How To Sleep Less: Altering Sleep Habits To Increase Productivity and Prevent Night Terrors

There’s just not enough hours in the day.

Sound familiar?

If you’ve never used this commonly-quoted phrase yourself it could be said with a fair amount of certainty that you’ve heard somebody else utter these very words several times over your lifetime.

There are many methods you can try to increase your productivity. This article will only concentrate on one: experimenting with the amount of sleep you need each night.

Through writing the first draft of this article I realised it would be impossible to write an article about sleep with a hundred percent honesty without mentioning my experience with night terrors – especially as I’ve found a way to, on the most part, overcome them.

You don’t have to search for long on the internet to discover sleep habits and suggestions packaged as ‘facts’.

I do not want this post to become one of these resources, but I am aware it could easily become so.

So at this point I’m issuing a disclaimer simply stating that the contents in this post describe my own personal experience with sleep, along with different sleep habits and trials that have worked for me. This does not mean they will work for everybody and I am not suggesting such a fact.

Preventing Night Terrors

As a young child I often found it difficult to sleep at night, sometimes being unable to sleep the entire night, which created a night of anger, self pity and general bad feelings for myself, and to an extent my parents who would be kept awake by my tossing and turning.

From teenage-hood onwards I never had trouble sleeping up until two years ago when I started having night terrors.

Night terrors are about as much fun as they sound.

You can read the Wikipedia article here, but a simplified description of a night terror would illustrate it as a kind of awake unconsciousness.

You are half awake, half asleep (in the mist of slow-wave sleep). They don’t last long, 10-15 minutes, and they always occur within the first half an hour of you falling asleep. Once you’ve had one that night you will not (in all my cases, at least) have another one that night.

I’ve become so used to night terrors now that whenever I realise I’m experiencing one I physically conduct myself, through my half-concious body, to shake myself partially awake.

Once I am almost fully awake I usually reach for my mobile phone or other light source and shine the light into my eyes until I am fully awake.

Thankfully, I quickly discovered that my night terrors are bought about by something I can, for the most part, control; outside noise.

It was easy to link falling asleep listening to music as a trigger for a night terror, so I cut it out.

Of the times since then that I’ve given into the temptation and put on some tracks to sooth me to sleep I’ve more often than not been punished with a nice-short-terror.

Outside noise made by other people was slightly more difficult to eliminate.

It soon became apparent that I couldn’t have any windows open when I slept – even in summer. The last three summers have created some impressive sauna moments through the nights.

Again, the few times I have broken this rule I was punished.

Everybody’s different, but if you find yourself starting to have night terrors, be sure to realise that as with everything, once you get used to them (and are therefore experienced in them) they will become less of a terror and more of a simple nuisance.

When I first started having them, back when I didn’t know the triggers, I was having them every night. I was genuinely terrified to go to bed. Now however, I have one every couple of weeks, and they’re less of an issue.

I can control it.

How do I prevent night terrors? I remove all outside noise within my control before I go to sleep. Why does this work? It works because my night terrors are triggered by noise. Either the sound of music in my ears as I drift off to sleep, or the sound of cars driving by outside my open window, any noise I pick up while in a light sleep (slow-wave sleep) could trigger a night terror.

Sleeping Less To Increase Productivity

Night terrors aside, sleeping less is a good way to increase your productivity if it is done slowly with a heightened awareness of the affect it is having on your body.

Up until six months ago I would consider anything less than eight hours of sleep a night as inadequate – the next day I would be very aware that I didn’t get in my eight hours.

I know through speaking with friends and relatives, as well as through online research that not only is this the norm, for many people this number is upped to 9, nine and a half, and sometimes even 10 hours a night.

Now I average 6 hours a night, though this often drops to five and a half and below. It very rarely exceeds 7.

This, as it is, is unsustainable.

The key, I have found, to getting more out of my short hours of sleep is to evoke a higher quality of sleep, in the absence of a higher quantity of sleep.

This is the difference between a deep sleep and a light sleep, which directly links to night terrors. If you can evoke deep sleep more often then night terrors will all but vanish from your vocabulary.

Whenever possible I listen to relaxing music in bed for 10-15 minutes before going to sleep.

Classical music work best, but anything you can relax to will do. I listen to it sitting up so I don’t drift off while it’s on (or I’ll be punished, remember).

The exercise works because during these ten to fifteen minutes of listening to relaxing music your brain sorts out your day, filing away every little piece of information that it picked up and linking it with future events to come.

Why does this help you sleep? Simple. If your brain sorts everything out before you go to sleep, once the relaxing music is over you fall asleep as soon as your head hits the pillow. What would normally take place once you lay down to go to sleep has just been undertaken prior to going to bed.

Your brain can now relax rather than keep you awake thinking, thus you go into a deep sleep quicker, rather than the more practical light sleep your brain prefers while working out the maths.

Last night I stayed up until 4am writing the first draft of this article.

When it came to going to bed, I was so exhausted that the last thing I wanted to do was to sit up for ten minutes listening to relaxing music before being allowed to sleep. However, I decided if I couldn’t do it then – the night that I’d stayed up for hours writing an article about that very matter – I’d never find the willpower to do it.

So I sat up in bed and started playing Spring by Vivaldi on my iPod (occasionally I listen to Autumn, but I’ve stuck with Spring for so long now that I respond to it better).

Once over, I laid down, went to sleep, and woke up six hours later feeling the most refreshed I’d felt all week.

Whether you choose to try it, or even believe it, or not doesn’t matter. This method works very well for me. Whether it will work for you is a different matter, but I encourage you to give it a go, just to see.

How do I sleep less to increase productivity? I sit up and listen to relaxing music for 10-15 minutes before going to bed, then sleep six hours a night. Why does this work? It works because during this time your brain sorts out your day, filing away every little piece of information that it picked up and linking it with future events to come – an activity that would otherwise take place when you rest your head on the pillow. When you go to sleep after the exercise, you will go into a deep sleep much quicker and you’re more likely to sleep through – giving you what is commonly called ‘a good nights sleep’. When you realise it’s not a high quantity of sleep but a high quality that you need, you will be able to free up more time during the day to work productively within.

How many hours of sleep do you get on an average night? Do you want to increase or decrease this number?

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