the value of sleep
A couple of weeks ago, over one of my many lunches with my friend Mike here in Hong Kong, I complained to him about feeling tired and ineffective during daytime training. When I'm in Vancouver, it's a breeze for me to train twice a day; usually at noon for an hour, and then around 7pm for two hours. I have absolutely no trouble doing so and I rarely feel run down even after an extended period of this. In Hong Kong, I've been having trouble getting on this consistent schedule.
We went over possible theories as to why. He suggested food, but I don't feel I've been eating poorly. I considered possibly air quality -- I have had a persistent mucusy cough/congestion for close to a month now -- but well, everyone in this city has to deal with that.
My best guess is that when I'm in Vancouver, I sleep a lot and nap liberally. I'll sleep a full eight hours and night, and my naps are actually longer than the typical recommendation, as I often nap for as much as 90 minutes. Random Googling indicates that most pro athletes sleep a lot; many for as much as 10 hours a night. This link indicates the average "world class" athlete sleeps an average of 8.75 hours a day.
Being in Hong Kong, for all its virtues, is definitely rough on sleep. It is especially hard to get a full night's sleep here on a typical poker player (3am-11am) sleep schedule. Hong Kong is generally considered to be in the midst of a pretty solid housing bubble (over 50% increase in the last two years). With that comes a lot of construction and renovation, and with that comes a lot of construction and renovation noise. My morning wakeup call is often some sort of drilling or hammering in my building. Afternoon napping is prevented by jackhammers, and often, massive piledrivers. It's an endless parade of noise pollution.
The obvious response is to shift my sleep schedule to that of a normal person and try to fall asleep by midnight, but this has never worked for me. It would be highly beneficial, but throughout my life -- starting from my early teens -- I've never really been able to do it. When I came back to Hong Kong from the Aussie Millions, my first couple nights I was sound asleep by midnight, as that corresponds to 3 AM in Melbourne. But pretty quickly, midnight became 12:30, which became 1:00, which became 2:00, which became 3:00. And it's not really a function of being a poker player; I didn't become a night owl because I was a poker player, rather I think that I was suited to poker because I was a night owl. When I had a job at Stars that required me to be up at 8:00 AM, I asked my boss if I could start working the swing shifts because I just wasn't getting enough sleep. Him saying I had to work daytimes was a significant part of my decision to leave. I'm like the kid who never stopped pushing his bedtime forward, only I never managed to grow out of the phase.
So here I sit in Hong Kong, at my desk at 2:30 in the afternoon, waiting for a brief lull in the jackhammers and cranes so I can get in a mini-nap. At some point I will climb into bed and put on some classical music. If the music is on loud enough to drown out the noise, it's loud enough to prevent me from sleeping, so I usually set it to about the same level as the noise. The end result is that I am able to drift into semiconsciousness listening to Bach, Beethoven and Brahms punctuated by construction noise. The length of my nap could be 0 minutes on a bad day or 30 minutes on a good one. It depends when the piledrivers start up.