I gotta say, I've become a huge fan of personal challenges. Just finished my 14 day SLEEP challenge yesterday. For 14 days, my goal was to get at least 7.5 hours of sleep for five nights each week by going to bed by 10:30pm as often as I could.
Our journal entry on Day 6 of the challenge:
It seems that we have discovered the secret to amazing and productive days: SLEEP!!
That first weekend, we went to bed each night by 10pm and found ourselves waking up gloriously on our own with no alarms. Ironically though, the more sleep we get and rested we were, the harder it's been to go to bed by our self-imposed 10:30pm "rule". But with this as my priority, I managed to get 7.5+ hours of sleep for all but three days over the last 14 days. And 13 out of 14 days logged 7+ hours (the obvious outlier was last Thursday night's Chateau Margaux wine tasting, where we got home at around 2am and had to painfully wake up early for our Korean class... There is an urban legend at Samsung that if you go into work hung over, you can go to the Samsung clinic and ask for an IV for your "headache". Tyler was about to check it out, but then got called into meetings all day. That's certainly a blog post waiting to happen...)
If I were to ever write a book on happiness and purpose, making sure you meet your basic needs of sleep, water, and nutrition would be the first chapter. It sounds so obvious and silly, but I can't believe how good we've been feeling with good night's sleep!
Of course, sometimes it's easier said than done. For the first two and a half weeks living in our new apartment, we had been sleeping on a mat of the floor... basically until I found out that Tyler's colleagues thought this was super weird. It seems like the conversations have gone basically like this:
Colleague: Hey man, how was your weekend?
Tyler: Good, getting the apartment all set up.
Colleague: Oh yea? What's left to do?
Tyler: A lot... we still need to get a couch and a bed.
Colleague: A bed?! What have you been sleeping on?
Tyler: Oh, a mat on the floor.
Colleague: [Incredulous look]
Tyler: Yea, my wife wanted to sleep like traditional Koreans.
Colleague: [Long pause. Confused look, can't tell whether Tyler is joking or not]
Tyler: And we're excited about the heated floors.
Colleague: [Still confused look; seriously, is this a joke or not?]
Tyler: And it's supposed to be good for your back...
Colleague: Um, yea -- well, I should go. Take care!!
The plan was to try this out for a month. I liked the minimalist look and feel, and planned to set up the room a bit Korean/Japanese style with bonsai trees and Asian artwork. But the truth is, after half that time, the real bed in the guest room proved too alluring. At least now we're making use of each room in the apartment!
It's also hard because Tyler and I don't have naturally similar sleep cycles. I love waking up early, and he likes going to bed late. It's especially hard since he now has Korean class from 7-9pm three nights a week, so by the time he comes home and I'm done with work calls, it's technically time to go to sleep but we're both so wired and chatty.
Determined that I'd get at least seven hours on my last night of the challenge, I proceed to go to bed anyway. Tyler quickly finds a replacement. Siri. I can hear him in the living room asking her all sorts of questions into the night:
- When will it start snowing in Seoul?
- Who's the best player in the NFL?
- How many calories are there in kim chi?
This is going to take a while.
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