Beating a Bad Habit

My whole life I've stayed up too late for no good reason.  Like, really late.  I tried many times to beat the bad habit but nothing worked. Then, two months ago, I made a new kind of self-control system and it has actually been working.

!!

Now I'm getting seven and a half hours of sleep a night.

Michele says this all sounds like an infomercial:  As seen on Facebook.  Not available in stores!  Operators are standing by.

I am trying to sell you something.  But not today.

The Problem

People stay up late for a lot of different reasons.

My reason wasn't having too much work, or lying in bed awake, but just wanting to do something stimulating.  Mostly I would play video games or read articles online; anything interesting would do it.

On a good night I would get to bed a little before midnight, and the kids would wake me up at seven.  A bad but not record-breakingly bad night would have me down at two and back up with the kids at six thirty.  Those were painful.  The average night was somewhere in the middle.

Most of the time I'd think I was OK on six hours sleep.

But in moments of clarity, I knew it was a problem.  I could tell I wasn't getting enough sleep because I never woke up on my own, and because I fell asleep so quickly.  Most of all, those four-hour-nights would leave me wrecked and ineffective, sleepwalking through the day.

I tried to fix it and failed, and failed, and failed.  Simply resolving to go to bed at a reasonable time did nothing.  For a while, Michele was in the habit of calling me to bed around eleven o'clock.  For a while after that, I had a calendar reminder that would tell me to go to bed, which after a week I learned to ignore.

Now, some of you have "will power" which lets you, in the moment of weakness, simply defeat the weakness.  Good for you!  This article is for the rest of us.

Good Intentions Are Not Enough

My management philosophy says you can't improve what you don't measure.  So I started tracking my sleep using the Jawbone UP band.

At first, the Hawthorne Effect kicked in — simply seeing my sleep each day was enough to encourage me to get to bed at a reasonable hour.  During the first two weeks with the UP, I averaged seven and a half hours a night.  But four weeks later, I was backsliding and was back down to only a bit over six.  Ugh.

One tired desperate morning, I realized that I was doing a better job of controlling my kids than myself.  Then it hit me.  Why not treat myself, at least my late-night self, like a child?  Why not impose Parental Controls?

Both Windows and Macs have Parental Control features allowing parents to set time limits.  So I set up a new "Parent" account, and locked it up so that I couldn't get the password at night.  How?  I'll explain in a bit.

Treating myself as a child seemed a bit extreme, but the problem was dire and simply resolving to try harder was going to get me exactly nowhere.  I had already done that!

Do you know the story of Odysseus and the Sirens?  Odysseus and his crew were approaching the Sirens, whose singing was so beautiful that sailors, enchanted, would jump off their ships and swim to their death trying to get closer.

Odysseus wanted to hear the Sirens song without dying.  So he instructed his crew to lash him to the mast, block up their ears with wax, and ignore anything he might say or do until they sailed well past the Sirens.

The wily Odysseus knew that he was no match for temptation!  And prepared himself accordingly.

Ulysses and the Sirens, 1891. John Williams WATERHOUSE. National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. Purchased, 1891 © Public Domain

The System: Superego

Sorry, Freud.

I wrote a bunch of software, called Superego.  Superego adjusts my Computer Curfew as necessary so that I get seven and a half hours of sleep.  At the Computer Curfew time, my browser shuts down and my games shut down.  With my interests and habits, that's enough to get me to trudge to bed.  (You might need a different system entirely, and I'd be happy to help you build it.)


The Computer Curfew time adjusts based on how much sleep I've been getting lately.  The goal is seven and a half hours; if I'm falling twenty minutes short, the curfew gets twenty minutes earlier that day.  Conversely, if I'm getting more than enough sleep, the curfew gets later.  For example, lately I've been getting seven hours forty-five minutes sleep, fifteen minutes over the goal; so tonight's curfew is fifteen minutes later than yesterday's.

The beauty of a flexible curfew is that it spared me the need to decide on an arbitrary curfew.  If I had chosen, say, 10pm, then I might be tempted to adjust it based on circumstances, thinking "it's a weekend, so I can stay up late" or "I've been getting a lot of sleep lately, it's OK".  If adjustments were permitted, I would no doubt have made some very poor adjustment decisions, and I would have ended up backsliding.

This system permits no discretion, yet does adjust to changes in the only circumstance that actually matters — how much sleep I've been getting.

All I care about, after all, is that I get enough sleep.

Breaking the System

My thinking went like this: I know myself, I know what my mindset is like when it's 11pm and I want to stay up another 3 hours.  So why not design a system that simply prevents me doing the things that I like to do at that time?



The next step was pretty radical.  I set a formula for "curfew time" based on how much sleep I was getting lately, and programmed my computer to kick me out of my favorite time wasting programs after curfew time.

An Example Day

• Wake up, hit the button on my Jawbone so it knows.
• Whoa, I got eight hours and seven minutes of sleep last night.
• Tonight's curfew is 10:40pm, OK.
• Do my life all day.
• Around 10:30, if I'm not already off the computer, I get off the computer, because I know it's gonna shut down on me anyway.
• Lay in bed, hit the button on the Jawbone, conk out.

See For Yourself

My Superego system is actually public and on the web.  It's not very pretty yet — I'm the only user and I'm just adding stuff as needed.  But my Mom is reading this, so, excuse us a moment — hey Mom, you can check on this anytime and see how I'm doing: http://superego.herokuapp.com.



Step 1. Track sleep.  [Check it out!](http://superego.herokuapp.com/)
Step 2. Computer curfew.

Step 1 FAQ
* How do you track sleep?
* What if you forget to hit the button?
* Are you tracking actual sleep or just time in bed?

Step 2 FAQ
* How does the curfew work?
* Can't you just circumvent the system?
* But don't you need your root password sometimes?
* I stay up late watching TV.  How does this help me?
* Can't you just stay up late doing something else?

General FAQ
* How does it feel?

** Here's Why It Works **

Superego

"You really do need a system"  —Leonard Shelby, Memento

My whole life I've stayed up too late for no good reason, like, really late. I tried many times to beat the bad habit, but nothing worked.  I was getting an average of six hours sleep a night, sometimes as little as four.

Then, two months ago, after yet another late night and hideously bad morning, I got desperate.  I made a new kind of self-control system directly aimed at breaking my late-night routine.

The system is called Superego, and it works like this:

A) Superego sets the day's Computer Curfew time based on how much sleep I've been getting lately.

B) At Computer Curfew time, Superego automatically shuts off web browsing and games until 6am the next morning.

C) I wear the nice-looking Jawbone UP band to track my sleep.

That's it!  Now I'm getting seven and a half hours of sleep a night.

Can't you just stay up late watching TV or reading instead?

TV and reading are not my poison of choice; for me, reading is a good way to fall asleep, and TV is torture.

This would never work for me, my sleep problems are different.

Everyone's situation and problems are different, no doubt.  Shoot me a note and maybe we can figure out a system that would work for you.  I love doing this kind of self-improvement stuff.

Why so much nonsense, why don't you just go to sleep?

Ha!  If you are one of those "willpower" people who can just decide to do something and then actually do it, good for you.  You're probably really attractive and well-read too, with a stylish wardrobe and lots of friends.  Why are you here, just to make fun of us?

Can't you just work around Superego by using your computer's administrator password?

Yep. That's why I've hidden my administrator password in places that are hard for me to get to at night.  I made up a new hard-to-remember password and printed out 5 copies of it.  I didn't put it anywhere online because that would make it too easy for me to get in a late-night moment of weakness.  I put one copy of the password in the cellar, another in Michele's nightstand, two others in the kids' piggy banks, and another at work.  So they're easy enough to get if I need it during the day, but at night, that's enough hassle that before I break a piggy bank, I'll give up and just go to sleep.

Most importantly, if the system somehow breaks and I get the password late at night, then I'll change it to something harder to remember, and hide it in an even further-away place.  My nighttime self has learned to respect the determination of my daytime self.

A few weeks ago, I realized that I have, in fact, memorized my administrator password — in the course of software development, you do have to type the admin password a lot — but rather than change it right away, my agreement with myself is that if I ever abuse the password to stay up late, then I'll change the password to something longer and harder to remember.

How is the Computer Curfew time set?

Superego knows I'm trying to get seven and a half hours sleep each night, and adjusts the curfew accordingly if recent sleep has been more or less than that target.  If, for example, lately I've been getting seven hours sleep, then it adjusts my Computer Curfew to be a half-hour earlier than the day before.  Usually the curfew adjustments are smaller than that, unless the kids kept me up all night, or I'm permitted to sleep in.

I have more questions!

Please ask away!  I'll add the common ones to this article.

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