Biohacking: Temp minimum suggests your most productive time | Hacker News Reader

Biohacking: Temp minimum suggests your most productive time

4 pointsPrdikt6 comments

The average wakes up time informs what’s called “temperature minimum” — the time in each 24-hour cycle when your body’s temperature is the lowest. The actual temp is not essential, but the time tends to be two hours before your typical wake-up time if you're consistent with sleep schedule.

The temperature minimum defines the trough of your temperature across the 24-hour cycle. And immediately after that, your temperature will start to rise.

You can be reasonably sure that your best work will be done anywhere from four to six hours after your temperature minimum. Nobody can say the exact time. You have to find it. It could be four, five or six hours after your minimum temperature and it varies from person to person.

If you’re someone who wakes up on average at 7:00 a.m., your minimum temperature is at 5:00 a.m. If you tend to wake up around 6:30 a.m., that means your temperature minimum is at 4:30 a.m. You can add five hours to that time which would mean that a 90-minute deep focus work session could fall at 9:30 a.m. and the timing would be pretty optimised. Or you could do it at 10:30 a.m. or 8:30 a.m. Somewhere in that time frame would be all right. Find the right timing for you.

Is there any study behind this suggestion or is this something that you have figured out on your own?

Also, this leaves out all those night owls who are productive later in the day.

Temp minimum and productivity are regulated by your circadian rhythm and there are many works on the topic. E.g., https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12388468/, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31033013/.

You also may want to listen to Dr. Andrew D. Huberman, a neuroscientist and tenured professor in the Department of Neuroscience at the Stanford University School of Medicine. He perfectly describes how it works in one of his YouTube videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXvDEmo6uS4&t=530s

Will be great to hear back if you try this approach!

Anything to support these claims ? Also, would it work to artifically lower the temp, like when you take a prolonged cold shower ?

Please, see some references in another reply.

In facts you can lower your temperature artificially. Your body implements some mechanics to do that. For example late in the afternoon, your temperature reaches its peak and starts to drop again. That drop in temperature of one to three degrees is vitally essential for falling asleep quickly and you actually can accelerate that drop! Although it’s somewhat counterintuitive, hot baths or showers or a sauna one or two hours before your bedtime will help to decrease your temperature. If you get into a sufficiently high temperature of water for about 15-20 minutes and then get out of it, your body will employ particular mechanisms for cooling itself and your body’s temperature will drop more quickly. That will allow you to fall asleep more easily.

As for the cold shower. When the cold water hits your body, it constricts faster circulation of your blood in your deeper tissues and helps to maintain ideal body temperature. Also, you could try to control your morning temp minimum by establishing sleep consistency and changing your average wake up so that your temp minimum falls into the time you want it to fall.

Would be interested in the research.

If true, my scrum falls in that time range. That does tend to sap my productivity.

If possible, scrum could be positioned to a different time. It's not the most productive activity throughout the day.

See references above. Will be great to hear back if you try this approach!

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