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Know your limits
(lemmy.dbzer0.com)
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this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2025
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I've been doing this for ages. I finally just started setting an alarm on my smartwatch and ran through a bunch of time trials to see what works.
I can nap somewhere comfy as long as I follow these rules:
If I just can't keep my eyes open or I have a food coma, 15m
If I know I'm sleep deprived, and all I have is lunchtime 45m
If I have a little more time to spare and i'm just dragging, 90m
I've tried 5m increments on either side of those numbers and found I could just wake up at 15,45 and 90 with no problem. At 30m or 60m, I appear to cancel the alarm but fall back asleep.
But I need to pass out right away. If it's going to take me 10m to get to sleep, I need to adjust for that.
My Biology teacher told us multiple times that you should sleep in time divisble by 90 minutes and nothing else. Need a nap, don't bother if you don't have 90 minutes. Going to sleep regularly, and have to get up at 7? Well if you go to bed at 10 you should set your alarm for 7. Go to bed at 1030, set your alarm for 530.
I can't remember if it was related to some biological thing she tried to teach us or was just an old wives tale she stood by, but I have followed it ever since. I always feel groggy if I awake at one of the off hours.
The idea is you want that full rem cycle. You're mildly paralyzed during it and waking out out of sync is a bad time
Average person's REM cycle varies. Time to sleep varies.
I just did a couple of months worth of nap testing and found when I could and couldn't get up. And unless the nap was so short that I was still in the state I was in when I passed out, I counted it a success.
interesting pattern observation. iirc, they roughly align with early sleep phase durations. Which would explain the difficulty waking up when you're off the usual times, as you're deeper asleep