For everyone that's intent on doing this, I've tried it before and it didn't work. I fly quite often between Honolulu and the East Coast to see family, and there's a six hour time difference. The jetlag is pretty terrible. Someone told me about this research and I tried it out very excited to finally have a way to avoid the jetlag, but it absolutely didn't work — at least, for me. Furthermore, not eating for 16 hours is not very enjoyable — arguably, it was less enjoyable than a couple days of jetlag.
I am planning to change my sleeping schedule tonight as it happens. I have just enough time to try this and see if it helps. I have changed my schedule before, so I will have past experience to compare it to. I will reply to myself tomorrow morning to let you know if it seems to help or not.
Be careful about this, I have personally had a (as in one) horrid experience, YMMV. (I've done this 3 times, and yes it works however I fasted for a full 16-17 hours.)
Back story: I irresponsibly slept for 2-3 weeks. Racking up a sleep debt of sometimes 4 hours per night. So by the time that I decided to reset my schedule I was about 24 hours+ in sleep debt. Needless to say I used this exact method, I didn't eat for 16 hours before, and I had to get up a 7 so I stopped eating around 3PM. This was a bad idea, I didn't have a very filling lunch, and after a while if you've done this before you note that not eating makes you very very very sleepy. I left work around 5:15. I fell asleep around 5:30, unfortunately I was still driving at the time. The car veered into the oncomming lane (it was empty) and went up the curb, on which was a small hill. I was still asleep when this happened, and then the car went up so far it couldn't sustain, and it flipped back into my lane (this happened at 40-50 MPH). Needless to say I awoke scared shitless as I was plummeting towards the ground and my airbags were deploying.
I escaped the accident with just some cuts on my hand from the shattered glass from the side windows. My car was totaled. The officer who came on site gave me a 200$ ticket. My father took me to the hospital, where I was given a CAT scan and everything checked out fine. However I had no way of getting to work. The car wasn't worth much it was an 11 year old Ford Escort Coup. Blue book value was around $4,000. The moral of the story is, be thankful for what you have, sleep responsibly and take care of yourself.
Don't worry about the car and the fine, I'm happy that the CAT scan showed no lasting damage and that in the end this is hopefully just a material thing, nothing affecting your health.
And please go a bit easier on your body, sleep deprivation is a great way to harm yourself permanently. Your body really needs that sleep and to push yourself past what is good for you is not something that you can equate with a 'couple of hours of sleep debt', it can harm you on a much longer timescale as well, even if you don't get into car accidents because of it.
Trust the Japanese salaryman on this: public transportation is not a panacea for avoiding accidents caused by drowsiness. You have to be able to get to the train station and from the train station to your house, all without killing yourself.
I have become a frequent face at a local hotel because I was so tired I did not trust myself to do that. (The project at issue is mostly done. Thank God.)
(Quick sidenote: Five minutes before checking into the hotel to avoid killing myself walking down the street, I was being paid time-and-a-half because my workplace apparently thought that my presence was adding value. Some of you people reading this will eventually be engineering managers. If you ever are, prior to ordering Heroic Efforts (TM), please consider whether you really want me working on a production system in that state.)
Oh yes. In terms of Bus Service. I live in the Greater Bridgeport/Hartford Area in CT. Buses are scarce, very scarce. There are stops but good luck finding a coherent schedule and good luck finding a way from the bus stop home. I'd take the bus every day to work if I could, I honestly dislike the commute drive, even though mine's pretty short and very scenic.
I am going to give it a try too; but we won't know if it has worked for 2 days. Tomorrow(Tuesday EST) you'll wake up and eat, and that is the trigger to alter your sleep schedule. If you wake up naturally the following day (Wednesday EST) you'll know it worked.
I waited till the second morning for this follow-up, as JeremyChase pointed out, one day wouldn't be much of a test of what was claimed. All I can say is that eating my largest meal yesterday soon after waking SEEMED to help stabilize my new sleep schedule easier than the change would normally occur. There was not enough difference to say it definitely did though.
If I have a full meal I barely can stay awake. I know that the body switches into a different mode to process the meal and extract the proteins etc and for this it drains me of other energy like focusing. It is interesting how my productivity increases with hunger. That's why lions sleep 20 hours a day. After a massive meal they can barely do anything but digest.
So I think mammals' first thing of the day is to go out and find food. Once food found and eaten there's no point to stay awake. I really think that a meal concludes the day not starts it in the animal world. Although providing the body with just enough to keep it fueled and in a way that it won't have to put you to sleep to extract the proteins we can make ourselves do more and take hunger & sleeping off our minds during the day.
To stay fresh just don't starve or over-eat yourselves. It works for me.
True. Some types of food will take a lot of work from the digestive system to be broken down before the body can use them as a source of energy.
That's why you put highly refined petrol into a car and not raw oil. It's choosing a musli bar over a burger...well almost.
A lion can eat and digest a large amount of calories and nutrition from a single meal. Apes have to forage for suitable and enough vegetables for a longer period of the day. I would rather infer humans natural digestion design from that of the apes.
I've flown back and forth Between Toronto and Amsterdam on a two week schedule for over two years. My take away lesson is this:
The body can adapt fairly easily to a longer day but it hates shortening days (and that's my body, so YMMV).
My trick to deal with jet-lag was very simple. Extend your day. Make sure you have plenty of low energy things to do but stay awake on the day that you travel.
Going 'west' makes your day 6 hours longer, going 'east' then makes your day 18 hours longer. 18 is pushing it a bit so I usually would go to bed around 10 in the evening and sleep for 9 hours instead of going to bed at 12 and sleeping for 7.
This simple trick seemed to work for me and I never suffered from jet lag after I started doing it, before it was absolute hell. It would take me roughly until the time that I was ready to leave again to acclimatize.
Fasting is considered to have some health benefits by many, so maybe you can kill two birds with one stone here. Though I guess 12 hour fasting would be too short to benefit.
The nice thing about melatonin is that it's not addictive. About three days, and the body finds its pattern. As the article mentioned, fasting during the correct times would work but that + a low dosage of melatonin 30 minutes before the desired bedtime would probably work even better.
Something important to note is that melatonin is not going to force you to sleep. You're not going to fall asleep staring at a computer screen if you take a dose of melatonin. It will make you sufficiently tired to sleep if you lie down and close your eyes for a bit, but it's not going to overcome the awareness-brainhack that is staring at bright light.
I accidentally noticed this a few years ago and have been waking up refreshed ever since (prior to this I was consistently groggy in the morning my whole life). I attempt to eat a large breakfast, a normal sized lunch, and then a light healthy snack in the evening if I must. Probably not for everyone but it's worked for me.
Not really, just the fact that I was eating later in the day. The hunch is that the energy being used to digest food while sleeping is now being used to re-energize my brain. I rarely need an alarm clock anymore.
Nice...I've been trying to wake up earlier and get on the same sleep schedule as hubby (I'm a night owl, he's a morning person, constant source of relationship tension). Maybe this will work...although since I don't work well when I'm famished, I'll have to wait until I have a free day to try it.
I never eat a breakfast. I usually eat my first meal after 12 closer to 2. I am now convinced I need to set up an easy breakfast the night before. Cause this night owl stuff just isn't working anymore.
Sounds familiar. I am naturally something of a night owl. I used to really dislike eating breakfast. I just didn't feel hungry in the morning and it seemed like too much hassle to prepare something. But now that I have actually started to have breakfast as part of my morning routine (I really had to force myself to begin with) I find that my energy levels during the morning are much improved and so is my concentration.
I'd recommend you try something that you don't have to chew too much to begin with. Like oat meal (lots of complex carbohydrates which is good for me because I do weight training). I buy boxes of compressed bricks of oats that come apart once soaked in milk for a while. two or three bricks in a bowl and I usually add a little protein powder (weight training again) and maybe a little extra sweetener (usually the protein powder is enough). Quick to eat and I'm not really big on chewy/crunchy stuff right after I get up, too much effort. :)
Seeing as I'm on a plane every few years I'll defiantly try this out.
On a side note, did anyone else find this amusing?
Here's a quick summary of Saper's research findings:
"For a small mammal, finding food on a daily basis is a critical mission. Even a few days of starvation, a common threat in natural environments, may result in death," the study said.
In my experience you'll wake several times in the night in bursts of energy (as a defense mechanism telling you to get food), they'll subside if you lay there for about 10 minutes and you'll cruise right back to sleep just from your body trying to conserve energy.
