I used to need 9.5 hours of sleep as a teenager and probably had diagnosable delayed sleep phase disorder.
Rules made by 55 year old early risers that only need 6 hours of sleep a night who have become school officials are just cruel and unusual punishment to a chunk of teenagers out there. In a better world there could be a class action lawsuit to make this stop--but its still considered okay to promote "early to bed, early to rise" and flat-out discriminate against people with sleep disorders.
If you are an early riser, you should know that as someone with a sleep disorder I view "helpful" suggestions like "get some exercise" to be roughly equivalent to suggesting that gay people just need to pray the gay away. I'm never going to become an early riser. I've gotten in somewhat under control with melatonin, tweaks to diet and consistent scheduling, but I'm never going to hop out of bed at 6:30am and its always going to take me 2-3 hours to wake up.
Allow me to back this up with an actual piece of research.
Here is an excerpt from the book "Why we sleep" (which BTW is written by a neuroscientist and psychology prof working at the Center for Human Sleep Science )
> An adult’s owlness or larkness, also known as their chronotype, is strongly determined by
genetics. If you are a night owl, it’s likely that one (or both) of your parents is a night owl.
Sadly, society treats night owls rather unfairly on two counts. First is the label of being lazy,
based on a night owl’s wont to wake up later in the day, due to the fact that they did not fall
asleep until the early-morning hours. Others (usually morning larks) will chastise night owls on
the erroneous assumption that such preferences are a choice, and if they were not so slovenly,
they could easily wake up early. However, night owls are not owls by choice. They are bound to
a delayed schedule by unavoidable DNA hardwiring. It is not their conscious fault, but rather
their genetic fate.
Second is the engrained, un-level playing field of society’s work scheduling, which is strongly biased toward early start times that punish owls and favor larks.
EDIT: This is just one argument against the generalization that humans are hard-wired to sleep early. The book is filled with countless research pieces and experiments; science seems to suggest otherwise. Highly recommended read!
I started seriously tracking my sleep a few months back, and two months ago I started to use "Sleep as Android", which has a neat feature that shows you a graph of the times you are asleep.
I'd likely be way more productive if I could just do that, and wouldn't have the sleep dep days that I do when I just power through it on zombie mode for a day or three until I can get back on the 24 hour schedule.
I find 5 mg of melatonin taken an hour before I got to bed combined with learning to use a sleep mask helped a lot. I still need to go to bed listening to something (that isn't too interesting to me) in order to derail my thoughts as well. Plus not eating late, and something in junk food (MSG/salt?) tends to keep me up all night almost in hot sweats. But with all that it has just become manageable so that I can hold down a job.
> The second unexpected—and more profound—result was that their reliably repeating cycles of
wake and sleep were not precisely twenty-four hours in length, but consistently and undeniably
longer than twenty-four hours. Richardson, in his twenties, developed a sleep-wake cycle of
between twenty-six and twenty-eight hours in length. That of Kleitman, in his forties, was a little
closer to, but still longer than, twenty-four hours. Therefore, when removed from the external
influence of daylight, the internally generated “day” of each man was not exactly twenty-four
hours, but a little more than that. Like an inaccurate wristwatch whose time runs long, with
each passing (real) day in the outside world, Kleitman and Richardson began to add time based
on their longer, internally generated chronometry.
I have similarly experienced non 24 on a roughly 26 hr cycle. I'm curious if you've had your vitamin D levels checked? Mine were abysmal, <13 ng/mL. I've been working on improving that with both a supplement and regular sun exposure. I'm not "fixed", but staying up feels much more like a conscious decision and less like it's out of my control.
I used to sleep like this for many years, though I shifted a little less than one hour per day, my full circle was around a month. What fixed it for me:
1) Getting out every day, even when I don't have to.
2) Using alarm for going to sleep, not for waking up.
3) I think this is the main one - I've got some social obligations, so I needed to be awake during the day.
I also think I'm non-24. Unfortunately its only considered a real disorder in the blind. Taking melatonin helps a bit -- I'm convinced my pineal gland is broken somehow.
Leftover customs from agricultural society, that have become subconscious moralistic norms. If you sleep the daylight hours away on the farm, you will get less productive work done. After ten generations of this, there will be unspoken and unconscious rules about what sort of sleep schedules are acceptable. These don't go away by themselves.
Farming isn't and never was, the only occupation in the world.
So, simple solution - Don't be a farmer. Be a night guard or something.
This is really like the kind of problem we have today. We only have some 5 most popular professions in the world, so people are rigged to cater to the customs of these 5 professions. Everyone else is just "lazy"!
Historically a much greater portion of the population was involved with agriculture (75% of the working population)[1] at a time when artificial light was both relatively poor quality and very expensive.
Given those constraints it makes sense that there was massive societal pressure to maximize the hours the sun did shine. Looking at the charts on that site also brought home how relatively recent the shift to non farm based employment really was (a couple generations). Even that probably fails to account for large behavioral changes: for example my great grandparents had a "garden" that was at least an order of magnitude larger than any suburban garden I've seen in the last decade. They weren't "farmers", just poor and the extra food they grew and canned was a huge help.
I used to believe like you do. What I believed to be my natural schedule--what I naturally gravitated to--was the nite-owl 1am to between 9-10am or so sleep schedule. In school, I always felt sleep deprived when I had to wake up around 6.
But I recently spent the better part of five months going to bed at 9:30pm and waking up at 4:30am. Despite getting less sleep overall, I've never felt as well rested or alert throughout the day as I did during those five months and I've never had an easier time getting to sleep. The key, for me, was also modifying my eating schedule and screen usage (computer, phone, TV). I often wonder how many people who simply accept that they're naturally nite owls are using blue-light-emitting screens late into the night and eating their last meal of the day so late that their body isn't ready for sleep. Because I know that once I adjusted those aspects of my life, my sleep schedule magically responded.
The difficulty in maintaining that schedule has been societal pressures. Those five months were spent living outside of a city where noise, light and social norms around dinner time all make it very difficult to maintain while having any sort of social life. I'm still searching for a way to reconcile my sleep schedule with my intended lifestyle.
Sleep schedules dramatically change with age and a lot of sub conscious stimuli. So, don't try and generalize from what works for any one person.
EX: I have started to get up around 6am even if the room is dark and I am not getting enough sleep. I find it annoying, and nothing changed but my age.
I'd agree with you, but as soon as I came back to live in the city, my nite-owl tendencies returned with a vengeance. It was like flipping a switch.
I'm also not trying to generalize to everyone, I'm only surmising that there may be a lot of people like me. It's arrogant to assume your personal experiences apply to specific other people, but it's equally arrogant to assume you're a snowflake and that other people's experience is irrelevant to your situation. Everyone is their own unique blend of the many human commonalities.
Sleep schedules also change base on your behaviour. If you need 10 hours of sleep, go to bed 2 hours earlier. I used to sleep from 1am to 9am half a year ago, but now I sleep from 10pm to 6am, and feel exactly the same. The only thing that changed was when I went to bed.
Yeah, behaviors alone can definitely work for some people, no question. But as research seems to be indicating, there are many factors aside from just behavior or hours of sleep needed. devexpy discusses some of it above. Some people’s circadian rhythms are just different, and this may be just hard wired. Some people still only need 6 hours but at a different time of day, some people need more at the same time of day.
In the modern era, there is no question that sleep hygiene is lacking for some, but it isn’t universally sleep hygiene, or universally scheduling, or universally a set amount of hours. It seems that we’re often dealing with different things for different people.
As I briefly mentioned in comment further up, the solution for me was a 9am wake up, and this seems to work consistently and easily with almost any amount of sleep. I can be just fine with 5 hours or 10. It just works. Prior to arriving at a career situation where I could set my own schedule, there were no combinations of solutions which allowed me to wake up at 6am and not be on autopilot and zombified for the first half of the day. And I tried just about every iteration and combination with diligence for years. Luckily I realized early enough in college to just never take classes before 10am or I would have almost certainly struggled.
If we can figure out ways to allow for flex schedules on positions which have no need for timing rigidity, I could easily see our collective productivity rising in measurable ways. And at the very least we won’t be needlessly forcing entire segments of the population to perform at half optimum levels for half of their days.
That’s amazing that worked for you. I know it works for some people, but there are a significant number of us who have tried all of those things and it doesn’t work for us. What does work for me, consistently and amazingly well, was to accept —after years of earnestly trying all of the incredibly well meaning advice from others— that I’m not a 6:30am riser. I adjusted to a 9am wake up and it just works. Actually just works, easily, and always. I wake up rested and alert. I’m incredibly lucky that my job doesn’t require me to rise at 6am.
It really is a shame that so many in the world seemingly assume that we’re just not trying to sleep in the proper ways or that we’re not trying with enough conviction. Once I was lucky enough to be in a position where I could set my own schedule, my performance jumped significantly. I was no slouch prior to slightly altering my wake up time, but the changes after are remarkable.
Again, I am genuinely happy those changes worked for you, but for some of us, the same things just aren’t impactful in any meaningful way, sadly.
I heard one theory that in general older people wake up earlier and younger people stay up later as a way that a group of people could watch the village 24/7.
I can confidently say that multiple years of waking up early as a high school student did nothing to make me a morning person. 10-15 years later I find it more difficult to sleep in to 12-1pm when given the opportunity.
As a kid, I seem to remember my grandmother always waking up obscenely early. I feel like I've watched my mother transition from a "normal" morning person who will sleep in an hour or two extra on the weekend to waking up obscenely early consistently.
> [so] that a group of people could watch the village 24/7
Matthew Walker alludes to this in his book on sleep; however, in his description it's not so much older vs younger people, it's just genetic differences that make some people sleep earlier and some later, with a fairly stable 60/40 or so distribution. Thus, the "dangerous" period (where everyone sleeps) gets reduced from 8 hours to, say, 3 hours.
> The key, for me, was also modifying my eating schedule and screen usage (computer, phone, TV).
Well, now you've introduced more variables into your anecdote. Any one of those could have been responsible for your feelings of 'well rested' and 'alert'...
> Rules made by 55 year old early risers that only need 6 hours of sleep a night who have become school officials are just cruel and unusual punishment to a chunk of teenagers out there. In a better world there could be a class action lawsuit to make this stop--but its still considered okay to promote "early to bed, early to rise" and flat-out discriminate against people with sleep disorders.
tbh, i doubt the time that students are required to be at school has much to do with their ideal sleep schedules. only about a third of women are stay at home moms these days, so you can consider parents to fall into one of two groups: shift workers and 9-5 office workers. shifts can start/end at any time so they can't really be planned around at the level of an entire school system. so by default, the schedule gets planned with the assumption of both parents working 9-5s. if both parents have to be at work by 9:00, the kids need to be at school by 8:00, so the parents can drop them off or at least make sure they get on the bus.
also, a lot of school districts only have enough buses to transport all the lower, middle, or high school students at once, so their arrivals must be staggered.
given that school also serves the purpose of gov't sponsored day care, i'm not sure what they could really do better aside from granting tardiness allowances for students with bona-fide sleeping disorders.
In Europe, school began starting earlier and earlier on the request of teachers, who wanted the afternoon free for more lucrative side-gigs in the early eighteen-hundreds.
If kids can’t get themselves to school by their teenage years, something is horrifically wrong with your urban planning. A school should serve the houses 1-2 miles around. My daily treks to middle and high school were parades of pedestrians, bikes, and kick scooters through the suburban streets.
> A school should serve the houses 1-2 miles around.
This tends to be how suburban elementary schools are, but high schools require more resources per school (for all the facilities for sports and enrichment programs), so there are fewer, larger high schools.
Having one high school serve only a 1-2 mile area would only work out if you have a bunch of 100-story condos in the 1-2 mile area. Otherwise, where are all these kids even coming from?
I grew up in a town of 50,000 people. The population density of it, according to Wikipedia, is 1,082/sq mi. The town has three high schools to serve its population, and they're all just about full. If it had more schools, though, then each school would have less than 200 students apiee. Where would the budget for these schools' facilities come from?
Condo towers? The suburb I grew up in was all single family homes with 2-car garages, 6,600 people per square mile and 14,000 people total. We have one high school in the center with ~900 students. Walkable for all of them. There are two elementary schools around half that size with even smaller coverage areas.
We were unambiguously a suburb. 1/6th that density would have been nightmarish sprawl. Berkeley, also mostly suburban, is 12,000 per square mile! That’s my point.
> If kids can’t get themselves to school by their teenage years, something is horrifically wrong with your urban planning.
i mean, according to the general sentiment of HN at least, there is something horrifically wrong with urban planning in the US. in the meantime, the schools need to settle on a "least terrible" schedule.
You don’t need to ban cars, build dense multifamily buildings, dig subways, live close to a central business district, etc. to be in a position where kids can walk to school. That’s still perfectly compatible with suburbia.
> given that school also serves the purpose of gov't sponsored day care, i'm not sure what they could really do better aside from granting tardiness allowances for students with bona-fide sleeping disorders.
Remote school. Lot of things could be learned and done from home. Then you can stagger your buses from 11am to noon for those who require communal food then group activities (art, sports etc.).
sure but, like i said in the part of my post that you quoted, school is also daycare. most parents don't want to have to think about wtf their kids are doing in the house until 11am or noon. maybe they're wrong and should take a more hands-off approach, but kids don't vote and they don't pay (much) tax. the system needs to cater to the needs of the parents as much as those of the kids.
Honest question: Have you tried waking up at the same time every day -- absolutely NO exceptions -- for a period of 2+ weeks? (Along with this, no snoozing and get up as quickly as possible after your alarm goes off, even if you're a zombie and won't be able to actually do anything for another hour or two).
I ask as a person who's been on both sides of the fence, from 8pm nights and 4am mornings to 4am nights and 1pm "mornings" (and, of course, all manner of ranges in between). I've had months where I'm alert and out of bed 15 seconds after the alarm rings, and months where it takes me 2+ hours to rely wake up (although, on the whole, I'd still consider myself a "morning person", since I tend to feel better and get more done when I'm on the early shift).
I've found that, no matter what time I'm waking up, my ability to start moving in the "morning" is dependent in huge part (55%) on a consistent wake up time, and in small part dependent on getting enough sleep (20%) and getting up immediately instead of snoozing or otherwise staying horizontal (25%). Percentages are non-scientific estimates.
I do acknowledge, it's hard as hell to transition to being a "morning person" when I haven't been for a while, because it's just SO hard to force myself out of bed for the 1-2 week period I need to aclimate. Especially since in a half-awake state I don't have much mental capacity to push through the sleepiness. And it would be harder if I'd never experienced easy mornings to know they're possible.
For the record, to preempt a rebuttle along these lines: I also don't dispute that some people, for whatever reason -- genetics, life circumstances, etc -- may just not be able to make the switch. I am curious whether whether it's a matter of "I've done the above and it had no effect on me" or "The above is just impossible for me."
- I can't eat any junk food pretty much at all (pizza is a particular trigger food -- salt/MSG, i dunno?)
- I can't eat anything late
- I have to take a melatonin an hour before bedtime
- At least 20 minutes before bedtime I have to put on a sleep mask and just start really winding down. Often this is more like 60 minutes before bedtime. This is just lying on my back and not really trying to sleep.
- Then I have to find some program to listen to, quietly, that derails my train of thought, but isn't actually interesting to keep me awake otherwise my internal dialog will keep me awake.
- Then it takes me about 20 minutes of actually trying to sleep to sleep on a good night.
And even given all that sometimes the slightest bit of stress will completely screw up my sleep schedule.
Exercise can help, but not right before bedtime, earlier in the day, probably through addressing stress. Too much exercise and sore, hot muscles will keep me up all night.
So, yeah, we've all collectively heard nearly everything that you can suggest, and it takes all of that just to barely make me functional.
And napping is usually awful and leads to staring at the ceiling until 3am. So if I miss sleep one night I'm usually powering through the next day on sleep dep. Then if its stress that is keeping me awake I may still get not enough sleep the next night. The stress from not getting enough sleep can cause stress at night that keeps me awake.
Ultimately it tends to 'break' and I get a good night of sleep and the stress drops off and I start getting back to normal again.
And I'm probably fairly well adjusted for being a sufferer, there's a lot of people out there who are more clinically diagnosable.
> we've all collectively heard nearly everything that you can suggest
Have you heard it suggested that insomnia is frequently a symptom of ADHD?
I have ADHD. It was undiagnosed until I was 22. And, through my whole life until that point, my sleep was "delicate" in the way you're describing, requiring careful set-up to avoid insomnia.
Then I was diagnosed with, and medicated for, ADHD. Sleep is pretty easy now. No care required.
One reason for that might be the way the medication (which I take in the morning) affects me as it's wearing off in the evening—it creates a feeling which is sort of the opposite of insomnia. With insomnia, there's a grating sensation that comes from the fact that you're still awake and a weariness demanding you sleep, but your brain won't shut up, so you can't. With the stimulant dose end-phase, meanwhile, there's no sensation of tiredness at all, but your brain is very quiet, not spontaneously thinking anything (in fact it's rather hard to spontaneously think), so you can fall asleep, even though there's no compulsion to. You just decide to, and then... you do.
Another reason might be that ADHD is apparently the brain being stuck in a state below the average behavioral-arousal set-point—essentially, being always half-asleep. As such, you don't get tired when you "should", because your brain wasn't working as hard. A car that stays in neutral half the time will still have a half-full gas tank at the end of the day. (This is also why people advise exercise for insomnia, but physical exercise doesn't really cause a brain with ADHD to engage any more than usual.) Whereas, a brain with ADHD that is fed a stimulant, will have its behavioral arousal level modified toward the normal level, expending more metabolic energy throughout the day, generating more waste products, and thereby reaching a point where it demands to enter a maintenance phase (sleep) sooner.
No matter the reason, I have to say that it works.
Interestingly, according to my psychiatrist, even if you don't think you have ADHD, other neurologically-founded sleep disorders (e.g. narcolepsy) are mostly thought to be disorders of behavioural activation as well—and, as such, are treated with stimulants, just like ADHD. They may as well all be different presentations of the same underlying pathology, given that the treatments for them are interchangeable.
My experience with amp induced comedown can only be described as a sharp onset of malaise that rapidly increases in intensity to the point you feel subdued and hostage to your impulses where normal tasks like flossing your teeth are met with dread and take a ridiculous amount of willpower that is simply overridden by dopamine producing activities such as using a smartphone. This really messed with my sleep schedule cause I could not make it to bed when my brain was held hostage by depleted dopamine neurotransmitters.
The obvious solution is to prep for bed early on meds but why waste that precious, fleeting neurotypical window of mental clarity flossing my teeth when I need it to perform cognitively during the day. This is on 50mg/day
I wish my brain was neurotypical. I'm a slave to these pills now cause stopping now literally leaves you in bed for days and you never really recover and bounce back after 5+ years of dopamine down-regulation in your brain.
What drug? The come-down from Vyvanse is very gentle.
(Really, it lasts long enough for a person of average metabolism that what you experience in the evening isn't even the withdrawal, but just the tail-end of the dose, where there's slightly less of it. To experience the withdrawal, you have to stay up ~18 hours after taking it. Even then, from the few times I've had to stay awake for other reasons, it's still what I'd describe as "gentle"; but it does do interesting things to your dreams when it hits while you're sleeping, until your brain gets used to it. Personally, my dopamine-crashes-during-sleep gave me dreams with the exact visual character of Zdzisław Beksiński paintings. Oddly, no emotional affect associated—such visuals are not scary or unsettling, as they "should" be—they're just... what your brain is doing, trying to suddenly elevate noisy sensory data to salience and ignore the model saying "you're sleeping, that stuff is meaningless." Like an extremely low-light picture causing noise on a camera sensor, crossed with DeepDream processing.)
Amphetamine salts instant release (10mg x 2) and extended release beads (30mg x 1) across the whole day. Make I'll try dexadrine and then vynase, but I recall vynase is converted to a lower level of amphetamine in the body than straight amphetamine?
Vyvanse contains less amphetamine milligram for milligram, but that's offset by better absorption and higher doses. It's also all the same form, which works better for some people.
What you describe can be mostly from physical stress of being stimulated all day. Dexedrine, Vyvanse, or methylphenidate might give you a better ratio of cognitive to physical effects. Supplementing with a non-stimulant medication might help with your symptoms in the evening and also let you take a lower dose of amphetamine during the day. There's evidence that some supplements, like magnesium, can reduce adverse effects from stimulants. You probably already know this, but it's important to eat enough throughout the day and often hard to do that.
Thanks for the information, much appreciated! I'm afraid to speak with a psych cause they will take me off these meds that I rely on to perform neurotypically. Ritalin made me bipolar with severe mood swings. Wellbutrin paradoxically made me feel depressed. Only amps have allowed my brain fog to subside and slow down my racing thoughts.
Magnesium is great, I take it throughout the day. L-theanine helps with the come down as well.
6:30AM is just some other city's 11:30AM... the difference in between is just light exposure, food consumption, and activity (the three big zeitgebers).
Unless you think you'd never resynchronize after moving across the world, it's pretty obvious that your wake and sleep time would have to be a lot more malleable than you suggest.
I think you’re missing the point. At least I do resync to new locations. Just not the way you think.
I used to travel from London to the Bay Area for work with some regulatity. The first few days were amazing, because the combination of westwards jet lag plus night owl meant that I was getting to the office nice and early every day. As the jet lag went away, and I started to acclimate to the timezone, it usually took me less than a week to be back to a night owl routine, even without the usual stimuli.
I'm an early riser and I always hated flying West. At 4:30am (local time) I was up and ready to go before anyone else in the office was even thinking about getting up. And since I didn't usually have keys or a way to get into the office my morning was wasted waiting on everyone else to arrive. Flying East is easy (for me). :)
I've skipped business trips to Europe and the East Coast before because jetlag is completely brutal for me.
And it takes all those tricks for me just to maintain a 24 hour sleep cycle. What I'd like to be able to do is what I did in college and shift my sleep schedule forward an hour or two every day. Instead I have a sleep mask, I start prepping for bed at least an hour early, I take melatonin, I make sure not to eat at night, and I lie down in bed with the sleep mask on for at least 20-30 minutes and listen to programs that help me to relax. Then it takes me 20-30 minutes after I really decide to go to sleep in order to go to sleep.
And right before bedtime is when I'm most alert. Even if I stay up all night, at about 9:30pm I won't be able to sleep.
What is really bad is when I'm seriously sleep depped and I get to sleep at say 7:30 or so, and I can easily wake up after 2-3 hours and then be stuck awake until >3am in the morning.
So I use every single trick in the book and then can just barely manage to stick to what the rest of society thinks is normal and its a constant fight.
No it isn't, unless you keep a completely unnatural and very strenuous artificial light environment. Not just any light source either. This is worse than people who can't eat most foods and have to have an extremely picky diet, because at least they can do that anywhere and can create a stash of food. To expect this of anyone is ignorant and cruel, IMO.
> Unless you think you'd never resynchronize after moving across the world
The synchronization is to the sun and its light, not to human clocks. That it seems to be the same is because the latter mimic the former, not the other way around. So you can't just use an arbitrary clock, not with any reasonable effort.
Counter-point: When you fly to another time zone, your body naturally adjusts to the new local time. If sleep cycles were totally malleable, you would just stay on your original sleep cycle until you decided to change it.
> Kleitman and Richardson were to be their own experimental guinea pigs. Loaded with food and
water for six weeks and a pair of dismantled, high-standing hospital beds, they took a trip into
Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, one of the deepest caverns on the planet—so deep, in fact, that no
detectable sunlight penetrates its farthest reaches. It was from this darkness that Kleitman and
Richardson were to illuminate a striking scientific finding that would define our biologicalrhythm as being approximately one day (circadian), and not precisely one day.
In addition to food and water, the two men brought a host of measuring devices to assess their
body temperatures, as well as their waking and sleeping rhythms. This recording area formed
the heart of their living space, flanked either side by their beds. The tall bed legs were each
seated in a bucket of water, castle-moat style, to discourage the innumerable small (and not so
small) creatures lurking in the depths of Mammoth Cave from joining them in bed.
The experimental question facing Kleitman and Richardson was simple: When cut off from the
daily cycle of light and dark, would their biological rhythms of sleep and wakefulness, together
with body temperature, become completely erratic, or would they stay the same as those
individuals in the outside world exposed to rhythmic daylight? In total, they lasted thirty-two
days in complete darkness. Not only did they aggregate some impressive facial hair, but they
made two groundbreaking discoveries in the process. The first was that humans, like de
Mairan’s heliotrope plants, generated their own endogenous circadian rhythm in the absence of
external light from the sun. That is, neither Kleitman nor Richardson descended into random
spurts of wake and sleep, but instead expressed a predictable and repeating pattern of
prolonged wakefulness (about fifteen hours), paired with consolidated bouts of about nine
hours of sleep.
But you gotta realize, just having the time clock (suprachiasmatic nucleus) synchronized and working perfectly in no way implies that OP will sleep early.'
Some people are hard-wired at DNA level to sleep late.
Just throwing in my anecdata, used to be a late riser (often after ten), had a kid and now I wake up a bit after six. Sleeping in is after eight. I just have to get up when he does.
If I had to guess, I'd wonder if school conventionally starts early because pre-teens are up early.
That's not how that works. You can go to bed early, but you won't fall asleep. You'll close your eyes and try to sleep, try to relax and empty your mind, yet you will not fall asleep.
Speaking as someone who suffers from the same as OP and heard this suggestions over a million times.
The worst part of this is that society sees those with sleep "disorders" as being lazy and undisciplined, even when their grades (or whatever other measurable output) are higher than their early bird counterparts.
But to be fair to your comments about "no size fits all", there is nothing stopping schools from offering two different schooling times. The school I went to offered classes from either 07:15 to 13:00 or from 13:15 to 19:00. The ratio of early/late students was about 50/50 amongst the younger and 70/30 for high schoolers.
Yet that compromise affects some people much more than others, which is the entire problem, and why some people go so far as to claim discrimination. I do agree that naps are an underutilized solution, but they don't really address the issue.
Personal attacks will get you banned here, regardless of whether someone else read a comment properly. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and don't post like this again.
I'm 46, still not an early riser. I sometimes wake up early, usually due to a bit of stress, but that just messes me up worse since I can't shift my schedule backwards (jetlag going West-to-East is hellish for me). I have become more 'rigid' in my sleep schedule which is better for fitting in with the rest of society than the phase I went through in college when I was on a 26-hour sleep schedule and every 2 weeks I'd rotate my sleep schedule around (generally trying to time the period when I was sleeping right in the daytime for weekends although I'd skip classes on either side). But that rigidity means that its hard to nap (and of course if I nap a bit too long in the day then I wind up staying up until 3am, so usually if I get up too early I wind up having to push through with sleep dep all day and then just hope it doesn't happen the next day -- but the stress itself from not getting enough sleep can cause me to get up early again in a bit of a viscious cycle).
I used to think this way until I realized we program ourselves with words and chose to believe the opposite because neuroplasticity is a thing and we are way less rigid/static creatures than we tell ourselves.
I change my life by changing my words.
Edit: No idea if this is applicable/useful for others, since we are also more complex than simply linguistically programmed machines. It's simply part of my own self-programming experiments. I'm not making claims this will work for all or anyone else; I'm simply sharing my truth. I'm curious if aligning beliefs with intrinsic motivation to change sleep patterns and changing thought/behavior patterns toward morning rising could lead to it.
One of the many fascinating facts I learnt from Matthew Walker's "Why We Sleep" is that the biorhythms of teenagers are shifted to later hours compared to those of adults in all human cultures of the globe, even in those rare societies hardly affected by technology. In evolution this was likely beneficial to make it easier for teenagers to socialize among themselves without adult disturbance, which was necessary to drive their tribe out of its ruts, to pioneer innovation and adaptation to changed conditions. In modern society we are stupid to undermine this by depriving the upcoming generation of their sleep.
This sounds like of a 'just so' story, as evolution is not usually considered to act at the group level, but instead at the individual level: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_selection
And some evolutionary biologists, like Dawkins, argues that it really acts on genes rather than the individual.
So, I might be missing some of the claim, but I find it unlikely that teenagers would stay up later to be away from adults and drive the tribe out of its ruts.
You can still get completely unselfish individual traits out of selfish gene selection (like the entire chapter on runt gene selection). It looks like group selection, Dawkins only argues that the mechanism is selfish genes.
Even he seems to have forgotten he wrote about that though.
That's true, I just meant to express (over-simplistically) that he argued that the mechanism is at the gene-level, which is even farther away from group-selection mechanisms.
The sections about emergent group-level behavior are really fascinating too.
> easier for teenagers to socialize among themselves without adult disturbance
We've also disrupted this with younger kids. They never really get to play without adults in the mix.
I think this is actually one of the reasons why Minecraft was so successful, especially with kids. It gave them a way to explore the wilderness (also rare these days) and a way to interact without adult supervision. They got to be masters of their domain and learn how to cooperate and resolve disputes among themselves.
A better argument is presented by this excerpt from that book.
> humans likely evolved to co-sleep as families or even whole tribes, not alone or as couples. Appreciating
this evolutionary context, the benefits of such genetically programmed variation in sleep/wake
timing preferences can be understood. The night owls in the group would not be going to sleep
until one or two a.m., and not waking until nine or ten a.m. The morning larks, on the other
hand, would have retired for the night at nine p.m. and woken at five a.m. Consequently, the
group as a whole is only collectively vulnerable (i.e., every person asleep) for just four rather
than eight hours, despite everyone still getting the chance for eight hours of sleep. That’s
potentially a 50 percent increase in survival fitness. Mother Nature would never pass on a
biological trait—here, the useful variability in when individuals within a collective tribe go to
sleep and wake up—that could enhance the survival safety and thus fitness of a species by this
amount. And so she hasn’t.
Thanks for giving me the inspiration to read it. This book is just fantastic.
I would argue that this ultimately has to do with one survival trait: who has more sex. I’m guessing that far more teen pregnancy occurs when teens are hanging out without adults around. The ability to shift to different sleep patterns than adults would be among other things, a procreational advantage.
You're mixing a modern model of family structure and sexual relations with evolutionary timescales.
It's very unlikely anyone gave a damn about who was having sex with who and at what age before our population sizes reached levels where paternity mattered.
There actually have been studies of primitive tribes and cultures where it was showed that they just didn't realize pregnancy happens from a single man's sperm, so children were considered the entire tribe's or to have multiple fathers (with actual language terms for the various fathers). There's also some cultures where men first slept with men while growing up before settling down with women due to thinking sperm was a guy giving up his power and younger ones needing it to grow into warriors. So it wasn't really as clear cut as we know it to be today.
But evolution happens whether or not the creatures in question understand evolution or even heredity. (In fact, if they know nothing about it, that makes it easier for evolution to do its thing without interference.) The legendary "shape of the human penis designed to pull out the sperm of other men who have recently had sex with the same woman", if it worked, would do very well evolutionarily in the first kind of culture you describe. Likewise, if teenagers being awake at odd hours does cause them to have sex and reproduce more often, then (assuming the tribe will take care of the children) the genes that cause them to do this will be selected for, whether or not the teenagers or the adults realize it.
Exactly. If jealousy and mate-guarding behaviour evolved in some males, it might spread whether or not they understood what was going on or what the mechanisms are.
One could look at the animal kingdom to get more insight on this, though of course there is such huge variety there that it drives home the point that "it's complicated."
Perhaps the first question we should answer is if our closest primate relatives have this same behavior among their adolescence? Especially given to what extent adolescence is a social construct and not biological (which seems to clash with the idea this is found to happen in all societies, probably an interesting point to look more into).
Sure, having some variation in circadian rhythms among the members of a group makes it easier to have guards at most times of day and night. But such variation exists independently of age: There are "owls" and "larks" at all stages of life. I find it interesting that, on top of that, teenagers specifically and consistently have their individual rhythms shifted towards the later hours.
That's a really interesting point I hadn't considered. And thanks to evolution's pseudorandom algorithm, it could be that the benefit was obtained in conjunction with another benefit (nighttime socializing), that one came about after the other, or that one exists and one doesn't.
I think it is more of an evolved response to predation. You need people awake to watch for threats. Teenagers could do that while adults tend to young kids etc... young kids and grandparents tend to awaken early etc... adults too wake earlier as they age so you reduce the threat window.
Maybe, but I wouldn't have put my teenage self on nightwatch. It wouldn't have been pretty. I'm also getting to the point where I don't think I would trust my father to be on early morning lookout.
Seems like there are enough adults who are night owls and morning larks to cover an adult-only watchfulness.
yea but we're not in tribes, are we? People take this evolutionary bullshit way too seriously, like we still run around with sticks and stones. None of that crap matters when we live in a modern society. Teenages are going to "socialize with themselves" whether they sleep in or not, no matter what, because, guess what, that's what people do in modern times. They can choose.
What they meant is that we evolved in a way that made teenagers having shifted cycles, going to sleep later and waking up later. We're not living in tribes anymore, but evolution is slow and we still cary these biological traits. It therefore hurts teenagers to wake up as early as adults. The point here is not about leaving them more time to socialize in the evening.
Wouldn't accommodating them make evolution slower? Those that have traits making them able to wake up earlier should be "rewarded" if you want to bring change.
I was trying to comment on the irony in adapting to our evolution instead of the other way around. I wasn't trying to advocate any solution. Clearly it didn't come out right based on the replies I got.
Do you realize you're talking about killing people? Evolution happens when the less fit die or otherwise fail to reproduce. If you want to evolve more nocturnal teenagers, the least unpleasant implication is that you want late sleepers to stay sleep-deprived so they'll die in accidents.
We evolved to be remarkably adaptable species. Our social and environmental conditions influence so much, that there is zero reason to assume that any particular behavior in prehistoric time is fixed and not just adaptation.
Moreover, half of those "past evilutionary people were like this or that" is guess made out of flimsy evidence at best. It is best we have maybe, but not accurate. (For that matter, majority of popular "past people were x" is wrong even for periods where we have a lot of documentation of).
My anecdotal evidence is that when I do sleep at night, eat less and have a regular sex, my body works very well in my 30s. Things change instantly once you lower some grips. Something in me is not just adaptation, but finely tuned core mechanisms. In fact, our current live is very different from what serves well to us. And this is even exploited to large extents – see ads, politics, social irrationality. If it were mere adaptation, then we could be rational and adaptive af.
Depriving people (especially, but not only, adolescents) off their sleep is disastrous for their mental health. For instance ADHD may be linked to lack of sleep (Walker suggests this in his book, I don't know how strongly this is backed by studies). Since by now we know that sleep times are driven by physiological factors to a large degree, I find it inhumane to not take these factors into account in scheduling.
Walker sounds quite sceptical of this story in his book, sleep deprivation may be effective as treatment in some cases, but could be a cause of depression in more cases.
As downvoted as this is, this has a point. People point too much to supposed "innate evolved tendencies" while completely discounting social construction and peer pressure and culture, which are definitely relevant.
> was necessary to drive their tribe out of its ruts, to pioneer innovation and adaptation to changed conditions
Surely teenagers could scheme among themselves while adults were awake? All they'd have to do is walk somewhere else. It's not like the adults would constantly be in their way.
Also, those functions may as well be done by adults. For instance startup founders are not all kids right out of college.
Anyway, I'm not disagreeing with the idea that teenagers sleep later, just sceptical about why it is so.
My high school started at 7:45am, unless I had zero period, in which case it was 7am. Throughout the entire four years I was there, I was never able to get my sleep schedule to match up. I would wake up at 6am groggy, irritable, and stupid. This would not change throughout the day, and I'm sure many people thought I was just an idiotic asshole all the time. Sometimes I could catch a nap at lunch.
After school, I would immediately pass out for 2-3 hours, and wake with tons of energy. I wouldn't be able to fall asleep until around 2am because of this, and then the cycle continued.
Now as an engineer with a much more flexible schedule that lets me sleep in, I'm a more attentive, happier, and smarter. I'm convinced that if I had gone to a school with a schedule that matched mine, I would have achieved much more.
> Changing the operating hours of an institution so central to the community is far from easy. It requires strong leadership and adjustments by school bus companies and businesses offering services like child care and extracurricular clubs.
Here's the elephant in the room. High schools start and end earlier with the idea that older kids can watch their siblings.
I'd say a lack of public commitment to child care is also a big reason for the low rate of young people having children commentators like to wring their hands about.
>Here's the elephant in the room. High schools start and end earlier with the idea that older kids can watch their siblings.
I've always been under the impression that start times were staggered for transportation reasons, as you can't drop everyone off at the same time. My experiences are limited to small towns, so I could be way off, but the differences seemed too small for sibling care to be the motive
So I looked at the CDC paper that seems to have influenced this article[1], the average start time for middle school is 8:04, and for high school 7:59. Elementary schools weren't sampled in it.
A later journal article just sampling Kentucky[2] shows elementary starting at 8:05, middle at 8:00, and high school at 8:0:1. Elementary is also the most likely to start before 8, but their average was raised by ten percent starting after 9.
There doesn't seem to be any forced order currently, and you'd likely see younger students get later starts as well.
It makes sense for the order to be older-younger, because high school has a longer day than elementary school, so pushing their start time to after the elementary school will make it so the elementary kids are out at noon or just after and the high school kids won't be done until dinner time. Symmetrical makes it easier for everyone's schedule.
When I was five, kindergarten was a half of a day. Every other grade was a full day, and I'm fairly sure kindergarten was full day by the time I graduated.
It's also not consistent in who starts first. I went to three school districts growing up: in two the elementary students started before the middle and high schoolers and in one the high school and middle school started first. It's pretty arbitrary who starts first.
I have a suspicion that after-school sports is one of the reasons school starts so early. If high school let out between 5 and 6 pm, then that would leave not as much time for sports.
There is a high school in Texas with a $72 million dollar stadium. That should be indicative of where the priorities are.
> Here's the elephant in the room. High schools start and end earlier with the idea that older kids can watch their siblings.
That's an interesting postulation, but is it born out by societies where most families have a single child?
What were the child care options like at the time that the current school hours were developed (I'm guessing this is close to a century ago).
Do all relatively-civilised societies have the same attitude towards school hours and public commitment to child care?
If not, then trying to identify some correlations would be informative.
My gut feel is it's entirely unrelated to older siblings looking after younger ones -- partly because if both are at school at the same time, that problem is already solved.
I suspect the root cause is probably something more simple -- at the time school hours were decided, schools / education departments looked to how it was done elsewhere, be it neighbouring schools / states, or failing that, simply aligning the hours with what was commonly regarded as a 'good honest day's work'.
Clearly this would all have been a long time before anyone knew about, let alone considered, age-specific circadian rhythm variations.
Jesus, we know more than enough about it now -- the damage lack of sleep does to adults, and its profound importance through development especially in the teenage years -- and yet it'll be at least a decade before even the more progressive western societies shift teenage school hours forward by a few hours.
> What were the child care options like at the time that the current school hours were developed (I'm guessing this is close to a century ago).
Unless you also consider how likely it is that Mom is working I'm not sure that's the way I'd do it, especially because school officials explicitly say they do what they are doing because of this issue, and also, why do you think the article mentioned childcare?
> My gut feel is it's entirely unrelated to older siblings looking after younger ones -- partly because if both are at school at the same time, that problem is already solved.
Think about this for a second. Mom and Dad work from 9:00-5:00 and then have an hour+ of commuting to do. All the schools get at or before 5:00. Is it more desirable for high schooler Joseph to get home before his 8-year-old sister, or the other way around?
> Unless you also consider how likely it is that Mom is working ..
I did consider that, and factored it into the historical shift in attitudes about both parents working, compared to when school hours were determined.
> ... especially because school officials explicitly say they do what they are doing because of this issue, and also, why do you think the article mentioned childcare?
You're assuming your school officials are fully cognisant of post hoc ergo propter hoc
It's possible childcare is the easy option and doesn't require much pondering or historical analysis.
As I noted, correlating how things are done there to elsewhere in the world, and elsewhere in time, may be informative in determining actual causation, rather than just correlation.
> Think about this for a second. Mom and Dad work from 9:00-5:00 and then have an hour+ of commuting to do. All the schools get at or before 5:00. Is it more desirable for high schooler Joseph to get home before his 8-year-old sister, or the other way around?
Yeah, you're making quite a few assumptions. I'm not sure how old Joseph is meant to be in this anecdote, but presumably older than 8yo, and (also presumably) attends a different school. The idea that different aged children attend significantly different geographical / scheduled schools is relatively modern too (I'd suggest a much more recent change than determination of school hours).
No, as I said before, I suspect this is all much more simply ascribed to doing what seemed appropriate at the time (aligning to a standard adult work schedules) and determined in the absence of any good understanding of circadian rhythms, variations during development, and importance of 8 hours sleep.
In my HS, we started about 1 hour after elementary school/middle school and got out slightly after them. I recall as a child I had to have a baby sitter until my sister picked me up after getting out of HS, and I remember when I was in HS, I saw them getting picked up by the buses about an hour before mine came.
High school started at 7:30 AM (actually 7:00 during some years since I had to take a math class a different high school, then commute to my high school). Elementary school started at 8:30 or 9:00, I forget exactly which.
"public" meaning what. Both legally and socially, caring for children is mandatory.
We had a breakdown of extended family structure (aunts watching the kids for an hour or two) and neighborhoods (same but for elderly neighbors, sometimes compensated). Everyone knows child care is labor intensive. Nobody knows how to pay for it is all.
(I feel like it goes without saying, but the idea that $90b for a program that would seriously improve many people's lives is unthinkable but another $50b for what is already, a few times over, the world's largest military budget, for a country facing no serious threats to its own security, is a trifle not even worth serious discussion is a false one, if you ask me).
Well, no one else has said it, so I guess I drew the short straw.
Teenagers are most likely wired for later nights because they have reached initial fertility. They will sneak off in the night to fool around, especially if they haven't had a child yet. At the risk of sounding patronizing, this is how babies are made. Adolescence is the age when women would first become pregnant, and the ancient's concept of marriage was probably not the same as ours. (There is evidence of monogamistic tendencies in humans for a long time but that isn't synonymous with marriage.)
Teenagers are biologically wired to want lots of sex and they tend to do it at night. I would put a lot of money on the fact that that hasn't changed in millennia.
Obviously, this is a critical aspect of the process that allows for the continuation of the human race. Humans didn't have the consistent ability to wait to reproduce until 30 as is common now. And probably not the desire too; I can't see career-building interfering.
The initial party must have ended pretty quickly. Poor ancient teeenagers.
(Edit: considering this speculative is reasonable and factually correct. But speculating there's been behavior change is currently more speculative. What reason do we have to think teens had daytime sex in ancient times and our behavior has changed? What about for mature adults? Never heard of an existing tribal culture that mostly has sex during the day, and that's how we get much of our anthropological evidence.
Humans tend to have sex at night, and the most fertile, desirious and energetic would be wired to spend more time at the time people have sex doing it: that would be selected for because of our primary biological directive. Is there a more logical evolutionary reason?)
Aren't you simply making a baseless guess with nothing to back it up? Why would there be biological pressure to mate at night? I don't understand how you're so self assured (unless you read something on this which I haven't, in which case please share :)) If you don't, then I don't understand the purpose of phrases such as
>The article misses the point almost to the point of absurdity.
Oh, I don't know about that. In Ekrich's ' At Day's Close: Night in Times Past' [1] seems in pre-industrial age society the norm was 'bi-modal sleep'.
First or "deep" or "dead" sleep, as it was sometimes called, often seems to have taken place shortly after sunset, or at least before 10 in the evening. After two to four hours of the night's deepest rest, people would wake up for an hour or two, then resume sleep for another stretch before rising with the light.
During this waking period, people would relax, ponder their dreams, or have sex.
Many might find the later a good description of teenage behavior. Couple that with the physiological fact that
For men, levels of testosterone are highest during sleep and require at least three hours sleep to reach this peak. [2]
It'll likely be the nth time Matthew Walker is cited here, but in his interview with Joe Rogan, he mentions this is likely a societal trend rather than a biological need:
> Joe Rogan: Yeah, I've heard this recently, that people - that you should have two sleeps. The idea of two sleeps.
> Matthew Walker: Yeah, it's actually a little different than the idea of two sleeps. So there was a time in the sort of Dickensian era where people would sleep for the first half of the night, maybe sort of 4 hours or so. Then they would wake up, they would socialize, they would eat, they would make love, then they would go back and have a second sleep. If you look at natural biological rhythms in the brain and the body, that doesn't really seem to be how we were designed. It certainly seems to be something that we did in society, but I think it's more of a societal trend than it was a biological edict. However, we do seem to have two sleep periods. Those tribes will often sleep about 6.5, 7 hours of sleep at night. And then especially in the summer they'll have that siesta like behavior in the afternoon. And all of us have that, sort of this - what's called the post-prandial dip in alertness, just means "after lunch" - and if I measure your brainwave activity with electrodes, I can see a drop in your physiological alertness somewhere between 2 to 4 pm in the afternoon [irrespective of diet].
I'm not sure this is true. Yes, adolescence is when childbearing ability and the associated hormonal incentives start, but where is this "sex must happen at night" component coming from? If anything, I would guess that's a modern phenomenon being retrofitted onto the past.
It’s pure conjecture until the commenter posts some sources. Now I feel patronizing pointing it out, but you don’t have to stay up late to have sex. I think this is modern cultural norms being propped with pseudo science.
That doesn't mean that having a 'late night' trait wasn't advantageous to mating. For example, when humans started pair bonding, infidelity may have been more common among those who could sneak out under the cover a darkness while their partner was asleep, spreading that trait further than those who remained monogamous. It is easy to think of many possible reasons why a late night trait could have been advantageous in spreading that trait further than those who naturally followed a more daytime rhythm during teenage years.
Or it could just be random chance. Either way, it's fun to discuss. We don't have to dismiss all fun discussion because it may be conjecture. It is only the comments section of HN, not a respected scientific publication. Time and place.
Also, when your jobs are a) finding berries and hunting mammoths and b) having sex, it is not implausible that doing a) during the day and b) during the night gives you more reproductive success than vice versa.
It is fun speculation, but still, OP's self-assured "this is so trivial" tone was not called for.
I mean, my impression from reading 19th century novels is that people used to just slip into a convenient glen or wooded area, it wasn't that hard before the industrial era.
I'd say visibility, permission avoidance, the excitement, and I'm sure there's more. Just like now, why would it have changed? For what specific reasons? Obviously spring and summer would be easier. I don't think that's retrofitting; I think we're continuing it still and the lack of recognition of that is confusing me.
I'm positive they figured out how to have sex in the day as well when possible. But nomadic daytime marching would reduce opportunity, and in a hunting culture it would be harder to separate a woman because of daily gender-disparate activities. In a predominantly gatherer culture, perhaps it was easier.
You couldn't do much of anything at night with stone-age lighting technology. Sneaking around at night would be more likely to net you a tryst with a nearby tree branch or ditch than an exciting sexual encounter.
You’re really off about that. Our night vision is actually pretty good, especially if you’ve used it for every night of your life. Fire’s clearly been with us for long enough to be a factor, in addition.
I’m against the hypothesis though, if only for the fact that energy levels peak shortly after waking up - “why we sleep” discusses this a little.
That book also suggests the variety of sleep patterns exists for evolutionary reasons. Ie we are social creatures. Having a multitude of waking/restful cycles in a group kept our ancestors protected with a nearly round the clock group of protectors - who evers sleep cycle woke them up when ever.
It isn't good enough to see what's going on when it's actually pitch black, which it is most of the time at night.
> Fire
Lighting a fire at night in the place where you're having sex seems like a pretty good way to get discovered.
> Having a multitude of waking/restful cycles in a group kept our ancestors protected with a nearly round the clock group of protectors - who evers sleep cycle woke them up when ever.
This is a just so story. If we all had the same sleep patterns, you could just as well point out that there would also be advantages to that arrangement.
> It isn't good enough to see what's going on when it's actually pitch black, which it is most of the time at night.
You mean in a thunderstorm, maybe? Or a fog bank?
On a clear night, even with no moon, humans can see quite well. Since rod vision is used, it is difficult to do fine work (reading, sewing, soldering, ....), but just walking around outside is no problem.
If you want to see the night for yourself, try spending a few nights camping out somewhere away from artificial lighting. Don’t bring along any of those terrible “white” LED flashlights – they completely clobber night vision. It takes about a half hour for eyes to fully adapt to the dark.
> It isn't good enough to see what's going on when it's actually pitch black, which it is most of the time at night.
It's pitch-black for city dwellers with eyes unadapted to darkness. Weather allowing, for most of the time you have moonlight providing good enough illumination to (carefully) navigate the outside.
Matthew Walker, PhD in his book "Why We Sleep" discussed sleep cycles and their variances from one person to the next. Specifically, during his discussion of circadian rhythm in chapter 2. From page 22: "As a social species, should we not all be synchronized and therefore awake at the same time to promote maximal human interactions? Perhaps not. As we'll discover later in this book, humans likely evolved to co-sleep as families or even whole tribes, not alone or as couples. Appreciating this evolutionary context, the benefits of such genetically programmed variation in sleep/wake timing preferences can be understood. The night owls in the group would not be going to sleep until one or two a.m., and not waking until nine or ten. [...] Consequently the group as a whole is only collectively vulnerable."
He discussed varying sleep cycles across individuals. Specifically, he suggested society needs to be more inclusive of different sleep patterns and needs. Instead, society rewards people who naturally wake early in the morning at the cost of "night owls". All in the same area of the book.
You're welcome to research and earn your own PhD in neurology and author your own book on sleep patterns, but I'll stick with Dr Walker's work.
>You couldn't do much of anything at night with stone-age lighting technology
I grew up in upstate New York and could actually run 5 miles around the nearby lake in the woods any night, even moonless ones. You can see the silhouette of the trees against the stars and it isn't even really needed once you memorize the trail anyway. And that was just for exercise. I imagine horny teenagers would be even more hard working.
I, and I assume most guys (and gals) in their puberty were horny most of the time, but my being a night owl I don't think factored into that at all. I studied much better at night, I was a lot more creative (music mostly) at night, and everything was more peaceful at night. I was horny too, I guess, but that was more of a 24/7 thing.
Same here. I don't think it's a stretch to say that increased teen sexual energy, inextricably bound to increased general energy, was a big part of that, whether sexually active or not. In fact sublimated sexual desire/energy can be extremely helpful in creative endeavors. It's the essence of creativity, the creation of a new human life is pretty hard to top power-wise.
> ...no competing theory that does have hard evidence has been proposed, so current behavior is actually the first rationalization.
I think it would be even more reasonable to investigate WHY this is being discovered now rather than a long time ago. What has changed in the lives of teens now compared to 3 or 4 decades ago?
I suspect one thing is a much higher percentage of "structured time". Teens today seem to have far more time obligations than my generation did. As a result, socializing and free-time ends up getting pushed to interstitial times, late at night _and_ online.
Young people need unstructured time for ad-hoc socializing and discovering who they are and there is less opportunity for that now so it happens later at night when their obligations have been met and the time is their own. That's a simpler explanation than primate sexual urges.
Very slight digression. I can't stop thinking that modern 'college' oriented societies forgot to take biology into account.
IMO teenage perception of the world, which triggers the frenzy need to act, create, be seen; this is how I interpret pseudonyms and graffiti for instance.
A century ago, the average independance was ~16, similarly some religion have rites of passage in mid teens to signal a change of status. I think they did notice there was a need for teens to change lifestyle.
This teenager sleep cycle thing is a bit of a revelation to me. I thought I just had bad habits, but when I was that age, I'd play games most of the evening, maybe do one or two bits of homework at 10om, and then possibly stay up to 1am with some essay that I'd procrastinate on for ages. I'd wake up at something like 7am and sleep on the train until I got into school, and then sleep after getting home at about 4pm for an hour or two.
It would have been a lot more comfortable getting in for maybe 10am and leaving at 5pm. I remember sometimes you'd have a special day in the week where there were no classes in the morning, meaning you started late. And then maybe an extra lesson or activity in the evening. But similar length of day, shifted, felt much better.
Having worked for longer than I went to school for now, I think the school calendar needs an overhaul. There's no reason to take a huge holiday in the summer. In fact, why have any holiday at all? Just have school on all the time, and let people take holidays whenever they want, like at work. You won't forget things as easily taking week or two week holidays as against 8 week ones. Also it means parents won't have their holidays dictated by the school.
Within the day, I also wonder about the frequency of context switches. You might be taking 6 classes a day: PE, French, Math, English, History, Physics.
Now image you are coding, and you do this: Troubleshoot the rendering issue on the website, install a lock free ring on your trading system, write a SIMD function in CUDA, fix your cmake file dependencies, add unit tests to your CI script, and set up Kubernetes.
Would you do those things one at a time, or in little pieces where you have to pick up where you left off arbitrarily?
It seems you should have large blocks, maybe just morning and afternoon, rather than dozens of little classes each week.
But then possibly as a teenager concentration is an issue, I don't know. I certainly think it's better to focus on one thing at a time, quite a long time, before changing contexts.
Same thing when I was having massive sleep issues with years of constantly having symptoms of chronic sleep deprivation. Turned out I just had a condition called ‘delayed sleep phase disorder’. Being diagnosed and reading about sleep cycles was also a bit of a revelation to me. DSPD pretty much just means that as an adult I have a similar circadian rhythm to an adeloscent. As soon as I started regularly getting up at around 10am instead of 7-8am and just going to bed when I felt tired, all the symptoms disappeared, with no meds or anything.
It’s lucky that I have a flexible workplace and a supervisor who has a kid with a sleep disorder, because the hardest thing about having this disorder is that it’s so hard for anybody with a normal cycle to understand how inflexible circadian rhythms are. You hear all sorts of BS about “you just need to be more disciplined”, etc. which just doesn’t work.
Block scheduling has been common for years and “balanced” schedules where you don’t have large summer breaks are becoming common as well.
The latter is harder because of how many societal conventions we’ve built up. There are lots of systems in place for childcare in the summer. Less so for longer fall/winter/spring breaks. This largely isn’t a huge deal for teenagers but having school systems operating on 2 major calendars is a challenge.
Honestly, I disagree with you on the summer part. When I was in high school, summer gave everyone a much needed break, and gave us the opportunity to work a job, do internships, and prepare for the sat/act. Summer is a time where students dont need to feel bound by school and do what they want, which is important for learning to be an adult.
I agree with this as well. No matter how hard I tried, I could not fall asleep early enough to get a decent nights sleep before having to be back at school in the morning. "Just go to bed earlier" and all of the other unhelpful suggestions lofted my way did not solve the problem. As a result, I suffered greatly with chronic fatigue throughout high school and beyond.
Had I been able to sleep properly during those years, I might be a completely different person now.
To this day, I cannot (and will not) work a Monday-Friday 8-5 job.
This bothers me too. Knowing the sleep requirements of teenagers and how much I actually got, and knowing the effects of sleep deprivation on cognition and growth, I can only imagine that I’d be smarter and taller with proper sleep (and better nutrition) while growing up.
I wonder if it'd just be easier for high schools to convert over to a college model: students are free to pick courses corresponding to their preferred times, and to leave and enter campus on will. Of course, there will be incentives to consider -- why would a high schooler attend their classes if they're not paying directly out of pocket? In contrast, a school district would try to maximize the attendance rate as that's how funding works (at least in California).
In hindsight, there's always a tension between high schoolers and those who administrate them; it's never a partnership since teenagers are quick to abuse / misuse a privilege.
Honestly, direct pay for attendance would be a great incentive for the poorest demographics. A few dollars can be make-or-break at the margin and even greedy parents that misuse the funds would end up wanting to get the kid showing up and not getting in fights - the bare minimum for a school day to go by undisturbed.
I'd be all for that, as long as there were negative penalties as well. E.g. Disturbing class = no points. Failing homework = no points. Failing test = losing all accumulated points. Failing end of year exams for the subject = lose all money for that subject. I.e. Attendance is only part of the equation, actually fostering learning/growth is what you really want, even if it's semi-artificial. Otherwise you're just making another perverse incentive for kids to keep their butts in the seat and not really engage.
And then further on, only give the money back in the subsequent year, month to month. Make it a long-term commitment with a pay-off.
The problem with that is that low-income families either plain can't afford, or tend to be completely bad at delaying gratification for long-term rewards.
Agreed. Education by itself and the benefits it gives are very long term, too. So this payment has benefit in that it's a quicker return than plain education and would impact a net amount of people. Perhaps there may even be network effects in that those that are able to plan for this medium-term returns can convince and be examples for those that aren't able to.
This seems like a great way to kill the public secondary school system. What percentage of kids do you estimate would stop going to class under this model?
I went to a high school that had a college-like schedule with the campus covering a few buildings in downtown (small city). Attendance wasn't mandatory, grades were exam/deliverable based.
The freedom was great for high-achievers. Normal students showed up to classes like normal. Almost-dropouts didn't go to class and waste everyone's time (eventually they were transferred to regular high-school).
I learned valuable life-lessons compared to the hand-holding and babysitting done in other high schools, and highly recommend the model.
I'm not surprised by this at all. I just wonder what the percentages of each roughly defined category is. I'll also point out that, in your case, there were fallback alternatives. If all high schools operated this way, what's the fallback?
Thanks for sharing. I'd be interested to read more about the program.
Attendance is mandatory already. This will just make it easier for kids to leave. In fact, they'll be coming and going all the time. Isn't that the whole point?
How would it make it easier? the rules for attendance would be the same. It is already fairly easy to skip school, especially if there is an open lunch or you
can forge a parental note. You can also set up classes in a way that doesnt allow for more than 30-60 minutes between classes, allowing relaxation in common areas and the library, for example. Or allow more freedom as kids age.
Just because it is "more like college" doesnt mean it is an exact replica.
We all know that the same teenagers that want to sneak out of their houses at night to go on their escapades (typically 2:1 supervision) would totally follow the rules of mandatory attendance (40:1 supervision )
To be fair, I snuck out from time to time and rarely missed school. Those things dont really go together like you imply. Missing school has totally different consequences and besides, I never really found school useless. I even took AP classes.
Some kids skip school. I did... twice in my school career. I imagine some kids would still skip school, but there is no real reason to think it would be higher than it is now.
That's how it works in Finland in lukio (upper secondary school between 9th grade and university), we picked the courses ourselves and left/entered campus on will. Looks like the course-based system was introduced in 1982.
And personally I did prefer course instances that were later on the day over those that were earlier.
We still had mandatory lesson attendance, though, unlike most university courses.
> students are free to pick courses corresponding to their preferred times, and to leave and enter campus on will.
I was doing this as a senior in HS in the 90s. Because I had been ahead since elementary school, by the time I was a senior in HS there were only a couple classes left I needed to take. I showed up late, left early and most days went to work.
The best ranking high school in my area (south of the Netherlands) works more or less like this (I don't think all attendance is fully at will). There is a lot of innovation going on in this space, even those who were in high schools just 5 years ago would notice major changes.
A high school I attended had a fairly novel system that's not too far off from this. People in the program I was in would get to school at 8 and leave at 12, with a good deal of variety in what classes they chose to attend. And classes were run on a college schedule with two sets of classes - short MWF classes and longer TTh classes.
The overall affect of this is that good students would end up receiving a more directed education and were in a much more desirable system with immense freedom to pursue their education and growth as they saw fit. But at the same time 'less good' students did extremely poorly. And I think in general there is going to be a strong connection between increasing freedom and increasing the polarization of results. In a way it's really an educational analog of the differences between capitalism and communism.
This was actually an opinion piece a while back that seemingly got updated around the actual news [1]: Governor Brown vetoed the bill in California to start at 8:30 AM or later.
I'm an early riser, always has been. My brother and mother are night owls but I somehow got my father's gene for getting up very early in the morning. All through high school I had a long walk to the train and had to get up at 6. I don't think I was ever late because of my tardiness. Today when I get to work at 8.30 I've already done my workout and some work on hobby stuff. This has been the case since my early 20s.
On the flip side, staying up late at night is absolutely horrible. I love hackathons and have been to three of them with my colleagues this year and I'm always such a buzz kill when I have to get some sleep past midnight. I wake up and a lot of the best code has already been written by them.
We're all different. I wish society was more adapted to people of all configurations, with more adaptable work schedules. And party schedules, even though missing out on them is not as bad as all the ways night owls are judged as lazy by ignorant people.
I'm not sure I like the reasoning in this article. They go to bed later because of FB and other stuff, which makes them not have enough sleep before school. Then it's the school, rather than the FB-ing that has to give way?
If they wake up and start school later, what's to say their FB-ing won't shift even later, causing them to sleep even later, and then again we're back where we started?
Teens ain’t on Facebook in my part of the globe. It’s all Instagram and Snapchat. The latest craze is multiparty live video where a couple of teens will broadcast themselves doing goofy stuff while all their friends watch remotely from their devices.
I was in a boarding school with hundreds of other teenagers. My classmates never* slept in (always attended the first class), and I’ve never seen anyone sleeping in from other classes/groups. We went to classes and were in a good shape, I don’t recall anyone complaining.
There was one exception - a classmate that I believe was secretely drinking alcohol. Even for him it was an exception to sleep in. Also I’ve see the monitor looking for the sleepers, like that guy, so the problem was not entirely unknown.
We were not selected based on our sleep, but on academic performance. This was long ago and we were poor enough to allow no electronic devices whatsoever, alcohol was forbidden, and lights-out were strictly enforced. Not much spare food either after dinner.
The “teenage owl” thing has to be almost entirely environmental in order to explain my experience.
What were the consequences (both formal and informal) if a student slept in?
People can do things that are both unpleasant and harmful to them for extended periods of time if subjected to sufficient coercion, social pressure, or reward.
No one ever complained about poor performance due to lack of sleep the way modern-day "owls" do. I don't think it matters how they (we) were forced to observe the regime, only that it yielded the result - lark sleep and good performance for near 100% of students. My point is that the "owl" thing is environmental.
To answer your question, tardy students would be admonished by the teacher/supervisor/monitor and possible written up. After several incidents (and several escalation layers in between) they would be expelled. Never happened in practice.
You didn't mention when you woke up or when classes started. An hour can make a world of difference.
Selection based on academic performance usually means above-average intelligence, which is still an asset when you're tired. It also means you were selected partly based on how well you dealt with your previous schools' start times.
You mentioned this was long ago. The subject is better studied now and people are more aware of it. Even still, a lot of people insist it's a matter of discipline. Would it have been socially acceptable for someone to complain about it publicly or even among their friends? Did most have anything to compare it to?
You’re right about the selection bias, there was a competitive aspect in the admission process. But it wasn’t all competition, a brainy owl kid would only need to rise so high before being swept into the school.
I’m pretty sure they would complain. Also they would point out something about learning much better in the evening than morning like the owls do, and that never happened. We had kids complaining about not enough hours in the day, for example.
I think there’s a lot of insight to be gained from the pre-iPhone days of various boarding institutions with diffferent selection criteria - STEM, religious, military, arts (?), wealth.
If the majority of students are owls by nature, and everyone was being coerced into a lark schedule, how would you know if that had a detrimental effect or not? There's no control group.
I'm sure that's true for certain values of "just fine".
Would you notice, however, if to the extent such things could be quantified, on average, students were falling 10% short of their potential? 20%? Would you notice a 10% increase in mild to moderate mental health issues within the student population?
We're not talking about differences so dramatic an untrained observer would notice a problem. Your observations are sufficient to say that severe, acute harm from putting teenagers on a lark schedule is unlikely, or at least rare. The article doesn't say that there's acute harm, just that a later schedule is better for the health and academic performance of students.
Fair enough. I was thinking more about modern-day adult owls with their "look at me, I can't function without coffee, ha-ha" jokes. 10-20% degradation wouldn't be visible that way, especially given that people came in with huge academic variance already and there is no baseline to work with.
> Anyone who talks about sleep as if it’s some kind of inconvenience and getting less of it is a virtue should be challenged. These people are dangerous.
This statement was bizarrely totalitarian. I actually agree with the fundamental premise that many schools probably start too early. But to say those who take the other side are dangerous people who need to be challenged? Too far.
Ironically, I think this Soviet-esque mentality that "people who disagree with idea X are dangerous" is dangerous!
As Vi Hart explains here[0], it's critical that you establish enemies for your followers if you wish them to crusade for you. Playful banter and "agreeing to disagree" don't cut it. You have to dehumanize them.
Wouldn't the average teenager just stay up even longer? It's not like they are hardcoded to wake up at a certain clock time.
I think it would make much more sense to change the content of school during those years to reflect the interests of students better. Let them take a break, do something practical, do projects, etc. instead of trying to cram facts into their heads. A lot of stuff I headed to learn when I was 13 I learned easily 5 years later, and vice versa.
That difference may be delayed sleep phase syndrome, which affects about 1 in 7 teens. You can mitigate it around the edges with sleep hygiene, but even doing everything correctly they're still going to behind adults with earlier chronotypes.
That they are "hardcoded" in this way is one of the major points of this piece. Changing the curriculum, whatever its merits or demerits, is not going to result in fewer teens dying in car crashes.
I don't know why this doesn't get brought up in every one of these conversations.
As someone who was recently a teenager, if school started an hour later, I would have stayed up another hour. Most of my friends were the same way.
One of the things people seem to miss is late nights are generally when teenagers have the most freedom. With your parents asleep no one is awake to bother you.
> Wouldn't the average teenager just stay up even longer? It's not like they are hardcoded to wake up at a certain clock time.
Additionally, what about the teens who do get up early? I feel like these studies are sometimes trying to explain something that really is simple to understand. Kids stay up later today because there is so much more keeping them awake. If they stay up late, then they need to sleep later to get the sleep they need.
Growing up, my friends and a I almost all got up with the sun. All the activities we wanted to do revolved around the daytime. As a consequence we were usually asleep not much later than 10pm.
Delayed sleep in adolescence has been observed in controlled settings, across levels of technological development, and even in other mammals.
School schedules currently require many teenagers to get up before the sun just to get to classes, let alone before-school activities.
The proposal is to start classes no earlier than 8:30. According to the statistics in the article, 14% of schools already do. 90% would have to change their start times by an hour or less. That's also around the time most adults arrive at work.
The few early risers can find something to do with the extra time, be happy for their friends, and take comfort in the lower rate of car accidents.
This is nothing new. What's more irritating to me is that these articles generate lots of conversation, but not one school will adjust its hours. Put up or shut up.
Well, you're assuming that just because we think it might be better for the kids, we should automatically do it. Everything is a compromise, including school scheduling. In particular, for any households where both parents work, shifting school hours could be a serious burden. Easy for those of us who work in an office with a flexible schedule, or have a stay-at-home mom/dad, but we're in the minority.
>Three out of every four students in grades 9 to 12 fail to sleep the minimum of eight hours that the American Academy of Sleep Medicine recommends for their age group
Do 3/4 teens fail in life? Do they develop debilitating disorders and such?
I guess I've heard for years we need more sleep yet we don't sleep and we continue living. May be certain things like stress and work are troublesome and such but that seems more like the issue than lack of sleep is.
Low sleep seems to correlate with disorders like diabetes, obesity, and cancer, which are definitely disorders of modernity. It also impairs cognitive performance in lab studies. Going through the book Why We Sleep right now and it’s eye opening for sure.
It’s not necessarily that they become failures but rather that they are being deprived of the mental capacity to reach their full potential every day.
They would be more successful if they got more sleep, so it makes sense to give teens a couple more hours to benefit society as a whole, even if only marginally.
I don't think my point is clear so let me restate it. 75% is a majority of people. 75% of people aren't deficient in some way, as far as I know, staying up all night as teens and living a life didn't make them maladjusted or deprived in some sense. Moreover, I don't know or feel like there is evidence that high performers in society sleep more than anyone else.
The whole "sleep more" mantra feels like the "eat less fat" mantra of the 90s which turned out to be not only false but detrimental to public health as fat became replaced by sugar.
Just because you can't see if people are drastically affected in ways you perceive; especially years after the fact, doesn't mean it's not affecting people.
It's just as possible the "high performers who don't sleep" are the least healthy people in society, and our society rewards unhealthy habits...oh wait...
On my way to work today I saw a couple of school buses picking up students at about 6:45. Now if you think that's too early and we should have schools open later, I see a real problem. By law where I live, all traffic, in both directions, has to stop when school buses pick up kids. Put those buses on the road between 8:00 and 9:00 and the already horrible rush hour traffic would get way worse. Along with making everyone's commute longer, every school bus route would take longer. Students would have to be picked up earlier relative to the school's opening time to allow for the slower traffic.
One problem for adults in the US at least, the center of gravity for many institutions is on the East Coast, New York for finance or DC for the government. Huge numbers of people on the west coast start their workday at 6a or 7a to align to accommodate east coast peers or organizations. If the European settlement of the US had been done in reverse, I can easily see a world where Virginians are regularly staying at work till 8p because that’s when their customer is available.
My daughter's school just changed all lessons to start an hour later for a few cohorts, as an experiment. My daughter likes that she gets to sleep longer. But it also means we don't get to see each other at breakfast, however brief that is.
I'm worried that more or less halving the number of times we see each other will have an impact on social cohesion. Of course, one solution would be for everyone to just started an hour later. Or two :-)
> I'm worried that more or less halving the number of times we see each other will have an impact on social cohesion. Of course, one solution would be for everyone to just started an hour later. Or two :-)
As a teenager I would hate you for that :). Part of the reason I seem to be wired for night life since my teenage years is probably because that's the time everyone else is asleep, giving time to think, concentrate, enjoy experiences without interruptions, and generally not be interrupted by other people's random nonsense.
Throughout high school I had the worst attendance record in the entire grade. For a few days after having stayed home, though, I was much sharper than the other sleepy kids. Then I started to feel tired again.
In asia, especially in rural areas, it is common to wake up early, between 5:30 and 6:00 and do a lot of things, including playing football, before reaching school at 9 am. And, you see, they are perfectly healthy and smart.
Of course, almost everyone is going to bed about 9 or 10 pm.
Failure to take into account cultural and social differences plague so-called studies all the time.
Rice as the cause of health problems is another example. Almost 2/3 of humanity consume rice on a daily basis, sometimes few times per day.
But maybe not too much? My parents let me sleep. School started at 9:00 for me but on weekends and holidays I would sleep for more than ten hours and default to a >24 hour circadian rhythm. I would eventually become completely nocturnal which is kinda funny and considered typical for a geek like me, but it really messed up my mental health for a number of years afterwards. I wasn't able to maintain "normal" sleeping patterns until my late 20s.
Or better yet, bring back apprenticeship and give them something to do other than worthless high school. I almost didn't get my first programming job because I had to be paid under the table at 17 due to child labor laws.
If you want to enrich teenagers' lives, offering them something other than a prison sentence where kids ruthlessly torment each other seems a decent way. It worked for most of history.
School's purpose is to introduce kids to things they otherwise wouldn't have a chance to learn.
Coming from a poor, working class family, an apprenticeship-driven society like those of centuries ago would've resulted in me being trapped doing back-breaking labor and having no chance to escape.
But I got a chance to study tech and other languages, got interested in things my family could never understand, and moved to another country to pursue what made me happy.
I think offering a choice of apprenticeships would be good, but discouraging schooling in any way in favor of them would lead back to cycles of poverty and and end to the upward movement we've seen in the past century with the introduction of widespread public education.
While I agree to your general sentiment, there are countries where apprenticeship systems work fairly well - Switzerland (full disclosure, I'm Swiss) is in my opinion one of those examples. At the age of around 14, you can choose to either proceed further with school or to get an apprenticeship. About 20% stay in school, 80% go the apprenticeship route. You still have usually two days of school during apprenticeship (with about 50-50 general education and education with focus on the kind of job you have chosen), and plenty of options to switch back to routes for higher education at any time.
Meanwhile in Ameriburger, the kids tear each other to shreds. It sounds like the educational opportunities you got were what I spent years fantasizing about, wondering if there was anything better than going from mostly-dead teacher to mostly-dead teacher and forced to memorize pointless geographical facts in exchange for ... nothing at all, as far as I could tell.
I really don't think sending kids off to learn a trade is going to change America's problem of violence. That's a deep-rooted American cultural problem and a big reason why I left (having been a victim of crime several times).
This is a false dichotomy - the only options arent "have gang land fights in all our schools" or "commit everyone to manual labor apprenticeships". If we're considering big changes to the education system, why isn't a safe learning environment on the cards?
Each to their own. An apprenticeship wouldn't work for something like the sciences where you need to understand the theory before you can work under someone more senior. But you're right, for vocational training where you learn by doing having the option of an apprenticeship may be far more fruitful than staying in school.
Switzerland is "kind of" a famous for his apprenticeship system. I myself went trough an apprenticeship, and that didn't prevented me to get a University Master's degree later on.
A random web search gave me this relatively recent article [1] presenting it. It says that 2/3 of students goes through apprenticeship:
«In Switzerland, two-thirds of students in the final stage of secondary education opt for vocational training, mostly in three or four year “dual” programmes combining classroom study with workplace training.»
> An apprenticeship wouldn't work for something like the sciences where you need to understand the theory before you can work under someone more senior.
At the university, we actually had a very successful internship program for high school students (in particle physics). It turns out there is a lot you can learn by "learning by doing".
Also the actual day-to-day work of a master or PhD student is not too different from an apprentice in crafts - but very different from a school or univerity student. You learn by being embedded in a working group and performing actual work, instead of only sitting in class and learning from books.
> An apprenticeship wouldn't work for something like the sciences where you need to understand the theory before you can work under someone more senior.
Do you have any evidence for that or is it an assertion? I feel very confident that the top decile of those who complete an apprenticeship as a Chenistry lab tech or as a Computer Programmer could go straight into a UK doctoral programme. If the proportion of academically inclined entrants increased so would the proportion capable. I’m sure they’d have massive gaps in their knowledge compared to those who went through a theory focused Bachelor’s but you learn plenty of theory with one to two days a week of class and you can apply it immediately so you’re going to remember it.
On a more Anglophone note lambda school seem to be doing great at training web programmers and data scientists in six months of full time project based work. It’s not an apprenticeship but it looks a lot more like it than any university.
We have this kind of system, and it works extremely well for most professions that don’t require a master’s degree, and where the field doesn’t change too quickly. It is a mix of school and apprenticeship. Great, for example, for becoming a nurse, less great for programming since the field moves so fast.
For higher education, we still have the old school university system. Students usually leave university with little industry experience beyond a few internships, but especially the technical universities put a lot of focus on preparing their students as well as possible for the real world.
It‘s just an observation. The apprenticeship system stems from the old guilds. There is no support yet for learning programming that way. It will take a while, the system evolves very slowly.
You can become a web designer/developer through apprenticeship at least. And there's the "dual studium" ideas that at least follow a similar model in some ways, which a bunch of large technical companies offer.
In practice, apprenticeship/traineeship starts too late. As you said, there should be something like it during / instead of high school, not after high school.
We had an apprentice at work (in Germany) who was going to a Waldorf school I think. They do a half-year apprenticeship as opposed to three weeks as the others do.
Half of my last year is dealing with bugs related to dst. It needs to go away completely. It is a stupid and unnecessary concept. The proposition is very simple "we won't be shifting the clock by an hour, deal with it"
If paid, half of your year may be worth having dst, if it turns out to be important. Hope they make their best decision, since it may affect too many things.
Btw, did you deal with it or it’s still a mess? Long ago I wrote a library that manages dst, leaps, even ancient calendar changes, for fun. Datetime is hard topic, but still manageable. What problems did you meet, specifically?
No it wasn't worth it. I'd rather work on actual projects instead of fixing undocumented nuances related to poorly implemented systems. Yes I got paid for it, I'd rather not deal with a never ending set of database queries in a legacy system. Specifically one problem was consistently being given incorrect info from a vendor, then incorrect specs and data that would not match with the first. How do you compare a day with 25 vs 24 hours.
Tldr: fuck dst, it has no purpose and should go away.
Teenagers natural sleeping cycle is markedly later than any other age bracket. When I was one, I wasn't allowed to play any videogames past 20:30, and I would often spend the evening reading books by a nightlight. Everyday I cycled for almost 2 hours (at ~20-25 kmh), so I got some regular exercise each day too.
Nevertheless, I would still on occasion go to bed at 10:30 (had to get up at 6:30) and lie awake in bed till 01:00-02:00am.
I had friends who went to school in nearby city - meaning they had to wake up 5:45 to catch the bus every day. Their sleeping schedule changed after few weeks - they went to sleep sooner then me every day and it became "new normal" for them.
Likely, if the school and whole world moved every activity an hour up, you would lie awake till 02:00-03:00.
It is same with adults and same with little kids. When you wake them up regularly determines when they will need to sleep.
People with sleep problems have sleep problems no matter flexible schedule or what.
Not the parent, but I grew up in the North of Scotland where it gets dark between 4-5pm for several months of each year, and as a teenager I could never sleep before 1-2am.
I was always forced to get up early, which of course resulted in me being extremely tired during the day, which negatively impacted upon my life (academically, relationships etc).
I don't think you should be downvoted, but there are parts missing to your comment. Teenagers have more distractions than ever, so it's easier to stay awake later. Teenagers also do less exercise than they have in the past. Just going outside and running around with friends is often a thing of the past.
Whenever someone tells me they have a hard time going to sleep, my first question is always to ask if they exercise. I rarely stayed up past 10pm, much less past midnight as a teenager because my friends and I were getting up early to surf, ski, skate, play football, basketball, baseball, etc... By the time 10pm rolled around I was dead tired and ready to sleep. And on days I had to work after school, I got home around 10 and would literally pass out.
I know the environment is different, but my experiences make me cautious to say 'all teenagers' have different rhythms or want to stay up all night because of something biological.
To add an anecdote, when I was a teenager I was on varsity track which meant 8 mile warm up runs, followed by 2 hours of practice, with 1 hour of weights afterwards.
Then I would head over to theatre which gave to more hours of backstage construction work.
Despite all that 'exercise', I still stayed up till 1am at a minimum, and sometimes didn't fall asleep till 3am.
So anecdotally, what worked for you, didn't work for me as a teenager.
My 15 year old son has had incredible difficulty going to sleep at a reasonable hour until recently when he started running with me. Now his problem seems to be gone. Go figure.
Teenagers are near their peak physical capability, yet most get very little physical activity.
Even if that were the dichotomy (and it may not be, for reasons pointed out in other comments), I'm not convinced that getting up at 7AM to go to high school is a more enriching experience than playing (certain) video games until 2AM.
When I was a teenager I would happily program until 02:00 and getting to sleep earlier was pretty much impossible. I could lie in bed for a few hours but unless it was 02:00 I was not going to sleep. I still do the same activities now but at 23:30 I'm done for the day and can't think well anymore.
Or maybe you and I should just go to bed at 7pm to match the circadian rhythm of the elderly? Circadian rhythm changes based on age, that much seems to be biological fact.
Rules made by 55 year old early risers that only need 6 hours of sleep a night who have become school officials are just cruel and unusual punishment to a chunk of teenagers out there. In a better world there could be a class action lawsuit to make this stop--but its still considered okay to promote "early to bed, early to rise" and flat-out discriminate against people with sleep disorders.
If you are an early riser, you should know that as someone with a sleep disorder I view "helpful" suggestions like "get some exercise" to be roughly equivalent to suggesting that gay people just need to pray the gay away. I'm never going to become an early riser. I've gotten in somewhat under control with melatonin, tweaks to diet and consistent scheduling, but I'm never going to hop out of bed at 6:30am and its always going to take me 2-3 hours to wake up.