Compared to articles on sites that Lifehacker that boast claims like "10 Ways to Perfect Your Sleep Cycle!"; I really love the honesty of articles written like this with the perspective of "it worked for me; I'd recommend it, but your mileage may vary".
Are you comparing the amount of attention cats need with the amount children need (particularly infants & toddlers)? You are so going to have a wakeup call one day :)
I trained my ex-cat. I'd get up when I damned well felt like it.
My ex-girlfriend at the time, would get up to feed cats.
So he'd bug her on the mornings she was in, and snuggle up with me on the mornings she wasn't.
Same cat learned not to beg at the dinner table for food. Even when sushi was being served. And yes, he loved salmon. Begging resulted in treats -- of wasabi applied to the nose.
He learned after the 2nd time.
TL;DR: with a sufficiently trainable cat, this doesn't work.
Ditto. I can't believe this isn't the top reply. Three and a half years post-fatherhood, I don't even remember what it feels like to sleep late. I've gotten better at managing bed times (lights out by 10:30-11 pretty much every night). And I wake up on my own by 6:30 even on mornings where my wife is handling the breakfasts.
All of which is just corroborating the linked post: just do it. Make yourself go to sleep at a reasonable hour. Make yourself wake up, by whatever means you want. You'll find you adapt surprisingly well.
Having done this, I still wake up at the same time, but may take naps (5-40 mins) during the day. It's not that I'm trying to avoid sleeping in-I just can't, having gotten so used to the habit of waking up at 6 AM every single day.
I work with therod and I basically do the same. Normally I do 1x 20min nap after lunch. If it was a rough night, with little sleep - one nap at 9am and one around 3/4pm.
It took me a month of living with withdrawal symptoms and headaches to get over the addiction.
Let me just point out that this is totally not normal. I drink 10-15 (20-oz) cups of coffee a week, in addition to caffeinated sodas, and when I'd go off caffeine for a few weeks (as I used to do regularly), I'd have 2-3 days of feeling depressed from normal, and a very mild but persistent headache over the first 1-2 days of it. If someone has caffeine withdrawal symptoms for a month, I'd think something else is wrong.
I'm not anywhere near an expert, but I wanted to point out that there is a difference (I assume substantial) between someone who drinks 10-15 cups of coffee a week for several years and then goes off permanently and someone who drinks the same amount but regularly stops drinking for a few weeks. The situation isn't exactly the same, but it makes me think of a person who's never run a mile before who can't do it any faster than 10 minutes and a person who runs a mile once every couple weeks and says "that's totally not normal; you should totally be able to run a mile in under 7 minutes" (whether you 'should' be able to as a level of physical fitness or not, it's unreasonable to expect of a person on their first attempt).
I take issue with his "coffee = bad" assertion as well. Maybe he was just drinking too much coffee. I know I was getting chest pains when I used to drink way too much, so I quit for a couple of years. Now I'm back to one french pressed cup everyday, although I don't need it, and I finish it well before noon. A little bit of good coffee goes a long way, and although no definitive link to good health has been found yet, medical research is looking into it because of correlations that have been found (just google "health benefits of coffee").
I agree. I deliberately stop drinking coffee for a month or two once in a while (just to prove myself that I can), and it never takes more than 2-3 days to completely withdraw from the physical effects.
Last time I did the "get off coffee to show myself that I can" thing, I was able to avoid the terrible headaches by pushing the "first sip" time back a bit each day, then reducing the amount. Initially about 11AM was the headache onset time, but after I moved my first sip back each day for a week, I found that I didn't get the headache onset till about 3PM. Then I reduced down the dose over the next week, which more motivated by the annoyance of mentally tracking "when can I (do I have to) have my coffee today". The two stages separated the task of having my brain produce its own wake-up/alertness state from dealing with the other withdrawal symptoms; and it turned what was a comforting morning ritual into a chore taking up time and attention.
There is actually a straightforward tip that is fairly reliable. Take melatonin 30 minutes before you need to go to sleep in order to wake up on time. This stops you from staying up too late because it softly commits you to only being up for another 30 minutes.
> 2 Don’t listen to that voice in your head. You know, the one that always tells you: “Just 10 more minutes of sleep won’t hurt right? We will definitely get up after that.”
I listen to that voice every day. My alarm goes off at 4:30 AM, I doze for another ten minutes, and then I get up promptly at 4:40 AM. YMMV, but for me, that last ten minutes makes the difference between staggering out of bed feeling ill and half-zonked, and rising awake and alert.
YMMV indeed. If I do that, forget it. The most awake I'll be when getting up is when that first alarm goes off; any subsequent "snooze" just gets repeated until "too late" hits. I may be staggering out of bed feeling ill and half-zonked, but I'm UP.
Best way I find to fight the "snooze button" effect is to have a reason to get up. Make sure there is no way to rationalize another 10 minutes. I have to be out by X:Y0AM, and must do P D & Q before, and any delay will screw that up - so I have to get up when the alarm goes off, no matter how much I hate the fact DST means it's just as dark out as when I went to bed.
Once up, the next step is JUICE. A shot of sugar, in a healthy format, to stimulate blood sugar levels and get energy going. That's enough to get the rest of the process going.
Toddlers help. Get 'em to bed so they'll get up when you want to get up. Nothing is more irresistible than 2.5' of "Da Da! Milk!"
Final tip: don't care. Doesn't matter whether you want to get up or not, just friggin' do it. Between this and other issues, I've largely eradicated the "I do/dont' want to" mindset: I don't care, it doesn't matter what I want, just do it because it has to be done.
I have tried nearly all of these, and the only thing that consistently works for me is forcing myself to go to bed by midnight, and preferably at 23:00.
On nights when I get less than seven and a half hours of sleep, it's like I'm a different person immediately after waking up: I don't care what my future or previous self wants. I only want to go back to sleep.
On nights when I give myself eight or more hours to sleep, I will wake up on time without any external prompt (including the alarm). It's a lot easier to be rational about time at the end of a day than it is at the beginning.
This is what works best for me when I need to get up. I have the problem that there are always a million more things I want to do before I go to bed. If I let myself do them I will be wide awake and focused until I hit a wall and have to go to bed, but this time will be about 2 hours after I should I have gone to bed and the next day I'll be terribly groggy if I get up at the normal time.
The most important thing for me is not giving in to staying up late. My brain wants to do it, but I have to say no.
For me the night-time is the only quiet time to get work done (full-time job, family), but I still need to get up about 5:40 AM. I aim to get to sleep by 10:30 but usually work up until that point. I know I sometimes suffer when trying to fall to sleep, but I guess it's a trade-off I'm willing to make.
It's the best approach when sane-me wakes up first, but usually a totally different personality wakes up first. It can justify almost anything in its effort to stay in bed. Kinda creepy actually, it's what I'd imagine having a multiple personality disorder is like. It's not even a voice, I am not "me" when I wake up :-)
I find that the most banal things on the radio suddenly become endlessly fascinating when the alternative is getting out of bed.
"This advert for conservatories? Oh, I'll just stay in bed until the end of the commercials.. ooh, I've not heard this Rihanna song for a few hours, just one more song.."
I believe just-woke-up me learned a different version of mathematics.
When I set the alarm the night before I can budget my time appropriately. 30 minutes to get where I need to go, 15 minutes for morning chores, 20 minutes for breakfast, etc. I'll add an extra 10 minutes for unpredictability, set my alarm, and go to sleep.
Then when I wake up, I can hit that snooze button because apparently 60 - 9 minutes is plenty of time to get 50 minutes of stuff done. Then I hit it again, because I'm sure I can just do things a little quicker. 60 - 18 is plenty of time to get 50 minutes of stuff done.
Finally I get up and start to wonder how I ever rationalized that I could get 50 minutes of stuff done in 30 minutes.
It reminds me of when I was on prescription pain medications after a surgery.
I realized this about me too, the other day. I'm completely unrealistic about schedule for the first half-an-hour or so after I wake up. So I try to get as much done the evening before so there's less risk of that unrealism trashing my morning.
One neat app I've discovered lately that helps me with this tremendously is Sleep as Android[1]. It has a "CAPTCHA" mode for alarms, where you have to do some additional task to wake up. It has a few choices for the task, but the most amazing one is QR Code scanning. You "teach" the phone a QR code of your choice, and when the alarm goes off you have to scan the code to turn it off. The use case is printing a QR code on a piece of paper and sticking it in the kitchen/bathroom/whatever room that requires you getting up and walking. A simple, yet (to me) a mind-blowing feature for an alarm.
It's what I did before, the problem was that the point of the app is sleep-tracking and waking you up at the optimal time in your sleep cycle. This requires the phone being somewhere on the bed so it can register your movement. The negative side-effect of this is of course being able to turn off the alarm with your eyes more or less closed by blindly grabbing at the phone conveniently placed at arm's reach.
I use Alarm Clock Extreme for Android, which (among other things) you can set to make you solve math problems before you can shut it off. The complexity of the problems, quantity, etc is configurable.
Much like the GP poster, I'm usually not myself when awakened by an alarm. I can go 30 feet to turn off an alarm and return to bed without ever really being awake. Having to do some multiplication and division wakes up the more rational parts of my brain.
I think part of maturing into an adult is realizing that future-you is not the same as present-you. Understanding that fact can help you solve problems like getting up in the morning; in fact the OP offers such solutions: Schedule an important meeting or event early in the morning that forces you to get up.
I tried this too, but then I started getting up while I was still mostly asleep, walking across the room to turn off the alarm, and then going back to bed again. I even tried putting the alarm in a closet, but I'd still get up and turn it off.
What worked for me was (1) going to bed at a reasonable hour and being sure I got 8 full hours of sleep, (2) giving up coffee, and (3) going running every morning (I lived next to golden gate park, totally worth it). I was able to get up early, got tons more done in the morning, and I also got in shape. Best thing I've ever done.
This sometimes happened to me when I was in uni. I'd leave my alarm (my phone usually) on my desk on the other side of the room. Some days I'd wake up and see my phone on the pillow beside me.. when this happened there was always an "OH SHIT WHAT TIME IS IT" panic since it meant that I got up, turned off the alarm and went back to sleep.
I also used my computer as an alarm clock for a little while. I wrote a program that would set the windows volume to whatever value (0 to 100) was passed as a commandline argument and then I set up the task scheduler to run it in the morning. This way, I could play music quietly at night and in the morning the volume got cranked up to 100% to wake me. Worked well until one morning there must have been a power outage and my computer was off...
Solving puzzles to turn off an alarm doesn't work for me either - my still asleep self is quite clever at pulling plugs, taking out batteries or simply just smashing a persistent alarm.
Luckily, unless I'm really tired (eg go to bed at 6am, get up at 8am), I normally wake up before I need to get up. Actually getting up is a lot harder than waking up tough.
Clearly getting out of bed isn't all the work in waking up, but it's a good start. If done in addition to the other things you mention, it's helpful. Getting up just seems to get your juices flowing better, at least based on anecdotal evidence.
I've read about people scheduling their laptops/phones to read them messages foreseeing any excuse and trying to argue against it.
"You think another 30 minutes will be fine, but remember how you always regret that afterwards? Remember how you spend the rest of each day wishing you'd got up 30 minutes earlier? Do you want to be that pathetic, regretful person again today?"
Of course, Sleep Self would probably reply "Hell yes, bed is awesome!"
I find that I have an easier time getting out of bed if I get up when I wake naturally. I almost always wake about 30 minutes before my alarm goes off. In the past I just went back to sleep, but when 30 minutes went by I felt groggy and sluggish.
Hopping out of bed right when I wake up, even if it costs me 30 - 45 minutes of extra sleep, makes it so much easier.
My fiance has been using this alarm application where she inputs the time she's going to bed and it shows best and worst times within the sleep cycle to be woken, it works well. I have a feeling this is what I'm doing on my own by getting up when I wake up.
I tried just jumping out of bed and getting going, but it ended up with me failing more often than not. What works for me is to ease into waking up with a set, autopilot-type routine, something you can do without even thinking about it. Wake up, get out of bed right away, walk to the bathroom, start the shower, get in.
For me, at least, rationalizations and planning don't work when it comes to forming new habits. I just have to jump into it. With sleeping, I set my alarm clock at 4:30 and got up. First couple of days were tough, but eventually my internal clock shifted.
Having said that, you should have a good reason for waking up early aside from "I want to be one of those guys that get up super early; they seem to do so much work before I even open my eyes." For me, it was a couple of reasons:
- doing my morning power walk before all the traffic (so I can put in my earbuds and crank up the noise)
- getting stuff done before everyone else wakes up and messages/emails/calls... start
- prepping most of my food for the day so that I save more time
- avoiding evenings when I have to do a lot of work so I can focus more on reading/learning
It also helps if you're tough on yourself. I know I won't achieve what I want by irregular sleeping schedule and spoiling myself. And if there is ever a late night I still get up at the same time; I just take a caffeine pill later in the day.
If I could count the number of hours I spent in my life half awake in my bed - it would fill many holidays <sigh>
I've tried a number of times to rise early, but I've never managed to do it consistently. When considering to get up, I can't convince myself that i HAVE to get up, since I can do what I want to do later anyways.
It seems that, on my own, the reasons are not strong enough for me to get up: the only thing that worked was when I had a commitment with a group of friends to swim at 7AM with them.
I find when I'm getting regular exercise, I open my eyes in the morning and I'm awake and ready to go. It's the opposite when I've been lazing around for a few weeks not doing my physical activity.
My uncensored opinion is that the original article is garbage. Waking up early isn't about what you do in the morning, its about what you do the night before (or fail to do.)
Forcing yourself to wake up early for the sake of waking up early is destructive as it means your body has not gotten enough sleep yet. Your going to either have impeded judgement capability, diminished work energy or both. A lot of people pretend this doesn't happen to them; they under perform for years or sometimes their whole life.
Being a business owner associating with a lot of people with the worst sleeping schedules imaginable I have a pretty good idea what causes serious sleep problems.
That said, most average people can fix their sleep problems just through being active.
Here are a few things that are a really big deal:
1. Wind down work hours before your ready.
2. Shut off most of your lights. Especially the horrid blue lights that so many electronics emit.
3. Don't do drugs. Yeah, if your snorting cocaine on the weekends expect to have some problems sleeping for the rest of the week.
4. Be on a regularly eating schedule. My sleep disruptions go hand in hand with meal disruptions.
I travel to trade shows and have 24 hour days. When I go back home, my sleep schedule goes back on track within 48 hours. This is coming from someone who, over half a decade ago, spent years attempting to stop a 26 hour day cycle (meaning your sleep plus awake time always ads up to over 24 hours a day resulting in no predictable sleep pattern.)
I don't know if "do not consume caffeine" is more important than "do not do cocaine", but otherwise I'd agree. That said, I personally care more about my Coke fix than I do about any impact to my sleep schedule.
That would depend on whether you are fast- or slow- caffeine metabolizer. For example, I am of a latter kind - I can drink few shots of espresso, then go to bed in an hour after that and pull of a full-night sleep.
This is not necessarily true. In particular: "2. Black and green tea manufactured from leaf from the same bushes on the same day will have virtually the same caffeine levels (within +/- 0.3%)"
I'm a green tea drinker and I've actually read that small amounts of caffeine throughout the day are okay. Seems to be working for me. Went from coffee to black tea to green tea and have been primarily drinking green tea for 2-3 years now.
With regard to your second point, late night hackers might find f.lux useful. I have used it with success the past year and half; just be sure it is not activated while doing anything which includes a color palette.
That one was actually on my initial list. I left it out though because I have just recently started working out regularly. But yes, so far I have been getting better night sleeps after my workout days.
The best tip: challenge your basic assumptions about sleep and experiment to find what works for you.
I've found that hitting the general 1.5 hour sleep cycle pattern works for me (i.e. the amount of sleep you get is a multiple of 1.5) much better than anything else in terms of actually getting up and feeling well rested.
It is extremely difficult for me to get up and go to bed at the same time every day (not to mention unnecessarily inconvenient), but if I can get exactly 6 hours of sleep every night (or 7.5 if I'm feeling particularly tired), I can wake up easily at any time and feel well rested.
As a grain farmer, it is rare to see much happen around this farm before 11AM. Except, perhaps, repair some downed equipment. You pretty much always need the morning sunshine to dry up the fields from the overnight dew before they are ready to be worked in again.
120 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 231 ms ] threadI am quite aware of the differences between a human infant and a cat.
My ex-girlfriend at the time, would get up to feed cats.
So he'd bug her on the mornings she was in, and snuggle up with me on the mornings she wasn't.
Same cat learned not to beg at the dinner table for food. Even when sushi was being served. And yes, he loved salmon. Begging resulted in treats -- of wasabi applied to the nose.
He learned after the 2nd time.
TL;DR: with a sufficiently trainable cat, this doesn't work.
All of which is just corroborating the linked post: just do it. Make yourself go to sleep at a reasonable hour. Make yourself wake up, by whatever means you want. You'll find you adapt surprisingly well.
Let me just point out that this is totally not normal. I drink 10-15 (20-oz) cups of coffee a week, in addition to caffeinated sodas, and when I'd go off caffeine for a few weeks (as I used to do regularly), I'd have 2-3 days of feeling depressed from normal, and a very mild but persistent headache over the first 1-2 days of it. If someone has caffeine withdrawal symptoms for a month, I'd think something else is wrong.
I listen to that voice every day. My alarm goes off at 4:30 AM, I doze for another ten minutes, and then I get up promptly at 4:40 AM. YMMV, but for me, that last ten minutes makes the difference between staggering out of bed feeling ill and half-zonked, and rising awake and alert.
Best way I find to fight the "snooze button" effect is to have a reason to get up. Make sure there is no way to rationalize another 10 minutes. I have to be out by X:Y0AM, and must do P D & Q before, and any delay will screw that up - so I have to get up when the alarm goes off, no matter how much I hate the fact DST means it's just as dark out as when I went to bed.
Once up, the next step is JUICE. A shot of sugar, in a healthy format, to stimulate blood sugar levels and get energy going. That's enough to get the rest of the process going.
Toddlers help. Get 'em to bed so they'll get up when you want to get up. Nothing is more irresistible than 2.5' of "Da Da! Milk!"
Final tip: don't care. Doesn't matter whether you want to get up or not, just friggin' do it. Between this and other issues, I've largely eradicated the "I do/dont' want to" mindset: I don't care, it doesn't matter what I want, just do it because it has to be done.
Most heart attacks occur in the morning.
On nights when I get less than seven and a half hours of sleep, it's like I'm a different person immediately after waking up: I don't care what my future or previous self wants. I only want to go back to sleep.
On nights when I give myself eight or more hours to sleep, I will wake up on time without any external prompt (including the alarm). It's a lot easier to be rational about time at the end of a day than it is at the beginning.
The most important thing for me is not giving in to staying up late. My brain wants to do it, but I have to say no.
I have no issues with getting out of bed and getting productive when I wake up; the issue has been waking up at all.
It's the best approach when sane-me wakes up first, but usually a totally different personality wakes up first. It can justify almost anything in its effort to stay in bed. Kinda creepy actually, it's what I'd imagine having a multiple personality disorder is like. It's not even a voice, I am not "me" when I wake up :-)
"This advert for conservatories? Oh, I'll just stay in bed until the end of the commercials.. ooh, I've not heard this Rihanna song for a few hours, just one more song.."
When I set the alarm the night before I can budget my time appropriately. 30 minutes to get where I need to go, 15 minutes for morning chores, 20 minutes for breakfast, etc. I'll add an extra 10 minutes for unpredictability, set my alarm, and go to sleep.
Then when I wake up, I can hit that snooze button because apparently 60 - 9 minutes is plenty of time to get 50 minutes of stuff done. Then I hit it again, because I'm sure I can just do things a little quicker. 60 - 18 is plenty of time to get 50 minutes of stuff done.
Finally I get up and start to wonder how I ever rationalized that I could get 50 minutes of stuff done in 30 minutes.
It reminds me of when I was on prescription pain medications after a surgery.
[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.urbandroid...
My low-tech version is putting the alarm clock on the other side of the room :-)
Much like the GP poster, I'm usually not myself when awakened by an alarm. I can go 30 feet to turn off an alarm and return to bed without ever really being awake. Having to do some multiplication and division wakes up the more rational parts of my brain.
See also: http://lesswrong.com/lw/ase/schelling_fences_on_slippery_slo...
Later, I would invent crazy excuses, or just tell about my monstrous condition.
What worked for me was (1) going to bed at a reasonable hour and being sure I got 8 full hours of sleep, (2) giving up coffee, and (3) going running every morning (I lived next to golden gate park, totally worth it). I was able to get up early, got tons more done in the morning, and I also got in shape. Best thing I've ever done.
I also used my computer as an alarm clock for a little while. I wrote a program that would set the windows volume to whatever value (0 to 100) was passed as a commandline argument and then I set up the task scheduler to run it in the morning. This way, I could play music quietly at night and in the morning the volume got cranked up to 100% to wake me. Worked well until one morning there must have been a power outage and my computer was off...
Solving puzzles to turn off an alarm doesn't work for me either - my still asleep self is quite clever at pulling plugs, taking out batteries or simply just smashing a persistent alarm.
Luckily, unless I'm really tired (eg go to bed at 6am, get up at 8am), I normally wake up before I need to get up. Actually getting up is a lot harder than waking up tough.
"You think another 30 minutes will be fine, but remember how you always regret that afterwards? Remember how you spend the rest of each day wishing you'd got up 30 minutes earlier? Do you want to be that pathetic, regretful person again today?"
Of course, Sleep Self would probably reply "Hell yes, bed is awesome!"
Hopping out of bed right when I wake up, even if it costs me 30 - 45 minutes of extra sleep, makes it so much easier.
My fiance has been using this alarm application where she inputs the time she's going to bed and it shows best and worst times within the sleep cycle to be woken, it works well. I have a feeling this is what I'm doing on my own by getting up when I wake up.
Having said that, you should have a good reason for waking up early aside from "I want to be one of those guys that get up super early; they seem to do so much work before I even open my eyes." For me, it was a couple of reasons: - doing my morning power walk before all the traffic (so I can put in my earbuds and crank up the noise) - getting stuff done before everyone else wakes up and messages/emails/calls... start - prepping most of my food for the day so that I save more time - avoiding evenings when I have to do a lot of work so I can focus more on reading/learning
It also helps if you're tough on yourself. I know I won't achieve what I want by irregular sleeping schedule and spoiling myself. And if there is ever a late night I still get up at the same time; I just take a caffeine pill later in the day.
I've tried a number of times to rise early, but I've never managed to do it consistently. When considering to get up, I can't convince myself that i HAVE to get up, since I can do what I want to do later anyways.
It seems that, on my own, the reasons are not strong enough for me to get up: the only thing that worked was when I had a commitment with a group of friends to swim at 7AM with them.
1) Feed cat(s) wet-food in the morning
the cat(s) will not let you sleep until you get up to feed them...guaranteed.
if you don't have a cat
1) place obnoxious alarm out of range
http://www.amazon.com/EcoTeas-Organic-Yerba-Loose-5-Pound/dp...
and
http://www.amazon.com/Wisdom-Ancients-Bombilla-Strainerstraw...
It's surprising to me that yerba is just starting to catch on in the US.
You should try it some time with a little bit of milk and peppermint syrup. It's heavenly :).
I find when I'm getting regular exercise, I open my eyes in the morning and I'm awake and ready to go. It's the opposite when I've been lazing around for a few weeks not doing my physical activity.
Forcing yourself to wake up early for the sake of waking up early is destructive as it means your body has not gotten enough sleep yet. Your going to either have impeded judgement capability, diminished work energy or both. A lot of people pretend this doesn't happen to them; they under perform for years or sometimes their whole life.
Being a business owner associating with a lot of people with the worst sleeping schedules imaginable I have a pretty good idea what causes serious sleep problems.
That said, most average people can fix their sleep problems just through being active.
Here are a few things that are a really big deal:
1. Wind down work hours before your ready.
2. Shut off most of your lights. Especially the horrid blue lights that so many electronics emit.
3. Don't do drugs. Yeah, if your snorting cocaine on the weekends expect to have some problems sleeping for the rest of the week.
4. Be on a regularly eating schedule. My sleep disruptions go hand in hand with meal disruptions.
I travel to trade shows and have 24 hour days. When I go back home, my sleep schedule goes back on track within 48 hours. This is coming from someone who, over half a decade ago, spent years attempting to stop a 26 hour day cycle (meaning your sleep plus awake time always ads up to over 24 hours a day resulting in no predictable sleep pattern.)
Most importantly, do not consume caffeine. No coffee, no tea!
http://chadao.blogspot.com/2008/02/caffeine-and-tea-myth-and...
Check it out here: http://stereopsis.com/flux/
1. The title of the article is "Waking up early", not "how to have more productive hours in the day"
2. I'm personally much more interested in the health benefits gained by exercising so I have no doubt it's worth it.
Heavy deadlifts & rack pulls: I sleep like the dead. Squats can have a similar effect.
Rowing, swimming, cycling, or other cardio: not so bad.
I've found that hitting the general 1.5 hour sleep cycle pattern works for me (i.e. the amount of sleep you get is a multiple of 1.5) much better than anything else in terms of actually getting up and feeling well rested.
It is extremely difficult for me to get up and go to bed at the same time every day (not to mention unnecessarily inconvenient), but if I can get exactly 6 hours of sleep every night (or 7.5 if I'm feeling particularly tired), I can wake up easily at any time and feel well rested.
This one is big - simple change, drastic results.