The Earlier You Sleep, The Later You Fall Asleep

This would be the most illogical article one writes about: the earlier you sleep, the later you fall asleep. That is, if you sleep at 1am, perhaps you'd fall asleep immediately, but if you sleep at 11pm, you'd probably fall asleep after 2pm. What happened?

Ok, presumably, we have biological clocks. If you'd used to sleeping from 9pm and wakes up at 5am, that's your clock. However, if your sleeping schedule is, say, 1am to 9am, then that's another biological clock. Then, you're told you need to wake up early the next morning, so you decide to go to bed early. Unless special cases which makes you really fatigued, like above-normal hard-day (physical) work, or an intense use of brain that causes headache pushing you to sleep, changing of biological clock, earlier or later, would disrupt its rhythm. That causes you to fall asleep later than if you'd normally sleep at.

If you choose to sleep later, you'd start feelings your organs are burning as they start cleaning your bodies even when you're still awake, asking you to go to sleep. If you sleep early, your body tells you: "it's not the time to sleep yet, so wake up and do something until you're exhausted, then go to sleep." The latter, because your organs already started working, it causes you to stay awake even if you feel tired (illusionarily), and laying in bed won't immediately get you to sleep. You're already out of your "most easily feel asleep" period. As for early sleeping, your brain just can't stop thinking about stuffs (at least for normal people whom probably doesn't practice meditation or mindfulness). You tell your brain to stop? Stop kidding, it overwhelms you. The only thing you can do is to be an observer and watch it does its job for hours and hours until suddenly, no thought comes out anymore, which is then even if you force it, you can't think of anything, then you naturally go to sleep (perhaps about the time you go to sleep usually). However, with one caveat: because you sleep for such long hours when you're not feeling tired, your brain might tells you to wake up, which disturbs you again for longer time, until your body can't take it and exhausted only both brain and body feel asleep (perhaps later than when you usually feel asleep).

So what can you do in such times? To foster an environment that's getting you better sleep. For example, body-temperature showers before sleep, and sleep in cold environments (that get your blankets on). This ensures you can feel the "cold" in the surrounding, which helps you to fall asleep quickly. Though, make sure it's not freezing though, which would likely keeps you awake. And keep watch for temperature when you started sleeping: if it feels warm, and you usually put on your blankets to keep heats in (which gets hotter over time), it'll ensures you stay awake until you turn on the air-con, and opening the blanket letting cold air in to remove the excess heat. Generally, you don't have body contact (with/without thin shirt layer) on something that exchanges heat quickly, like metal (and perhaps wood), so as you sleep in a position for long, it traps so much heat that you'd want to change a position to sleep for a while, before it gets hot again. That's why you need a colder environment to remove the heat away, or your skin would be burning.

And sometimes, the first day of changing rhythm doesn't get you good sleep. It takes a few days to get used to it. Getting earlier/later to sleep is similar to changing time zones when you travel, especially transatlantic to countries having > 4 hours difference than your country, plus or minus. When you first arrive, you'd probably opt in to sleep at your previous country's time zone, perhaps start sleeping during 5am (local time) and wakes up at 2pm (local time) (which, for example, translate to maybe 10pm to 5am your previous country's time). So, don't worry if you can't get a single day of good sleep, but you'd give your best shot to slowly tune in to the local timezone, back to your 10-5 sleeping schedule.

In conclusion, sleeping earlier does causes you to fall asleep later, when it fluctuates your biological clock, as the title suggests. :)

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