You’re just butchering REM sleep at the end of your night. A sleep cycle takes about 1.5 hours for most people. If you wake up feeling like crap, it’s likely you’ve been woken up in the middle of the cycle. Even if you go back to sleep, you presumably start a new cycle and should properly wake up ~1.5 hours after that, which is in fact confirmed by your ‘optimal point’.
Typical eight hours of sleep is five cycles plus padding of thirty minutes either for those having trouble falling asleep or for a slightly longer cycle. You’d do better figuring out your cycle length and how long you need to fall asleep.
Clearly the cycle doesn’t restart every time I wake up, if it ends at the ~1.5hr mark (which by the way is quite fluid, sometimes as little as 30min, sometimes it doesn’t happen until 9am).
I have tried figuring out both cycle length and falling asleep time, but thanks to my raging ADHD I sleep quite restless (it’s frequent I wake up 2-3 times during the night), and need lots of time to fall asleep (and no, melatonin sadly didn’t help). So for me this trick works.
it’s frequent I wake up 2-3 times during the night
Did you ever notice the time between wakings? For me it’s three hours pretty much on the dot — i.e. I have a regular 1½-hour cycle, but prefer sleeping for two cycles minimum for some reason, and do the same with naps.
As for the cycle being restarted, REM is deep sleep, so you’re unlikely to get it if you’re woken up all the time.
It’s quite random, the time between wakings. If I go by smartwatch data it’s anywhere between 10 minutes and 4 hours. Consciously remembered ones, those are almost always 2 hours on the dot.
You’re just butchering REM sleep at the end of your night. A sleep cycle takes about 1.5 hours for most people. If you wake up feeling like crap, it’s likely you’ve been woken up in the middle of the cycle. Even if you go back to sleep, you presumably start a new cycle and should properly wake up ~1.5 hours after that, which is in fact confirmed by your ‘optimal point’.
Typical eight hours of sleep is five cycles plus padding of thirty minutes either for those having trouble falling asleep or for a slightly longer cycle. You’d do better figuring out your cycle length and how long you need to fall asleep.
Clearly the cycle doesn’t restart every time I wake up, if it ends at the ~1.5hr mark (which by the way is quite fluid, sometimes as little as 30min, sometimes it doesn’t happen until 9am).
I have tried figuring out both cycle length and falling asleep time, but thanks to my raging ADHD I sleep quite restless (it’s frequent I wake up 2-3 times during the night), and need lots of time to fall asleep (and no, melatonin sadly didn’t help). So for me this trick works.
Did you ever notice the time between wakings? For me it’s three hours pretty much on the dot — i.e. I have a regular 1½-hour cycle, but prefer sleeping for two cycles minimum for some reason, and do the same with naps.
As for the cycle being restarted, REM is deep sleep, so you’re unlikely to get it if you’re woken up all the time.
It’s quite random, the time between wakings. If I go by smartwatch data it’s anywhere between 10 minutes and 4 hours. Consciously remembered ones, those are almost always 2 hours on the dot.