Consistency is Key: How to Hack Your Sleep Schedule
By Madeline Wujek
Our physical, social, emotional, mental, and spiritual health are all at the mercy of one thing: sleep. Cortisol and melatonin affect our lives significantly. Mood, energy, productivity, food consumption, optimism, pessimism, and the way we interact with each other and with our surroundings are influenced by both hormone levels in our bodies. For the first decade of our life, we avoid sleep at all costs, fighting every forced nap with the age-old, “But I’m not tired!” Then one day, with absolutely no warning, we wake up and never say those words again. From that moment on, 8 is the magic, seemingly unachievable, number. Every day is a war against heavy eyelids, spending $3.50 on that morning coffee, holding an unsubstantiated hope that we can actually achieve prolonging that afternoon slump for just one more hour.
Like most college students, I fell victim to the vicious cycle of passion, production, and exhaustion. Opportunity is both the rose and the thorn of the university system– for many, it’s the first time in our lives that we really get to explore our passions and interests in a vacuum alongside other students who share the same desires. There is a multitude of resources at our disposal. It’s invigorating to finally feel at home and to finally feel heard.
But it is also exhausting. Finding something you’re so passionate about that keeps you up at night is a blessing and a curse. You’re passionate… but unsure of how to balance that passion with life. Giving it your all does not have to come at the cost of your mental or physical health. As a neuroscience student, I spend a LOT of time learning about the brain, and how biological processes impact our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Coincidentally, during my clinical psychology class this week we focused heavily on the importance of sleep; “It’s one of the most important things for us, but it’s the first thing we let go of,” as my professor noted. And she’s right—if I have a paper deadline coming up, or a test on the horizon, or an organization’s event to plan, my sleep schedule is the first thing I let go of… or at least it used to be until I learned about circadian rhythms and the cycle of the human body.
I am going to strongly emphasize one thing: consistency. Simply sleeping the recommended 7-8 hours is not enough. In order to get the best sleep, you need to sleep for the same 7-8 hours every night. Your body is regulated by an army of hormones, neurotransmitters, chemicals, and other biosynthetic compounds, but there are two specific hormones that play a crucial role in our understanding of the sleep/wake cycle: cortisol and melatonin. Cortisol is the primary stress hormone in our bodies, and it regulates our responses to all types of stress as well as other biological mechanisms, including sleep and wakefulness. Its release is triggered due to light exposure. Melatonin is a hormone produced by the pineal gland in the brain in response to darkness. These two hormones have evolved to work in a cycle; when the body is exposed to light, cortisol is released in a surge at the beginning of the day. After 12-14 hours, the body automatically starts releasing melatonin to get us ready for sleep as the day is coming to a close.
This repeats every day, and as the name suggests, our circadian rhythms operate at their smoothest when they’re consistent. It may seem fine if we’re up really late one night to just sleep in and get a total of 8 hours, but that actually throws our system off even more. Or, if we know we need to get up 3 hours earlier than usual and we try to go to bed 3 hours earlier than usual, it won’t work. We know this. We lay, and we toss, and we turn. And every once in a while it’s ok! Life gets in the way, things come up, and sleepless nights will occur as long as the world is turning—but we can do our best to minimize that.
The first thing I did when trying to fix my sleep schedule was identify the most consistent 8 hours I had in my schedule. This meant thinking about the latest I’m consistently going to bed and the earliest I’m consistently waking up. I work a late job once or twice a week, so I started there. On those nights, I go to sleep between 12am-1am, so I decided to go to sleep every night between those hours. I also work in a lab intermittently, and when I go in it’s usually between 8am-9am (I’m lucky enough to not have any early morning classes, so I don’t have to work around that). So for this past semester, I committed to going to sleep between 12am-1am and waking up between 8am-9am. If I was tired before 12, I’d read or make myself do something else until it was 12. If I didn’t have anything on my schedule until noon, I’d still get up at 8, even if that just meant laying in my bed awake for a while.
About once a week I’d break this rule, if I was out with friends or had an early lab day, but for the vast majority of this semester, I’ve followed this strictly, and I cannot emphasize enough how much this has transformed my life. I don’t hit the afternoon slump anymore, I sleep more soundly, I haven’t caught as many colds, my gut health has vastly improved, and I’m overall much happier on a day-to-day basis. In college, a lot of our socializing happens at night and a lot of our activities start early in the morning, so I’m not at all advocating for you to give up your life. My social and academic life has barely changed at all (other than my friends making fun of me for having a bedtime at age 22). I’m just more intentional about the hours that I sleep and the things I do when I’m awake, and I feel a million times better already. I hope you can find the same balance in consistency in your sleep schedule—it truly is a game-changer!
