Cherish Wake Up Calls

Harvard’s B.F. Skinner is one of the most influential psychologists of all time. It’s hard to find a corner of modern life his insights haven’t explored. An eccentric habit (recorded in a 1963 journal entry) reveals how he found extra hours in the day.

“I usually wake up for an hour or so during the night. I have a clipboard, paper pad and pencil (with a small flashlight attached to the board) for making notes at night. I am not an insomniac. I enjoy the nightly hour and make good use of it.”

“I make good use of the nightly hour.” Quite a contrast to how I normally treat waking in the night.

I’ve noticed that I often have trouble sleeping before a keynote or other large event. Inevitably, my mind is racing, usually trying to solve a tangential problem that, for whatever reason, has intruded upon my sleep to interrupt the precious pre-event rest hours.

This happened just before a recent keynote in Chicago. Ordinarily, I’d fight the intrusion by tossing and turning until I go back to sleep.

But instead of tossing and turning, I decided to “pull a Skinner” and treat it like a gift. I actually turned on a light, and wrote down my thoughts without too much filtering, or even processing. I started to go to sleep, when a few more thoughts came. Dutifully, I accepted the gift and wrote them down, too. In the morning light, I was delighted to discover that I had made a couple of significant advances on a problem that’s been puzzling me.

There’s a rich heritage of innovators who’ve leveraged their sleep to accomplish breakthroughs. And learning of Skinner’s regular habit, I couldn’t help but wonder how many inventive ideas must have been documented in his hypnogogic state — and how valuable the following morning must have found them — for this to have become a regular ritual that he enforced the rest of his life.

As Mason Currey describes in his delightful Daily Rituals, “By the time Skinner retired from his Harvard teaching post in 1974, that nightly hour of sleeplessness had become an integral part of his routine. His timer now rang four times a day: at midnight, 1:00 AM, 5:00 AM, and 7:00 AM, for one hour of nocturnal composition in addition to his usual two hours at dawn. He followed this routine seven days a week, holidays included, until only a few days before his death in 1990.”

Skinner clearly derived immense value from wake up calls, so much so that he started waking himself up! I’ve seen firsthand how making good use of such unwelcome interruptions is possible.

Instead of resenting them, try cherishing them.

Related: Seed Your Subconscious
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