[INTPenis]

Ever since I learned of sleep cycles, and how to measure my own, I've pretty much governed my life around them.

Each person has a cycle where they go between waking and resting state. The trick is to go to bed when you're headed into resting state. And if you wake up and can't go back to sleep, get up and do something for X number of minutes until you go back into resting state.

For me the cycle is about 45-50 minutes.

This also means that if you wake up naturally before your alarm that means you're in the waking state, so it doesn't matter how sleepy you might feel, just get up and get on with your day. Going back to sleep will waste 45*2 minutes at least.

[q7xvh97o2pDhNrh]

Can you share more about how you got accurate measurements on this?

I've got some moderately interesting graphs from my fitness tracker, and I'm broadly aware that my sleep cycle is not the "usual" 90 minutes that the standard-issue human gets. But I've had a lot of trouble refining the data to a useful point, let alone building a routine around it.

[INTPenis]

I did this at community college ~15 years ago. So I'm mostly improvising regarding my cycle being that long. I'd say it's around 60 minutes.

Specifics don't matter after a while because you build new habits and do them without thinking.

But the thing our teacher told us was to stay up until you get more and more tired, until you feel your eyelids wanting to close, but power through it and measure the time between the most tired and the most alert after that.

[IndySun]

The trick to going back to sleep is often, after waking too soon, to do something boring. A chore. Try it for 5-15 mins, go back to bed. Repeat if you're not nodding off. The thinking is, you'll prefer sleep to the boring chore.