Z4: Second 'short night'

Having had one short night and then -to be honest- survived the day after, I wondered how difficult it would be to repeat the feat. Would it be much harder to do two nights in a row, or would I start adapting already?

Not surprisingly, by midnight I was already tired, but from previous experience I do become more wakeful at those hours. I also had a later-than-usual cup of coffee at 20:00.

This time, I thought I'd try to actually be productive and do something work-related. To get into the groove, I started by writing two more entries for this blog. Once I was done with that, I spent over an hour reading up on a specific research topic that I would need on Friday morning for a meeting. Read introductory material from emails, then some summaries from OMIM and PubMed, skimmed a relevant paper. With some background info, I went ahead and studied the relevant genomic locus at the UCSC browser and in Gestalt (my genome analysis software), searched online databases for additional relevant information. Being much better informed, I sent a quick email answering a question from a collaborator... at 2:10 am.

At that point I was very pleased with having had the opportunity to study the topic ahead of the morning meeting. I was also much more tired, presumably at least in part due to having done a more intellectual effort. So I called it a night, and after winding down, I went to sleep at 2:35 am, earlier than intended. I reckoned there might be the extra benefit of going to sleep right after having studied the topic at hand.

So I wore the Zeo again and, since I was turning in 25 minutes earlier than intended, I decided to try the feature of the Zeo that is supposed to wake me up at the optimal point before the set alarm time. According to the Zeo, I again fell asleep in 8 minutes. I had various dreams, and was woken up by the Zeo's alarm. I turned it off, and before I could anything else... my regular alarm went off as well, meaning the Zeo woke me up at 6:30, not at the optimal time before it.

This time I was less surprised to see that it had failed again, though not less disappointed. Again, it had stopped recording after exactly one hour, and the recording indicated largely only light sleep.

As I was preparing the coffee around 8:30 in the office, the Sun was shining, so I spent a couple of minutes facing the sunshine. Very invigorating, of course. The day passed in meeting after meeting... but my wakefulness was much improved as compared to the previous day. Whether that was due to the sunlight boost or to incipient adaptation, I can't tell.