Vivosmart (with a little OLED display) lets me mark down “going to bed now”. I have used that the next morning to enter in the time.
I did not have weasel problems, but that’s a “your brain” thing. You can enter in data for the previous day, but I don’t ride the edge of the road, so you might lose out on a day of road. Not sure.
When I want to minimize blue light exposure, I wear orange-tinted safety goggles up till bedtime. I find it easier than installing fl.ux and the like on all my devices. I haven’t measured if it’s actually more effective, but a pair is less than $10.
Downside: you might look like a huge dork. But whatever.
Once I have the glasses on, I just use the app anyway.
(Credit: this was suggested by Will Eden on the OBLW NYC mailing list four years ago or something. Posting this is a reminder to follow up with him to see if he still does this.)
If you happen to be an early riser, you could set the goal deadline to be as late as possible on the previous day (currently 6am). That might help jolt you out of bed, in order to enter the datapoint!
I have a lingering suspicion that some people would prefer different cut-offs on account of their habitual wake-sleep patterns, but it’s presently universal. As always, agitate for change if it doesn’t suit you.
I just want to plug that if someone wants to automatically beemind sleep time, I just added this option to beemind.me
It works well with Sleep as Android and probably other apps that sync with google fit platform.
For the moment, I aim to be up before 7:15. This may change in the near future when I get a gym membership sorted out and start going in the early mornings. So I’ll stash this tip away maybe to try then. Now, though, it’s currently working out that I submit a point at 10:25 as I’m going to bed, which works pretty well.
@olimay Yellow glasses do work against the blue light. [1]
Personally I use an app called Twilight on the phone and Redshift on my PC (but I know there are other alternatives depending on platform), that tints the screen towards red based on location on earth and time of day. It feels like it works quite well, at least I fall asleep much faster now than I used to.
Not a Beeminder solution, but a new app called SleepTown is helping the last few days to cut down on mobile use at late hours (and effectively resulting that I end up sleeping earlier instead of endlessly browsing the internet)
I know this is years old, but it’s nice to know I’m not the only one like this. No one else seems to get that being tired makes it HARDER to go to bed early.
I’ve tried the “focus on wake up time” strategy several times, and it is indeed the wake up time that slips - eventually after enough days of going to bed at 2 and forcing myself to wake up at 7, I end up being way too exhausted to go to bed early, so I go bed at 2 again, and then in the morning, I just physically cannot get up and end up sleeping in.
I know this is an old thread, but since people are reading and liking my earlier posts, I thought I’d update with my thoughts years and years later.
I ran a bedtime goal experiment for this term, and it actually went really well. The hardest part goal-wise was determining what a reasonable bedtime would be, given all my other commitments, most of which I have flexibility in determining. I didn’t track “in bed and asleep”, instead tracking some kind of “best effort to set up for bed”. There were a lot of nights I was in bed, but then got back up due to discomfort of something or another and only really really got to sleep two hours after. But I think that metric was the correct one to track, since I’m really trying to adhere to a series of actions that tend to lead to an outcome, rather than force an outcome.
Since I’ve whitelisted Beeminder to give me notifications even when in bedtime mode, the zeno reminders actually helped hurry me along.
Here’s what actually made it work this time — and I think what actually makes almost any goal work: there was a long lead-up period thinking and experimenting with things that actually allowed a particular set bedtime to be feasible. A lot of the stuff was logistical, i.e. how I arranged the rest of my activities, and that included some of my other Beeminder goals. A lot of it was medical, and a lot of it was figuring out a good sequence of steps to take.
I’m specifically not going into what stuff worked here, since my situation is weird and I’m continually improving my practices — maybe if I get around to starting a journal on the forum, I will. But I think a fair summary is that beeminding bedtime didn’t work for me in the past because the problem wasn’t just akrasia — it was a lot of other stuff! Once I made enough progress, Beeminder was fully sufficient to help nudge me through the critical, but really rather limited-in-scope akrasia part.
