Next Saturday, on the 4th of June, it will be exactly four months since I started a new intense sleep regime - a guarantee of eight hours a day, from 7pm to 3am (or 3.30am).
Let me be clear about this: I'm the kind of hard-working GCSE student who probably puts far more importance on school than it's worth, and frequently takes an overload of work on top of said schoolwork. I regularly volunteer in extracurricular clubs, chair the local youth parliament and I readily take up the challenge of a few extra exams here and there.
I can usually bear this amount of workload: I take pride in never having had too much of a social life and not having crazy, overblown addictions to time-consuming activities like gaming and foruming. Before February, however, when the homework load began to increase as we steadily approached the exam season, I was finding it more and more challenging to sleep a good number of hours each night. I typically went to bed at midnight to wake up at 6 AM the subsequent morning - with stuff still to do for school before I could let myself leave the house at 7.40am. I couldn't survive a schoolday without four cups of tea, which also partially nibbled into the mere six hours of sleep which I could afford each night. Being lethargic from a whole day at school, I found myself more and more frequently doing homework more and more slowly, and leaving it more and more to the last-minute or to the next morning.
I eventually fell behind homework in many subjects, and found myself with more, and more, and more to do every morning. 6am starts became 5.30am starts; 5.30am starts then became 5am starts. Exhausted, I returned home one night, on the 4th of February, and fell to my pillow the moment I came home. That would be the first night of sleeping from early in the evening to early in the morning. I have continued this sleep regime ever since.
What are the benefits, then, of my 7pm to 3am sleeping times? Asides from the fact that I'm able to guarantee myself eight hours each night, there are a lot further hidden benefits I've found.
After a long school day, I used to come home without any will to work - so I tended to do more homework more slowly, meaning that a 30-min homework could take anything between 45 mins and two hours. Now, though, by leaving most of my homework until 3am in the morning, when I'm freshly-awake and not exhausted after a whole day at school, I'm doing homeworks quicker and also better. The time constraint of knowing I have to be out of the door in just four hours' time also helps this.
Additionally, the sleep schedule means I have a set amount of time I know I can allow myself to dedicate to playfulness and idleness - from when I get home to 7pm. By compartmentalising my time in this way, it's become much easier to ensure that I don't waste time: I simply allow myself to waste those precious few hours in which I know I'm too tired from the school day to do anything else, and thanks to my sleep regime, it's easier to separate the idle time in the afternoon from the active time in the early morning and to avoid crossovers between the two.
The final benefit - which I think is crucial - is found in the first few lessons of the morning. The usual victim of my old sleeping regime used to be any lesson that fell between 8.30 and 11.00; after all, it's a well-known fact that the schoolboy's brain is not wholly-awake until 10am in the morning. By having an earlier start, my brain changed these times and I can now concentrate just as well during a 13.00 lesson as I can in a 09.30 lesson - meaning more focus in school and less dozing, whilst at the same time using those extra hours in the morning to do the homeworks that I can afford not to concentrate on as much as a school lesson necessitates.
Quite importantly, I also don't feel any more tired at the end of the day than I used to, which would offset this benefit. This is because the change in sleeping times has meant that I'm now eating more which keeps me more sustained during the day: whereas I used to eat at breakfast, midday and dinner, now I need an additional 'early-lunch' at 7am after my 3.30am breakfast because I'm hungry from my first few hours awake. As a result, I'm eating more (which is good, considering I'm clinically-underweight) and so there have been no adverse impacts at the end of the schoolday to offset this benefit of heightened first-lesson concentration.
And of course, it is needless to say that the truly spectacular rousing music of birdsong at 4am in the morning, coupled with the awesome thrill of watching Dawn slowly ascend from her throne at 5.15am, has given me a refreshed reconciliation and closeness with nature that - having lived in London all my life - I had never before been able to experience.
With it being four months since I started my sleep regime, my grades have gone up considerably in school, and I'm finding myself better prepared and more rested for the exam season which we're now in the swing of. There have been no more homework detentions and no more abrupt 'Southwesten, wake up!' calls since February.
The only downsides, as far as I can see, are that I can no longer permit myself to have my habitual afternoon tea for the fear of staying awake, and that I have to watch my favourite TV shows on iPlayer post-broadcast. True, the late-night parties have had to stop of late and it's annoying to be woken up by a call at 7.30pm from a friend who needs homework help or who wants to invite me round for dinner - but the calmness and serenity of the early start work so well with the frantic business of the school day to provide a truly balanced equilibrium of noise and commitments in my life. The early start makes my day begin in a relaxing, natural and precious peace that preps me for whatever may come later in the day.
My recommendation, therefore, to the sleepyhead students worried about the long-term impacts of their late-night, caffeine-induced insomnia and their dozing off in lessons is this: consider this proposition seriously. It's not for everyone and many take comfort in knowing that life around them happens only when they're awake and never when they're sleeping, but it could be worth a week's trial.
For me, the net benefits of a 3am start have been conclusively proven to outweigh the net disadvantages of a later 7am start.