I've been a night owl my whole life, with the exception of that period during secondary school where I was so depressed in the evenings I went to bed early and as a consequence woke up super early.
I have followed every advice, meditation (1yr), excercise (3*1.5hrs per week for 18 months), staving off screens after 18:00 (8mo), no caffiene, no sugar, no food of any kind, I also tried: too much food, cooling my body down before I go to bed, valerian root, sleeping pills, codeine, running before sleep.. absolutely positively everything.
Why? because there is a strongly negative view society has on me for waking up at nearly 9am every day, or staying at work longer into the evenings.
At some point I have to call it quits, it's not working.
(FWIW my brain "wakes up" at night, I get the majority of my best work done between midnight and 4am, and for 6 years now I have avoided being awake during that time for any reason.. but recently I let it happen for one night and the output was insane compared to my daily hours)
EDIT: Based on the comments here, I just need to have a kid.
I've done everything too, and the only thing that works for me is sleeping pills. I think it's a very unpopular view nowadays (esp. after Why We Sleep), but a small dose of a benzodiazepine changes my life completely.
I'm in the midst of a full diagnostic course including cerebral scans, a sleep study and blood analysis, but my neurologist told me there's a good chance that nothing actionable will be revealed and that the pill will remain the best treatment for the rest of my life.
I just wanted to say to you:
(1) I feel you, it sucks to feel that you're underperforming b/c your clock is messed up, and what further sucks more is that people, especially the internet, will tell you you're doing something wrong, when you're actually a disciplined guy that has tried everything.
(2) Get pro help if you can. Seeing my GP and my neurologist is the first time I've been assured that there's a good chance that this is something that's entirely out of my control, and that _actually feels good_.
(3) "If the mountain will not come to Muhammad, then Muhammad must go to the mountain" - if you can't fix it just roll with it, that's what I've done at times. I've told a few of my bosses I'm a night owl, and they've fully respected it and given great freedom over my schedule.
You've got plenty of options with your skillset... If you wanted to f* off to the beach and code as a freelancer late at night I'm guessing you could also go do that!
I’ve upvoted your comment but I would disagree with saying “your clock is messed up”. The OP’s clock is fine and acting as it it’s ‘programmed’ to. What’s messed up is the way society places a higher value on the circadian rhythms of early-risers over those of night owls.
I recall hearing a theory that having individuals with differing circadian rhythms within the same social group provided an evolutionary advantage as not all members of the group would be asleep – and consequently vulnerable to external dangers – at the same time.
If we define larks as those whose circadian cycle leads the day-night cycle, and owls as those whose circadian cycle lags the day-night cycle, it's easy to hypothesize reasons for lark dominance in the civic schedule.
Hypothetically, say local sunrise is 6 AM, and sunset 6 PM, a lark rises at 5 AM and retires at 9 PM, and an owl rises at 7 AM and retires at 11 PM.
If the lark wishes to be immediately productive on waking, they might generate noise, vibration, or odors in the owl's sleeping area, or may simply resent the owl for continuing to sleep while the lark has started working, and thus may wake the owl intentionally. If they have a task that requires cooperation, they could either wait 2 hours for the owl to wake, or go rouse them immediately. At that point, the owl has had 6 hours of sleep, and could probably function on that amount for that day. The owl, on the other hand, can work cooperative tasks immediately on waking, as the lark is already awake, and has no reason to ever awaken the lark prior to the natural conclusion of their sleep cycle.
The converse act to the lark waking the owl 2 hours early is the owl keeping the lark up 2 hours late, after which the lark will likely just wake later. Each has a 2 hour sleep deficit, but the owl would have been re-clocked by daylight all day, and thus it would be more difficult for them to retire early after being awakened early (unless the weather was gloomy and overcast). They would also desire to awaken 2 hours later than usual the next morning. But there the lark is again, waking the owl up early again. The lark can cause the owl to be chronically sleep deprived, and the owl cannot effectively retaliate.
So the owl can, at best, create rules that prohibit larks from disturbing others' sleep before "a reasonable hour". Commuting, artificial lighting, time zones, and daylight savings have all combined to make that "reasonable hour" less reasonable.
Daylight savings is a particularly execrable lark tradition. While the owl is sleeping, the lark changes all the clocks, and then wakes up the owl, waving the clock in their face, so the owl does not murder the lark immediately. And then the larks only relent when the evidence of the sunrise would reveal the ruse. Only the larks have any real incentive to redefine civil time to get the owls out of bed earlier. So when someone says, "your body-clock is messed up," the best response is, "your civil time is messed up," and then roll over for a few more zees.
I imagine you consider yourself an "owl" because keeping "larks" awake longer at night to you results simply in them waking up later the next day.
That is not the case: if I usually wake up at 6am, I will again wake up at 6am if I had at least 4h of sleep. So a "lark" will be similarly sleep deprived in circumstances you describe (eg. in young adult life and lots of nights out).
The reason while early-risers had more success getting their schedule accepted throughout history is because they needed no artificial light source to perform whatever they needed, and artificial light was costly for a long time.
However, the solution in a global world today is simple: move to a timezone where your productive hours will align with whatever the societal norm is, and do remote work.
If you keep going, you'll go through nocturnal and wrap back around to lark.
I assume that sleep-wake cycles plot neatly onto a population standard normal distribution. Everyone on the early-riser half of the bell curve is larkish, and everyone on the late-riser half of the bell curve is owlish. As with most things, if you live more than 2 standard deviations from the median, you may sometimes experience problems arising from your deviation from the norm.
Based on studies of people living in an actual cave with no timepieces or natural light sources, there may also be a component for the natural duration of one's cyclical body-clock. I suspect larks cycle faster than the median, and owls cycle slower, but I'm not aware of any supporting evidence for that.
> I recall hearing a theory that having individuals with differing circadian rhythms within the same social group provided an evolutionary advantage as not all members of the group would be asleep – and consequently vulnerable to external dangers – at the same time.
This also applies to oncall rotations at software companies!
It was Why We Sleep, alright. I had started the book last year but only read the first couple of chapters. I must return to it and finish it. Thanks for the other suggestion.
Ah, OK. I had originally parsed your sentence as it sucks to feel that you're underperforming and your clock is messed up as two separate clauses. On re-reading it, I can see that it can be interpreted as “it sucks to feel that you're underperforming b/c your clock is messed up”. Thanks for the clarification. I had upvoted your comment because I found the rest to be thoughtful and insightful.
from that why we sleep podcast, weed sleep is pretty bad sleep. the withdrawals (not being able to sleep) are pretty bad too. not that i don't use it too.
they said cbd might be better, but i haven't bothered.
At least i don't. The only thing i do notice is, that the first initial 5-10 minutes in the morning are more slow. But i don't know if thats how it should be when you wake up :D
I've taken the opposite approach to you, I guess. I take 10-15 mg dexamphetamine every morning, first thing when my alarm goes off.
I've never particularly had a problem going to sleep once I'm in bed though, and have just struggled rolling out of bed within a reasonable timeframe (apparently a very normal symptom of ADHD, which I'm prescribed the dex for), causing me to stay up late to try and get things done, causing my sleep cycle to be pushed back even further. At one point during university, when I had nothing I needed to be awake and on time for, I was doing 20 hours up, then 10 hours in bed.
Now instead of taking 1+ hours to get out of bed and get going, it takes me 20 minutes. My brain just needs a bit of a jumpstart in the morning.
I can't recommend enough getting professional help for chronic issues like poor sleep patterns, if you're in a country where it's affordable. The worst that can happen is they say there's nothing they can do, on the other hand, it might be that it might be as simple as medication.
Has your GP checked your electrolytes ? I had insomnia for 30 years. Couldn't find any fix, and I tried everything but prescribed drugs. (Addiction issues in my family.)
Fixed my insomnia on accident. Tried the 4HB diet. The supplements advice did it for me. Magnesium, calcium, and potassium. Overnight fix. Turns out, the culprit was my poor diet. Now, I only have trouble sleeping if I try to sleep less than 12 hours after waking. Best of luck.
Have you tried Time Restricted Eating(TRE) and limiting food intake to daylight hours? Did you notice any changes from that?
As someone who was fortunate to fix a self-created sleeping disorder where I managed to completely f up my circadian rhythms, I wish I had known about TRE years ago. As far as I know it's not (yet) part of the usual list of sleep hygiene/CBT advice, but for me at least it's been the most comprehensive change I've made to my lifestyle that has benefited my rhythms and sleep quality.
I made the switch. Not intentionally; it just kind of happened. I think there were a lot of things that made it work, like taking up running (in the mornings), avoiding stimulants, and good sleep hygiene. But the one that finally made the difference surprised me: it's that I'm not a responsible lightswitch user.
I built an automated lighting system such that dawn in my house comes at 6 am and gets gradually brighter. In the evening, it gradually dims, going out entirely at 10. As long as my ambient lighting is the only thing on in the evenings, I reliably go to sleep between 10 and 11 pm. But if I leave my non-automated task lighting on, I don't get sleepy until hours later, which easily can lead to me falling back into night-owl mode.
I avoid that because my mood is much less even when I'm a late riser, so I'm not advocating that anybody necessarily follow my approach. But if people do want help going to bed on time and getting up early, I strongly recommend automated ambient lighting in key rooms that mimics a natural day-night cycle (but with little or no seasonal variation).
It's a sunrise and sunset alarm clock. I wake up at 5:15 AM on a daily basis and 20 minutes before, the light starts with increasing brightness. At 5:08 AM, I have selected ocean waves for the sound and at 5:15 the loud alarm comes on.
It's been a dramatic change for me with this. I would normally get 7 to 7.5 hours of sleep but would have a very hard time waking up and more often than not, would go back to sleep.
With this arrangement, it's been really wonderful. I now tend to be mostly awake before the main alarm comes on and I am able to just get up.
I know this is not a inexpensive option but there are other models without the bells and whistles.
My wife got one of those (or a similar model), and it was very helpful for her, especially during the toughest part of winter here when it's completely dark for 17 hours. For me on the other hand, I just made a deliberate mental switch when I was around 35 years old when I decided, for efficiency reasons, to stop working late evenings and doing all-nighters, and tried to catch the early bird instead. The switch was surprisingly easy for me, but YMMV of course. And I've since started working late evenings for a bit again, but my sleep habits have stuck.
my girlfriend got one of those, and i absolutely hate it. it wakes me up with light in a way that makes me feel bad. it honestly puts me in a bad mood immediately.
one thing i have noticed being a night owl is that even during periods where i am sleeping "normally" (i.e., early) and waking up moderately early is that i still hate the mornings. i could be making this up, but it feels quite inherent to me that i do not like the climate and sunlight in the morning. the climate transitions that happen at night and also the light at twilight have always been extremely calming to me.
when i was younger, i would play basketball during the evenings and into the night. during the summer, i would also get up early and workout and practice, and it was always a complete slug, despite being well rested. the air and light just feels different for me in the mornings. also, when i wake up and immediately shower, like for a workday, it feels worse than when i sleep in on the weekends, am awake for an hour or two, and then shower.
i have no idea if that's really what's going on, but that's what it feels like to me.
Yes! I started with a Philips sunrise alarm clock, an older model than that. It was good, but I really wanted more light and coverage in more rooms than the bedroom, so I got a bunch of Hue bulbs and wrote my own daemon [1]. I added the dim-in-the-evening thing more as a lark, but it ended up making a big difference for me.
I also have an older model of that. What I found however is that if my back is turned to it when it starts brightening up its effect is greatly diminished. It simply doesn't have enough power to brighten the whole room.
The lux level on this is 315 which I believe is the highest. For me, this hasn't been an issue as it is right beside my bed. At this point, I believe the ocean waves have become a signal to my brain that I need to start getting up. I did have to experiment with how many minutes before the alarm goes off to turn on the ocean waves sound.
I made the switch unintentionally too. I ended up with a job in logistics which required me in work at 0630, with a 30 min commute. Started going to bed earlier to try and maintain 6-8 hours sleep. Was working 13 hour days and pretty tired by the end of the day anyway.
I'm pretty sure the biggest change which made me an early riser was my diet though. I stopped drinking sugary drinks and cut out carbs almost entirely after midday. Diet is mostly meat, some dairy (but lactose intolerant). I only drink water or zero-sugar drinks after midday too. I drink Coffee as soon as I wake and only up to midday.
I no longer work the same job, but I still wake up around 0430 every day and do a couple of hours programming before I go to the gym for an hour, then have breakfast at 0800.
Also stopped watching TV before sleeping. When I do watch TV in bed I feel like shit in the morning. Now I turn off the screens around 2000 and am in bed by around 2200. I rarely watch any TV anyway, but still spend a large part of the day at the computer screen.
I'm sorry, but people who claim "they've made the switch" just don't get it.
You don't really make a switch from being a night owl. I thought I'd made switches multiple times too:
* Taking early classes in college
* Deliberately cooling myself down and going to bed super early
* Getting a puppy that forced me to wake up super early
Every single method regressed to night-owl schedule within 2 months. Not to mention my productivity and learning ability took a nosedive during the periods I was waking up early.
This is over a period spanning 15 years, so it involves multiple stages of life as well.
I'm sorry, but people who claim "they've made the switch" just don't get it.
Agreed. At 46, and having been a night-owl pretty much my entire life, I'm skeptical that you can just "switch" to another mode. Maybe you can, through very conscious and focused effort, manage to adapt to what appears to be a "morning person" lifestyle; but I suspect that people who do that are ultimately just faking it.
That said, I've never looked at being a night-owl as something that needed to be "fixed" or something that I'd want to change.
I was a night owl until about 30, and I enjoyed it too. I didn't plan to become a morning person.
When I had to wake at 4:30 for work, I hated it. Now that I don't have to go to work so early, I love getting up early, because those first couple of hours are my most productive. There are zero distractions and my mind is fresh from a good sleep. I'd rather have these most productive hours for myself, whereas when I was getting up and going straight to work, I'd only have the evening hours where I was already exhausted after working 13 hours.
I'm almost certain I couldn't do it without the proper diet and exercise though. If I let go with the diet or stopped going to the gym, I reckon I'd probably slip back to becoming a night owl, and become more lazy too.
I was a hard-core night owl for years (all through college and my first 20 years of working). Then I had a kid, then another. They're 10 (+/- a bit) and I now reliably wake up sans-alarm at 5-5:30 every day, after years of doing that for [or because of] the kids. They even sleep later than that now, but I'm easily up by then.
It does mean that I'm tired by 11 or midnight, but even when left entirely on my own schedule (kids away on school vacation), my "new" natural schedule persists.
I didn't seek to change it (and if it drifted back later, I might even be slightly happier).
What I've found has helped me to change patterns is to pull an all nighter, then go to sleep at the target time. Its worked for me a few times, until I slowly drift out of sync (I'm definitely not an inherent morning person).
I have kids and I’m still a night owl. Thankfully, I have flexible hours at work so I can work late. When the kids hit school age, we will attempt to find a school that has a later start time.
Anecdotally, at 51 and previously thought the same as you, I'm going to disagree. I'm closing in on two years of getting up at 5:00 am and it doesn't bother me anymore. I never thought it would be possible for me to adapt, but so far I have and I have no intention of changing.
People's circadian rhythms change over the course of a lifetime very considerably. Trying to keep all age groups on the same schedule is actually a pretty bad idea. Check out the book Why We Sleep. I think especially how we treat adolescents, who are usually late shifted by 2 or 3 hours compared to adults, is going to look barbaric in another 30 years. People think that 9 AM is a "late start" for high school, but it should probably be more like 11 AM. Even the ratios of NREM versus REM sleep change a lot over different age groups.
Additionally, sickness, including common cold, can lengthen sleep enough to make it unreasonable to get to work early, and forcing (mildly) sick people to early work getting them further sick is an accepted practice.
Or running civic services 7 AM - 3 PM which makes it impossible to schedule without a free day or understanding boss. Something that should be available with perhaps only a minor downtime works only for a few hours.
The cumulated morning/evening hours tend to overload transportation facilities too.
I'm with you on all of this. It was an eye-opener visiting other countries (USA native here) that were more laid-back about getting to work and staying at work. Mexico City in particular was nice and relaxed when I worked there for a while.
People tend to wake earlier as they age, maybe that helped?
I've noticed it already in my 30s, I can no longer sleep in so easily and have to get up, even if I'm tired.
Unfortunately it is because older people tend to have poorer sleep quality in general (less time in deep sleep cycles) so that's a pretty big downside.
Possibly but I don't think so in my case. I've worked 9:30 am - 6:30 pm or later for most of my 25 year career. Stayed up until 2 am every night pretty much.
I really did force the change for myself and it totally sucked going through it. I still don't just jump out of bed and feel instantly great. It takes 30 minutes or so to get fully awake. For example, this morning I so did not want to get up because I stayed up until 1 am. However, I did get up at 5:30 am anyway. It was awful and I'm dragging today. Caffeine helps as well.
Maybe there's a hormonal aspect to this? Do you think that's possible, as you're getting to be - please forgive my noting this - past reproductive age [menopause and/or lower testosterone levels come around this age AFAIK].
Huh. Interesting stuff. Well, if mine changes, it changes I guess. I don't object to the idea of a more morning oriented schedule, it's just not who I have been up to this point in my life. And I'm not making any conscious effort to change, as I'm pretty happy with this mode. I like being awake in the wee hours of the morning. One of my favorite things to do is go bike riding (or maybe walking) at 3 or 4 am when nobody else is out and about. Just me, my thoughts, and some music, and the world to myself... or at least that's the way it feels, for an hour or so. :-)
I was really forced into it by wanting to retain my job. If I wasn't working where I am, then I wouldn't have made the change. But I like working where I am just 8 minutes from my house, pretty good job security compared to the tech industry, pretty good benefits, everything else pretty good compared to other jobs in my career. That 8 minute drive is worth so much to me.
I work for a transportation company and there are a lot of field people that have moved in to c-level positions and have the "butts in seats" mentality and I think that's why after 12 years of 9:30 - 10:00 am starts, suddenly I get smacked with a "needs improvement" on my review. And our technology department is having big problems retaining talent.
I think food is definitely related to your sleep cycle.
I tried a bunch of things, but eating at the right time helps.
If I eat too close to bedtime, I think my sleep is initially ok (food makes you sleepy), but it's possible it disturbs my sleep or I get acid reflux or something.
If I eat too far from bedtime, I wake up I suspect because my blood sugar is low -- and of course the body produces adrenaline when that happens.
What you’re describing sounds similar to me years ago
Then one day I moved to a house that had no internet, and we would have to wait a month to have satellite put in, and we had no smartphones
After 20+ years of just thinking I had a sleeping disorder, losing internet access and living like a pilgrim caused my sleep schedule to naturally coincide with the setting and rising of the sun
Without any deliberate effort from myself whatsoever, I would get sleepy at like 9pm, and wake up around sunrise, wide-eyed and ready to start the day
I thought I had tried everything too, including screen limitations and so on. That probably didn’t work because just the awareness that I could go online if I wanted was enough to keep me awake, feeling like there was a party going on that I wasn’t there for. And of course I would cheat some days, and doing that even occasionally was enough to reset my progress to zero.
There’s probably some kind of “disconnection retreat” nearby you could try, where people get together in some remote place and stay off tech for 7+ days. Could be a fun way to see if this is the cause of your sleep issues.
I did an accidental retreat by attempting to climb the Cotopaxi volcano, in Ecuador.
Lodged at "Secret Garden".
To our suprise on arrival, they had no wifi and we could not get cell tower signal.
So we had to find other ways to be entertained. They helped: activities + daily group hikes and mountaneering trails that are bound to leave you ready to crash by 8pm. We are not big hikers, in fact we hike at most 3 times per year - but we found that the combination of peer pressure, adventure/adrenaline plus the need to do something kept us going on daily treks.
1-2 weeks of that and you could be forming a positive routine. At least you will be rested.
PD met an SRE from Netflix there. He successfully summitted the Cotopaxi. We hiked it... but did not try to summit due to difficulty + sleep deprivation requirement to make an attempt :)
Same when I go camping in a natural reserve, without electricity: daylight is the sleep governor and it's incredibly effective and effortless, without even a sensation of jetlag.
But it's not the place for cerebral activity, where things works best after hours.
I guess in the end it's a matter of performing well under distractions or not. I often found that the reason for late night performance was due to the lack of interruption and all sorts of external stimulation that goes with daytime.
I had a similar outlook, I thought I could only code productively during hours where other people weren’t working and I knew I wouldn’t be bothered.
But I started exercising during the pilgrim days, mornings, and the habit stuck but now I do evenings. I feel most productive now between 8am-noon, even with people around.
There was a job change too though, so can’t guarantee it was the exercise that changed things. Exercise was definitely a massive net benefit either way though.
I go really hard with kettlebells for about an hour/day. Very low-impact, no stress to the joints, loads usually not heavy enough to cause severe muscle failure. Cardiovascular/aerobic state is similar to running, climbing stairs, swimming, etc. The exercises are all compound, and there’s enough resistance to build a good amount of muscle too (kettlebells go up to 200lbs).
Flexibility too, most of the motions involve stretching from the hips in one way or another.
And all you need is a living room and a kettlebell.
I feel like I found the holy grail of exercising, so I take every opportunity to recommend it. Google Pavel’s Simple and Sinister routine if interested, or check out /r/kettlebell. I add overhead presses and standing rows, a lot of people add snatches and cleans. Always new things to try. It’s fun.
Thanks for the recommendation. One thing for sure is that exercise if a massive factor considering the time we spend sitting still in front of screens. Our bodies aren't meant for that.
Kids are very luck-of-the-draw, too. You can get one who sleeps through like a champ, or you can get one that guarantees you won't have a solid night's sleep for half a decade.
What I never told my parents until I was an adult is that the entire reason I still had a night light at 12 years old was because it was just bright enough to play with my favorite toys in the dark. I thought I was so sneaky. However, while I almost never missed school as a child, the most common cause of doing so was exhaustion. Too many late nights and I'd pay for it, badly, sleep in until 1pm and then feel like I could win a war single-handedly.
So somewhere between keeping me from getting sick and just appreciating that as long as I pretended to be asleep they could get 2 hours of peace before bedtime, I would get spot-checked inconsistently. Got really good at listening for footsteps in the hallway.
Getting up early because of kids or dogs isn't a 'fix' for insomnia, btw. It's a coping mechanism. If you are too tired at 10 because the dog thinks breakfast is to be served sharply at 6:30 even though it's been 7:30 since they were puppies, you're not gonna stay up trying to invent a new compression algorithm. You're gonna collapse like a sad sack and make the most of tomorrow.
I was, and still am, a night owl - if there are no constraints.
However, there often are constraints that require me to be up earlier (yes, a kid is among them), and I found the following helps maintain reasonable focus and relative ease of waking up early:
1. About 10,000 IU of vitamin D (at 190lbs), taken before 10am - as a replacement for significant sun exposure which I don’t have. This is significantly higher than the RDA, though still below the toxic levels (50,000 IU/day or so at my weight). The timing is important - vitamin D is apparently part of the body’s sunlight clock PLL. Gwern has some n=1 experiments and references.
2. Sufficient protein intake (between 0.5gr and 1gr per lbs of body weight - low end for sedantry, high end for very active). Don’t know the mechanism - discovered by trial and error - but makes a huge difference for me. If I don’t have enough protein, I can’t fall asleep before 3am regardless of how tired I am. (Well, except when I do a multi day fast and everything goes berserk, but that’s for another post).
Even with those, at times I am not constrained I will naturally nightowl.
Don’t trust me. Do your own research and n=1 experiments.
> Why? because there is a strongly negative view society has on me for waking up at nearly 9am every day
I laughed OUT LOUD at this!! I wake up at 11am/12pm every day, and yes there is a strongly negative view society has on it. I've been trying to wake up at 8am for almost 10 years now, instead my bed time has slowly moved from 2am, to 3am to almost 5am now.
however, I get so much done working straight from about 12pm to 8pm that its totally worth it to put up with the snide remarks about my schedule
Do not have a child to solve this issue. It won't work.
My wife and I are both night owls, but having kids just makes it worse. We still go to bed at 2am, but now we have to get up at 7 to get them ready for school. Then every third night or so we crash out around 10:30.
I'm a naturally night owl. I've had years of being more productive at the office between 5 PM and 8 PM than the entire time between 9 AM and 5 PM. For a while, a sudden burst of productivity was the thing that let me know I was at the office late.
Conversely, I also have a tendency to wake up with the sun, full of energy, when there's sun (and, living in Vancouver, that's about 50% of the time on average).
Then... I had a kid.
This morning, I was awake at 5 AM. Got up to go to the bathroom, went back to bed, started drifting off, and then what felt like a herd of elephants came storming into the bedroom, climbed into bed, went for some cuddles, and then just started thrashing around from being bored. Guess I'm awake now, then.
Sure they will get you to wake up earlier. Even if the kids themselves are night owls, you don't decide when school starts. But it is not so different from any other obligation.
Waking up early is easy, you just need a loud enough alarm clock. Doing so without being in a constant state of jet lag is the hard part.
Lots of international travel helps. If you're jetlagged from going to a different continent every week or so, when you're awake and asleep doesn't really factor into it.
Pretty much how it feels as a night owl forced to get up by 9am. A bit tired all day, want to go back to bed, then suddenly awake when it gets dark even though I've had no rest since rising.
Yes, by the standards of most employers and schools it is very late. I am fortunate in that I can often sleep until past 8, and I'm much saner and healthier for it. But all through high school I had to get up at 6:30. Since I was _also_ an extreme night owl and used to do all my schoolwork after everyone else in my house was asleep, I'd usually get to bed by 1:30 or 2:00, which meant I was severely sleep-deprived all through high school.
I've had to take various contract gigs where I had to start my commute at 7, or be at meetings that started at 7, and it's terrible. Employment arrangements like this wind up getting a version of me that is at my lowest, least-focused, least-productive ebb, no matter how much coffee I pour down my gullet.
These days I still get my best, most focused programming work done between about 4:30 p.m. and 8:30 p.m. It's a constant strain because it means my time at home with my family is foreshortened every single weeknight.
There are jobs in I.T., like emergency Server Admins for hospitals who get paid extra to work the "night shift". That might be worth looking into.
Or if you live on the East Coast working Remote with a company in Pacific Time Zone.
The thing that finally worked for me was finding out the amount of sleep I ABSOLUTELY needed to function. Which was about 4-5 hours. My body wants 8, but I can make it through the day with 4 hours.
Try to only sleep this minimum about for several weeks, and eventually you will be tired enough to go to bed exactly when you want. For me that was a midnight to 4:00am schedule, and I was gradually able to add a couple hours sleep to that over the course of a year. Now I'm sleeping 11:30pm to 5:30am.
4 hours? You are insane (in a good way), mate. Any less than 7 hours and I literally can't even wake up. If I force myself, my body will literally not respond to my commands and getting up and straight becomes as hard as deadlifting 100kg...
I used to be the same way, but I went on a Zero Carb diet a few years ago because of some food allergy problems and I immediately needed about an hour less sleep.
Also I have an ADHD medication that I take first thing in the morning, and it wakes you up about 100x better than coffee, sort of short circuiting your biology and making you a morning person.
I feel this in my bones. You described my entire 20s. I felt pretty ashamed that I couldn't master this single skill.
When I got into my thirties, I chose to embrace it instead of fight it. I worked at companies that were understanding of my chosen schedule. By every metric across the board I've been happier since then. The single exception was a period of time where I had to be up on a 7am international conference call every morning. The stress necessary to maintain that schedule was enormous, and came with consequences to my health. Never again.
I just don't think humans are meant to keep to a schedule. It requires massive amounts of stress to keep up.
Exercise everyday as soon as you wake up for 30 minutes may help reset your brain (treadmill or similar would work or a brisk walk before you shower). Your brain will naturally anticipate the exercise and wake up faster because it has to do so. It would take 3 weeks to become a habit.
Also sometimes this can be an early sign of sleep apnea if you fall into the other risk factors. CPAP + room air filter + blackout curtains + exercise changed my life. I can't sleep later than 6:30 AM if I wanted to now. Used to be a very hardcore night owl and now brain shuts down at a reasonable time at night with no pills.
Counter anecdata: One summer, I didn't have AC available so I forced myself onto the early bird schedule for 3 months so that I could run at the daily temperature minimum. It did not "reset my brain" or "make me wake up faster" -- I was still groggy after my run with metabolism ramping during the day and peaking at night (with dips after meals), just as it was before + after.
> Your brain will naturally anticipate the exercise and wake up faster because it has to do so.
It's amazing how true this is. My first day in the military they woke us up early with an air horn and we immediately started running and doing pushups. Like everybody else, I was disoriented for a few minutes.
There's no better time to write or code than late at night, in my opinion. I don't stay up until morning every night, but some.
I have switched away from routinized, schedule-based sleeping, and towards going to sleep when I am tired, waking up when I'm ready, and listening to my body for what it wants.
When it's cold, gray, rainy, short days, I sleep more on average. When the weather is warm and sunny, I sleep much less. If I'm feeling down or like I'm coming down with something, I let myself sleep as much as will fit, sometimes 16-20 hours or even more.
On occasion I do scheduled things, and I try to anticipate it and steer the day before, sometimes resorting to an alarm.
I'm extremely different. I was tired in the morning and tired in the night until I started getting up much earlier.
I now wake up at around 0355 every weekday. I'm still as tired in the night but at least my day feels a whole lot better and while I'm still tired at night like before it hasn't gotten worse, it might even have improved a bit.
I'm wondering if - with todays technology for remoting and asynchronous teamwork - if some companies will test if they get better results if they let certain people work at night?
(Been living like this for 4+ years now so the novelty should be gone by now and I still enjoy it.)
I'm in the same boat as you. There's no "fix" here, and you're not broken.
I have three kids and spent 11 years in the military waking up a 5 AM. That didn't reset or change my natural rhythm.
My answer is that you need to find a job/lifestyle that fits your natural cycle. It's not perfect but I get to set my own schedule for the most part and it's working ok for me right now.
I have never encountered those strongly negative views, it seems.
In high school, I was sleepy during the morning lectures, but people just assumed that I was bored or partying too much.
In university, I simply didn't have many lectures before 10 AM. Plus there actually were lots of late-night parties going on.
Now that I'm working, I told people that I like to enjoy a peaceful morning with my family and it seems nobody really cares if start working at 10 or 11.
That said, I noticed that bright lights work wonders for helping me to concentrate. I bought a lot of those 1800 lumen IKEA LED light bulbs. They need 20W each, so you can connect 3 of them where normally one lamp would be. And that makes my living room bright like a sunny day at the beach :)
Same. I am most productive 10pm-2am (thankfully earlier than you so I can actually sometimes work in my productive time and get to bed early enough to be okay in the morning).
Kids mess everything up in regard to sleep. It won't put you on a schedule :-)
You say "You've followed every advice", but what were you trying to achieve exactly? Is it that you can't fall asleep or that you're not productive in the morning, or something else?
Personally what worked best for me is just to wake up at 6am for 2 weeks without nap during the day.
Most people try to adjust their sleeping time to match their waking time, but they've got it backward. Set your wake up time and listen to your body for when it's sleepy, then go to sleep and wake up at the same time the following day.
The "have a kid" is just a way to force this behavior because they will wake up early every day over a long period of time.
> You say "You've followed every advice", but what were you trying to achieve exactly? Is it that you can't fall asleep or that you're not productive in the morning, or something else?
Well, that's a good question since I assumed that the answer was obvious but putting it down is important:
I wanted to:
A) Not spend hours trying to fall asleep at night.
and
B) Have energy in the Morning, not feel groggy all day after forcing myself awake.
--
When I was in my early 20s and had long vacations my body fell into a natural sleep cycle of 4am to 12pm, when I woke up I had enough energy that I actually _wanted_ to do things and the energy lasted until I fell asleep in the night. Now I'm just groggy and tired and procrastinating all the time.
Of course, I'm _really_ conflating things because; Vacations are inherently less energy consuming, waking up naturally is going to make you feel more energised too and, obviously, I'm falling asleep naturally also.
I have to be very careful when I have more than a few days off work in a row. When left to fall back into my own schedule, I always drift toward more of a 2am-10am sleep schedule.
Normally I need to be up at 7am in order to get to work so I have to make certain I'm in bed, in the dark, and reading in dim light by 11pm (midnight at the absolute latest) if I hope to fall asleep at a reasonable time for a 7am rise.
It's not ideal, and as you mention, I typically spend much of the morning groggy and slow, but it's preferable to my late teens/early 20s when I followed my natural rhythm and missed way too many classes or came in late to early, low-level jobs.
I even made sure it wasn't some sort of sleep apnea causing problems but I'm clear on that front and I feel fine when I am able to keep my natural schedule. When I have a couple of weeks off I let myself drift later and get a lot more stuff done.
Ditto. When I was in a warm climate with no access to air conditioning, I forced myself to follow the early bird schedule for 3 months so that I could hit the daily temperature minimum for my run. Contrary to popular mythology, not only did this fail to turn me into a paragon of virtue in all aspects of life, it robbed me of my highest productivity / highest energy free-time, which typically happens late at night.
Pretty much. I'll wake up because I need to go to work. But I'm always tired :/
Sometimes I wish I could work nights, but I did work from home like that and sleeping during the day is also pretty bad. Especially during winter, not seeing much daylight can mess you up.
Going to sleep at 2-3am and waking up at 10-11am seems like it would be great.
And just as a curiosity, were you taking nap? What about the weekend?
I'm curious as I have a few friends with a similar problem (I.e. struggling to wake up early for work). But they often party hard the week-end and wake up between 11am-3pm, so it's hard to tell if that's the reason it's so hard for them.
Lifelong (51 years) night owl and morning hater. I got in trouble at work for being late and that was it for me. I have been getting up at 5:00 am for almost two years now. I don't leave for work until about 7:30 am. I do now enjoy the time in the morning before work and the desire to not miss that time has become extra motivation to get up in the morning.
At first I did go to sleep between 9:00 - 10:00 pm every night without fail. That seemed to help the transition. Now, I can stay up later if I want and "sleep-in" until 6:00 am.
No neat tricks or anything for me, just fear of losing my job and the disaster that would cause.
Interesting story about sleep. I tossed and turned until 3 or 4 am every night for most of my life. Horrible horrible nightmares every night. Exhausted every day, falling asleep behind the wheel on the way to work, nodding off in meetings or at my desk. I slept 10-16 hours on weekends sometimes and still felt tired. Napped every day after work.
About 8 years ago, my co-worker said he used to have the same problems until he got a CPAP machine. One sleep study and CPAP machine later, now I fall asleep easily and rarely dream. If on the rare occasion I can't go to sleep, I just accept it, get up for an hour or two, then go back to sleep knowing that I'm gonna suffer a little that day. Definitely the exception though.
There's one tactic I've tried that worked wonders for me: get a job where it doesn't matter.
It's midnight here, I just had dinner with my gf, and after kissing her goodnight I'll come back to work, until about 4 am. Tomorrow I'm coming to office for the meeting at 5pm, so I'll have to wake up about 1pm. I'm delivering the product on time, cheaper then expected, and nobody gives a flying fuck where and when I'm doing it.
Had very similar experience myself, even had trouble sleeping as a kid still remember just laying there for hours and hours trying to sleep. Same as you describe, my brains very active in the night and I get great creative output in the early hours. Caused a lot of problems, almost got me fired on occasion and at times I have to do things that seem ridiculous just to fit into others schedules, if there is an important meeting, train or flight I have to catch 8 or 9 am I often just stay up all night just to make sure I get to it then sneak a nap in the afternoon or as soon as I get home. Went through a few weeks of all nighters after a warning at work about turning up late, my output was pretty shocking that week but hey at least I got in on time for the watch checker PM to be happy, that's all that matters right...
Just seemed absolutely effortless for everyone else to be sleep at a sensible time and turn up to work on time and here I am setting 30 (Not exaggerating) full volume alarms on my iPhone and a backup physical alarm elsewhere in the room and still sleeping through it all on occasion.
Really just thought I wasn't trying hard enough or maybe I should just get better at forcing myself to sleep until I came across Delayed Sleep Phase Disorder [1][2] which seems to describe it.
Honestly my only real solution has been finding a job where they're not fussed if you show up between 15-45 minutes late almost every day and my job starts at 10. Think if I were in a normal company it would really just be starting an egg timer until I happen to show up late too many times in a row to raise a red flag.
Advice intended to help normal people wont work if the system you're trying to affect isn't actually normal. That's the most frustrating part of all this and why people just think you're not trying hard enough or you're just a bit of a screw up who hasn't got their stuff together.
Screw what others/society thinks and follow your natural cycle/needs!
Waking up at 6AM while being rested means having to go to sleep before midnight but 10pm to 1am for me it's the best time in the day, quiet, alone quality time. Take that away and then it just feels like a never ending (rat) race of waking up, go to work, come home, eat, go to sleep. I'd hate my life if that was all it was left.
> Based on the comments here, I just need to have a kid.
Sorry to say that, but in my case it did not help, made things worse instead. Seriously. It forces my body into unnatural rhythm and feel sleepy most of the days. Even if I get 7..9h of sleep.
Oh, how I love those productive hours from 22:00 till 03 in the morning and waking up between 10 and 12 next day fully rested!
> Based on the comments here, I just need to have a kid.
That did work quite well for me for the first year or so. Now with a two year old I’m back to staying up until the middle of the night and then being painfully tired when the child decides to wake me in the early morning.
Same here. I have a 15 month old and find that I'm slowly reverting back to my pre-baby sleep routines. I'm well rested most days, but when I'm forced to wake up early it impacts my entire day.
> EDIT: Based on the comments here, I just need to have a kid.
Nope. Father of two here. One is grown. Other halfway through high school. I’ve been single most of their lives. Neither of them changed me being a night owl. I’ve raised them on a few hours of sleep each night—regularly awake till 3-5a to get those crazy productive hours in when the world is asleep and my brain is awake, and still took them to and picked them up from school daily (though my high schooler recently started driving; the adult child didn’t want to drive until after high school). I do usually get a short afternoon nap in, though.
I'd be skeptical of you trying to assume what someone else said. However `3` is un-italic while `1.5` is italic. It can be hard to spot that difference in font. I'd say you're right.
You mean there are sleep specialists who can do more than schedule a sleep study and then say that it was inconclusive because you couldn't fall asleep during the study?
The impression I got from mine is that all they care about are sleep interruptions (mostly sleep apnea) which does nothing for problems getting to sleep in the first place.
They said my sleep quality was fine, but a bit less than normal which is fair because it was at a lab not at home. But no, that's pretty much the amount I get anywhere. Suggested I lose 5-10kg and see how I go. Seemed like a boilerplate response.
Some people have reported that taking 0.3mg melatonin five hours before desired bed time was helpful. Sort of imperfectly turned me from a 6AM-1PM sleep schedule to a 1AM-9AM, sometimes better, and when I stopped after a few months it was easier to stay closer to diurnal. But blue light filters (f.lux etc.), dimmable lights, and timed lighting were also necessary, and nothing is 100% sufficient.
Long time night owl here - I just quit office jobs and exclusively work remotely now. I'd always joked that my life goal was to never have to wake up to an alarm clock, but really it is a huge boost to my quality of life.
Funny though as I write this I'm actually waking up very early, but that's because this week I flew somewhere 5 timezones earlier. Not sure how long this will last.
Cooling your body down before going to bed will have the opposite effect if your goal is to go to sleep. By cooling your body it will start to try and warm itself and trigger a stress reaction. Eating and working out before bed will similarly raise your heart rate and sympathetic nervous system activity, the opposite of what you want. Sleeping pills are also bad for sleep, ask any sleep doctor. They are great and knocking you out, but that's not what sleep is.
Saying you did "meditation" for a year doesn't tell us much, just the same as you saying you "exercised" for 4.5 hours a week doesn't tell us much. Both of those terms can mean a great number of things qualitatively speaking.
Counter-intuitively you could warm yourself 1-2 hours before bed with a hot bath or sauna session. This triggers the body to bring blood closer to the surface and extremities to shed heat, in effect "helping" the body cool itself as it approaches bedtime.
Based on these observations I think maybe you haven't tried "absolutely positively everything". And even with all the environmental and body things you've tried, the mental aspect cannot be understated.
EDIT: based on some of the replies about temperature. The hot bath method because it will help your body cool in a physiological way while a cold bath will do the opposite. A cool environment will do the same while a hot one will do the opposite. So hot bath 1-2 hours before bed and lower the room temp for the best of both worlds. Some people go further with chilled blankets such as the Ooler.
Rising body temperature is correlated with tiredness, that's why you feel exhausted after you've been home for 5 minutes.
Meditation itself was 'mindfulness', some of it was guided, most of it was not, guided meditation was once a week (I'm not counting the yoga, which was also meditative), I spent 5 minutes in the morning, 5 minutes at lunch, 15 minutes when I got home and 5 minutes before bed. (and I'm pretty well disciplined so I stuck to that routine).
The reason I say I've tried everything is because I've seem therapists/psychologists and taken their recommendations on board, I've researched and taken more information on board and this is not the first thread where "night owl" information has come up, and I took information from there too. And, like I said, I'm rigorously self-disciplined; so I'm able to stick to things... But, I will happily take your advice on board and try that. Since I don't care about whinging, I care about results.
The only thing I can recommend that's helped me significantly in a rigorous way is tracking HRV overnight (heart rate variability). This is an objective indirect measure of HPA axis activity (parasympathetic vs sympathetic nervous systems). Having that data to form a feedback loop is priceless in helping you determine what things you're doing in the day that is actually having an effect on your stress levels one way or the other. As I'm sure you can imagine, my best sleep is on nights when my HRV is high. I no longer drink alcohol or work on software after 7PM in general after seeing just how much those activities would wreck my body's ability to sleep well.
I use an Oura ring for this but I bet there are cheaper methods, perhaps with a heart rate chest strap, though there's an additional bonus with the ring in that it tracks sleep phases as well.*
*to some degree of accuracy (~66%?) I use it directionally only since the values have big error bars.
> Having that data to form a feedback loop is priceless
I'm surprised to hear this, although I'm glad it works for you.
I wear an Apple Watch Series 3 night and day, which reports HRV. I've found it to be pretty difficult to draw conclusions from since the measurement stays pretty much the same even when significantly changing lifestyle/habits. Over the past year I have went pure vegan (went down 15% body weight), went from exercising 0 days a week to 6x 1 hour high intensity, went from chronically sleep deprived to 7-8 hours / night, and HRV has been exactly the same.
Perhaps the accuracy of the apple watch isn't so great compared to what you're using. My measurement tends to fluctuate between 25ms - 40ms throughout the month with an average of 30ms over the entire month for the past year, despite the dramatic lifestyle changes mentioned above.
I've noticed Apple Watch's VO2 max measurements are also -very- unreliable. Mine has decreased 25% in the past year despite being at a dramatically higher cardio fitness level.
Curious if anyone else with an Apple Watch has had a similar experience with these measurements. I really like the idea of using them as a feedback loop, which is partly why I wear an apple watch to begin with, but hasn't quite panned out.
That is interesting. I haven't used any of the Apple watches so I can't speak to the effectiveness of its HRV calculations for me. One of the Oura C-level guys spoke in a podcast that doing those kinds of calculations isn't as reliable because of differences in vascularity / fit on the wrist vs a finger but who knows how true that is. Maybe it's true only for the existing monitoring tech?
I've seen my average vary from 10-50 and HRV max from 50-140 depending on sickness, exercise routine, hydration, drug use, etc. The quality of that average is interesting to observe as well, ie two nights' average of 40 can look very different depending on the peaks and valleys.
It is challenging though to suss out what effects various things have. It requires a whole lot of normality in my lifestyle so as to limit the number of variables as best I can.
Thank you so much for the reference and especially the link. I tried it last night before going to sleep and it felt great. You can bet this is going into my daily wind down routine. :)
This is really surprising. All the studies I have read say precisely the opposite. The theory goes that because, in the environment in which our minds evolved, the temperature would ALWAYS drop at night, this is one of several signals your body responds to to prepare for sleep. Others include lower availability of food and darkness.
It goes against my experience as well. Years ago someone on HN equated an ice bath to elephant tranquilizer. So I tried it and can confirm it had a similar effect on me. In addition, I grew up in a cold climate. Being cold and absorbing my reflected body heat under the blankets made it so much easier to sleep. In contrast, hot humid nights were impossible.
When my sleeping issues were at their worst, having the pills knock me out for a night or two meant I felt tired the following nights and got normal sleep. And just having the pills really helped with the mental aspect. I knew that if I had a bad night it wasn’t going to turn into months long ordeal.
So recognizable! Thanks for sharing. It can be so frustrating lying awake at night, with no probable cause.
The more I look forward to a new day, the later I fall asleep. Causing the new day to turn into a total disaster as I walk around like a zombie on 20% of my usual energy level.
That makes me even more anxious to go to bed, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.
You could do what most people do and have a day job with a long commute :D
Only half joking, it definitely works for waking you up in the morning (unless you like being fired) and going to sleep earlier (because you're tired).
You will likely feel tired until 11am-1pm or all day, but you'll be "normal" in other people's eyes... yay /s
Since you’ve invested time in this, did you ever try moving to a different time zone for some time, enough to truly adapt to the local day/night time. If yes, what did you observe about “when your brain wakes up”?
Your edit is spot on. I was exactly like you until I became a father. Now up at 6:15 and asleep at 9:30. I used to have a horrible time falling asleep and on and off insomnia. All that is no more too.
I was a night owl my entire life until my last few years of college, when it got difficult. Then I was able to transition to being an early riser in a couple of weeks, and I carry that experience many years later.
Waking up early does have a practical advantage: your free time is before you go to work, so then you have energy to do important things.
> Waking up early does have a practical advantage: your free time is before you go to work, so then you have energy to do important things.
This doesn't make any sense to me. I have zero energy or drive in the morning, it's a struggle to do anything. My brain turns on at about 11am - I can be active before that, but serious creative work or figuring out something that requires mental effort is going to be much less effective than if I waited until later in the day.
It doesn't even really matter when I wake up. I can wake up at 6am and be a zombie for 5 hours, or wake up at 10:30am, shower, and be ready to go for the day. Sufficient application of caffeine helps a bit if I need to be fully on before that, but the quantity necessary to do so is not sustainable.
Sure, sometimes if it's a particularly hard day. But except for really crushingly busy days, I'm always in a better place to get stuff done after work than in the morning, even if I got plenty of sleep.
Edit: This might be different, of course, if I worked in a physically demanding profession. I work as a software engineer though, so that's not the case.
I need to rest an hour after work. Maybe one and half. Afterwards, energy is back. At least if I'm overall well rested. But even tired, a spark of energy in the late afternoon is garantied.
My energy peaks towards the end of the day, not right after I wake up. I'm a night owl so that I have energy to do important things during my free time.
If you were able to "no longer be a night owl" after changing diet, through exercise or by other changes in your behavior, you were in fact never an actual night owl but simply someone with bad sleeping habits.
You read the same thing whenever there's a discussion on clinical depression. People push their anecdotes about mindset changes but fail to acknowledge they were never clinically depressed in the first place.
> If you were able to "no longer be a night owl" after changing diet, through exercise or by other changes in your behavior, you were in fact never an actual night owl but simply someone with bad sleeping habits.
Is there an established strict definition of "night owl" that supports this conclusion? I always thought a night owl meant anyone who for whatever reason prefers to stay up late and sleep in, which doesn't really presuppose a genetic cause.
This is part of the issue and one of the causes of the stigma. People who have biological and/or genetic particularities and are unable to follow regular sleep cycles should not be put in the same category as people who have regular circadian rhythm. This article is about biological factors so its safe to assume we are discussing about people with actual circadian disorders and not people who have bad habits.
"Circadian rhythm sleep disorders are characterized by a persistent or recurrent pattern of sleep disturbance (difficulty falling asleep or staying asleep and excessive sleepiness) due to alterations of the circadian timekeeping system and/or misalignment of the endogenous circadian rhythm and the external environment." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3523094/
Key part of this being "persistent or recurrent". In other words, people who have been struggling with this for a long time and have it reoccur after trying out different strategies.
Adding a distinction could help. Perhaps "voluntary night owl" vs "involuntary night owl".
> Key part of this being "persistent or recurrent".
The key part is that it's related to the circadian rhythm and time keeping. That it's persistent and recurrent doesn't in itself distinguish it from other sleep disorders that may cause delayed sleep schedule, such as sleep-onset insomnia, or "bad habits" as you call it.
> Adding a distinction could help. Perhaps "voluntary night owl" vs "involuntary night owl".
If you want to address people affected by e.g. DSPD, and not "night owls" in general, it is perhaps just better to simply address them as such.
I think for it to be a clinical problem, there needs to be a struggle. Like, in my particular case, I enjoy staying up late. The neighbors are quiet, my housemates are generally falling asleep, and I've got an hour or two to myself to knock something out or research something I find interesting. There's no struggle though; I found a job that lets me work an evening shift and I couldn't be happier with the state of things. I feel like if I needed to get up regularly very early in the morning, there would be an adjustment period and then I would equalize on a new normal.
That certainly fits the description of "night owl," but I don't think there's anything clinical about it. My particular manifestation is more of a lifestyle choice, and based on what I observe in the tech field I'm hardly alone in making this choice. Folks who do have a sleeping disorder causing night owl tendencies to manifest (especially when they'd prefer, socially, to rise early) are in a different boat altogether, and I'm... honestly not qualified to classify them. It's an interesting space.
My position is this: if you have a headache, do a Google search for a few minutes, "diagnose" yourself with brain cancer and then you lose the headache after drinking water, you haven't cured the cancer but you've simply fixed your dehydration.
I think the position is different. Symptoms can have many causes. You can undo symptoms due to some causes by doing some things. That means you can cure the condition that's expressed via a symptom by doing the thing. However, that doesn't mean you can cure the symptom by doing the thing.
A personal example is shortness of breath. My friend and I both had that when we were kids. However, I had it because I got bronchitis for a bit. He had it because he was asthmatic. Imagine if I said "Oh, I don't understand what the problem is. All I did was rest and it went away". Well, that won't help my asthmatic friend, will it?
I have a very hard time believing that this stuff has to do with anything other than having the discipline to have a proper sleep schedule. It's possible to adjust your sleep schedule. People do it all the time when they change timezones. I didn't read the article, I'll go read it and update if I change my mind..
Yes, people can adapt to different timezone. However what's interesting is that night owls will adapt based on their own circadian rhythm. If you are someone with delayed circadian rhythm, you would end up synchronizing to the local timezone but still fall asleep after midnight.
An easier solution would be to colonize different planets and send the folks with non-24-hour sleep–wake disorder to planets with orbits that corresponds with their circadian cycle.
Seems like an unpopular opinion, but this is my experience as well. Went from sleeping from 4-10AM to 11PM-5AM over the course of 3 years, without changing time zones. I swore I was a night-owl my whole life, but I definitely fall into the category of early-risers now. Overall happy with the switch; I love having those quiet morning hours to prepare for the rest of my day.
For me, it was about establishing new habits, setting up an environment conducive to sleeping by midnight, and having some external pressures like a work schedule, etc. I've heard this validated by external testimony as well.
Can't say there are no biological factors at play that impact individual inclinations, but it's a bit hard to believe that we're hard-wired for one over the other.
Sure, you can change timezone, but you usually feel like shit in the process. The idea seem to be that it takes about a day per hour to adjust.
Now the idea (somewhat supported by the article) is that night owls have a natural cycle longer than 24h. It means they are in a constant state of jet lag. The (unrealistic) solution to get in sync with the rest of the population would be to always go west.
Early birds are in the opposite situation. They have a natural cycle shorter than 24h. It is just that for some reason, waking up and going to bed early is not seen as a problem in our society, while the other way is.
"You could have a proper sleep schedule if you could hold yourself to a proper sleep schedule" doesn't seem to usefully explain or add anything. Surely the people with poor discipline lack exactly that which they need to build discipline?
Counterpoint: when I fly back home westwards from the US, that first week is the best. I get up at a normal-person time. I have energy during daylight hours. I sleep at a decent time.
I am very much a night owl and I have a really hard time getting into a routine of getting up early in the morning, even if I do manage to get my hours of sleep.
It took a long time to find a balance of forcing to sleep and forcing to get up. But now I have to be very concious, if I have a late weekend I am out of sync for the rest of the week.
I’m in the same boat. It’s very hard for me to operate on a schedule compatible with the rest of society. I can force myself into it, but I never really feel well rested. What makes matters worse is if I don’t keep my sleeping schedule for two or three days, everything gets messed up again and I see myself reverting back to falling asleep at 3am.
It’s really hard and it limits greatly my employment options. I’m sure my career has been severely impacted by it, since most management positions require lots of early meetings. I am an engineering manager now, but it’s hard for me to enjoy my job, because it often requires early meetings. So it’s hard to really be good at it and progress in the career.
My perception at workplace is that most managers are early risers, and people who stay forever at senior engineering level are the night owls.
One of the worst things that happened to me in my last job is that I became important in the mid-level at work. Suddenly, I was expected to be at work earlier, be ready to rock at 8am, knocking meetings out and making decisions. I ran on fumes for years.
A few times, when critical bad shit happened after 5pm and I had to stay at work until midnight, I felt like I was the competent and motivated person that got me into that position to begin with. There was no way my bosses were going to let me saunter into the office at 1pm, after all the client meetings had already wrapped up... I definitely tried to convince them though lol
Maybe it’s just the small subset of software engineers who frequent HN, but I swear 99.9% of the people on here are night owls, and they very much let their opinions be known on every thread about sleep.
Nearly everywhere in US society where productivity comes up, the “early bird” is held up as the standard of efficiency. Thus, those people who instead prefer a schedule that doesn’t begin pre-dawn have been chastised in books, talks, and in media despite there not being any proof that that they are “lazy” but rather are simply naturally attuned to a different schedule.
Interestingly, this early=virtue thing goes back more than a century. Before electric light, the common sleeping mode was in two chunks, first and second sleep. Moralizing busybodies, kin to the anti-alcohol movement, decided that second sleep was self-indulgent and unnecessary. The history podcast Backstory had a great set of segments on sleep a while back: https://www.backstoryradio.org/shows/on-the-clock-4/
Even as an early riser, I think the virtue part is horseshit. Not everybody has to be the same. Indeed, my (entirely unsupported) theory is that sleep schedule variation is natural and useful. In the wild, it's safer for everybody if somebody is always awake keeping an eye on things.
Perhaps because this is one place where kindred spirits feel comfortable sharing without fear of the denigration we've experienced our entire lives -- the overt and the subtle, conscious and inadvertent, the malicious and the good-intentioned.
Makes an amusing change from the percentage of people on LinkedIn who need to share morning rituals involving getting up at 4am to ensure they have time to read inspirational business stories, go to the gym, update their inbox over green tea and freshly baked bread and enjoy an hour of contemplative meditation before cycling to work to arrive before everybody else. :D
If the passive aggression from early birds weren't so intense, us night owls wouldn't have such a chip on our shoulder. But it is. Just look at the early birds in this thread: nearly every post equates their schedule to virtue.
It's refreshing to have a space that is welcoming of all sorts of circadian schedules instead of subtle shaming. But it's not just software engineers who decry the early risers - writers, artists, and PhD students constantly speak up about their need to stay up late in deep focus mode on a creative project. Maybe that's the common denominator - the need to be able to focus for hours without the disruption of emails or meetings.
I am an early-morning person and I am not feeling condescending towards you right now. Just slightly put off that you decided that all early-morning people have something against you.
Used to have nasty insomnia, now I've sorta forced myself to sleep earlier cause I know if not I will not function at work. However, my wife's a night nurse so when she has days off and on weekends, it screws with my sleep schedule. I wish I could just function on less sleep honestly, but I can't anymore.
One thing I read from a fellow insomniac though was that sometimes when you just can't sleep, laying down on your bed helps vs walking around or being on a computer. Even if you don't fall asleep, and sure enough it does help.
I read it here on HN coincidentally but I couldnt remember by who, but I felt way better later on that day. I think the best I can do is force myself to sleep though. I'll watch shows on Netflix till my eyes start to shut down nowadays.
Read up on melatonin and how light, esp. blue light, will tell your body through the eyes that you're supposed to be awake still. Turn the Netflix off!
You definitely don't want bright lights in your eyes (computer) if you're trying to sleep. I've heard getting up and doing a menial task (dishes, knitting, etc) for a few minutes can help if you've laid in bed for a long time with no luck.
Yes there's value in just lying there with your eyes shut and one of the books I read supported that. Throw in some meditation if you're into that too.
The common refrain is to avoid it because you'll associate the bed as a place of not-sleeping, but that ship has sailed for most of us anyway. The same book said "rituals" (such as getting up and reading a book instead) can be harmful as the habits become normalised and become just one more required step to sleep, instead of an occasional help.
> Yes there's value in just lying there with your eyes shut
I never read the book you mentioned, but I do this almost every morning, as a way of mental preparation for such a simple thing as getting up. It sounds so stupid saying it out loud but I completely live this.
Reviews are mixed, it's written in a worksheet format to help you get a grip on your thoughts and habits to change or accept them as necessary. Didn't help me a lot but it helped a lot of others.
No, it is not and it is equally frustrating if people shut down early in the evening. Granted, the normal work hours favor early-birds, but I think that changes a bit in some occupations.
There is certainly some form of habituation and I mostly don't need a clock. But I am still considerably more grumpy on week-days after waking up.
Early risers have to "force" themselves to stay up late, since they got up so early in the morning. Really, changing one's "chronotype" is mostly just a matter of what you're used to, and what kinds of "stressors" you incur during the day. If you don't want to be a "night owl", don't do stressful stuff late in the afternoon or at night.
For some reason I don't get creative and productive until the hours I should be sleeping.
Throughout my teens and twenties (I'm in my 40s now) I indulged this tendency and it served me well, often staying up for multiple days without realizing it and the productivity was incredible.
Since then I've become more interested in preserving/improving my health and how such behaviors may be harming it, so I try to keep a regular sleep schedule and it does seem to be better for my general well-being.
The down side is, I am never anywhere near as productive as I've been in the "sleep is for the dead" mode of operating. Occasionally I'll revisit that mode to get something that's been dragging on finished, and it's always incredibly effective.
I wish I understood why long waking hours seem to stimulate my mind and coerce myself into the deep flow state.
Colleagues have recommended I try Adderall in the past to enter that mode at-will with a pill, but I've always been averse to becoming dependent on a pharmaceutical to do something I can already do naturally.
I wonder what's more harmful to self: regular sleep deprivation or consumption of amphetamines in the daytime?
I can relate to this, and I wonder if it has to do with the unscheduled nature of staying awake through sleep hours. Our adult lives become so regulated and scheduled, which is arguably a good thing for health, relationships, and business. But, for me, during the recent times when I could not sleep at night, or had an unexpected pocket of time with no obligation -- I was unbelievably motivated, creative, and productive. Happy, even.
Something about the nature of constantly being "on", whether that means online, or simply fulfilling some sort of obligation to others or even yourself, seems to sap away at what really makes us human. Of course, if you take away those obligations, you're left with nothing. So I imagine there is a balance to be found. And our society is very bad at finding it.
I can relate to this as an early riser too! Getting up at three in the morning, not being able to fall back to sleep, and then just deciding to start my day then is weirdly productive and fulfilling, probably because I’m not expected to be doing something productive at that hour.
YMMV with amphetamines -- they seem very specific-body-metabolism specific, but you'll always be fighting your body's attempt to move to homeostasis which means it will be very probable that you'll run into tolerance, diminishing returns, side effects, and so on.
As far as sleep deprivation goes: it's fascinating what happens to our brains at night. Studies show that REM sleep prunes and maintains new synapses associated with development and learning[0], but other studies show that this effect might be amplified with sleep deprivation[1]. If intermittent fasting can cause one's body to behave differently in a fasted state, perhaps intermittent sleep deprivation could cause effects that in moderation are not wholly negative? I really don't know, but anecdotally, I've noticed myself able to sometimes get some huge breakthroughs in the late night hours. This has been happening less frequently as I age and become more proficient at a lot of things I do, though.
> I've noticed myself able to sometimes get some huge breakthroughs in the late night hours.
My personal theory on this is that something dream-associated is still switching on from a purely hours-awake scheduled mechanism.
Dreams are inherently creative and cerebral, and it feels like I'm just tapping into some of that by staying up late and working while my brain is wearing pajamas.
I don't know if you've ever dabbled with more extreme forms of sleep deprivation, but at a certain point, in my experience, a full-on wakeful dreaming state is entered where fully featured dreams are playing in the visual field while the eyes are still open. The brain definitely has the ability to essentially dream while awake. Experiencing those things made me start suspecting sleep deprivation was a way to tap into the dream world for productivity/creativity/focus advantages.
Were you averaging around 7.5 hours of sleep a night, even with your long vigils? If so, I doubt it's a harmful pattern. Based on some studies I've seen recently, oversleeping is a larger health risk for many than undersleeping.
No, I would stay up for 2-3 days straight and it'd end with just a longish ~12 hour sleep, often leaving me with a sleep cycle randomly out of phase with the rest of the world to boot.
The stuff I've read about sleep being when your brain bathes itself in spinal fluid convinced me this was probably not a good long-term strategy for preserving cognitive health.
I’m stuck in a loop like this right now. I’ve been getting an average of less than 3 hours of sleep per night on weekdays for a few months now. On the weekends, when I don’t have strict external obligations, I sleep 8-10 hrs.
I’m really scared that I’m going to cause myself to develop early onset Alzheimer’s or something. Even then, that fear looms nowhere as large as the anxiety of going to bed before 1am.
Maybe it’s an existential thing. When the world’s light goes out I start thinking about death, and then the idea of sleep being the “little death” overwhelms me. Next thing I know I’m passing out just as my wife is getting up for work, but I feel so much safer laying down to sleep when I hear the world stirring and birds chirping. It’s almost like my body stays awake to make sure everyone else is safe while they sleep...
If it's an existential thing, and, judging from your description, perhaps a hint of paranoia, then I'd be a bit optimistic about overcoming it with either some regular meditation/mindful introspection or maybe therapy.
It'd be nice if we understood the actual causes of things like dementia and alzheimers so we could make better informed decisions regarding behaviors like sleep deprivation. Even if we couldn't cure those conditions, just understanding something like "it's 50% more likely you'll lose your mind if you don't sleep 8 hours most nights" would be super useful.
This isn’t always true, but in general, you can tell by how you feel whether something is very likely affecting your long term health.
If you truly feel fantastic staying up for days on end, and then sleeping extra for a while ... I know at least one hyper successful person who uses to be the same way.
She eventually outgrew it, and stopped.
I am skeptical this harmed her long term.
Now, lots of behavior makes you feel great and is in fact terrible for you ... but even obvious ones like drugs tend to be felt in subsequent days, same with that awesome tasting cheeseburger, etc.
So I think it’s worth it to at least entertain the notion it isn’t as harmful to pull all nighters for you as is commonly said.
This was what did it for me as well. I was alone with my three kids (5,6 and 9) for half a year recently (wife went on a foreign student exchange program) and to prevent life from descending into chaos I established a pretty dictatorial parenting style. Kids were asleep by 8-9pm, and we had to be up at 7am to prevent our mornings from being stressful. I eventually discovered that I could make much better use of the day if I also went to sleep early and woke up about 5am to prepare the day or start working. These early hours were much so much more productive than the evening hours.
I've tried to stick with this program, or at least a version of it, but ironically it's kind of harder now that there are two of us again.
I regualrly slept between 1-3am for many years. After having a baby (6 month old), I'm ready to sleep whenever, and definitely can't stay up past 11. Huge win in terms of sleeping early and waking up early.
Just FWIW this doesn’t always work. I’m more of a night owl, and having kids didn’t flip my schedule, it just left me really exhausted. My wife and I ended up working out a sort of arrangement where she usually goes to bed earlier and gets up earlier, while I stay up later and sleep in more. When our kids fail to sleep through the night, it’s often a wake up around 11-midnight where they want milk or need to use the bathroom or something, so since I’m still awake I can field those without my wife having to wake up. Thus it works okay, but it’s not perfect.
I dunno if this is hyperbolic, but having a baby to fix a sleep schedule seems like an insanely complicated solution that carries a lot more side effects to a fairly trivial problem.
Although I wake up for work every day and live the early bird schedule, I am a night owl. Every so often my body will reject the schedule and I wake up between midnight and 1:00AM. Of course I am sleepy by sunrise but I have to push through the day to get back on schedule.
Yeah sure, this happens to me as well. I just woke up at 3:30 today, squeezed a few oranges and played the guitar for an hour like it was the middle of the day.
And if for some reason I'm home alone for more than a couple of few days I'll revert to my schedule of sleeping early in the morning.
But my point still stands, I can adhere to my new schedule pretty effortlessly when the situation is right.
Which makes me personally question how much of being a night person is nurture.
Most of the night persons I've encountered have a pretty consistent schedule of staying up at night, which isn't what should be happening if they fit the profile of the kind of person that the linked study examines.
A person like that should have, when situations allow, no schedule because they function on a non-24-hour cycle.
I made the swap too. As an individual contributor I wanted to work until everything was finished. When I moved to managing managers I wanted to get ahead of the day, and be current before everyone else started.
I was the same for many years then travelling from Chile to Peru, there was a two hour time difference, despite being pretty much the same longitude (there was a one hour difference, and I think Chile had daylight savings on top of that).
It made me realise that it's all just a number. In other words if you don't like getting up early, then go to bed an hour or two earlier. It has exactly the same effect. In countries with daylight savings we adjust our schedules by an hour two times year and no one makes much of a big deal. Its the same as that!
I think we perhaps need some info on the sex of, and level of responsibilities of, the people claiming to be cured by having children.
[Father's testosterone levels drop considerably starting a little prior to birth of their children (and when taking on care of young children) reportedly. Mother's hormonal changes go without saying, I feel.]
Just FWIW none of my well-spaced in age children fixed me. But having a fluid sleep cycle often meant I wasn't bothered. Sometimes I'm super awake at 4am, sometimes 6am, sometimes I'm ready to crash by 4pm, sometimes by midnight.
What killed me was having to work a second job during the night-time with our first kid, not fun.
In short, still broken sleep cycle, almost exactly like my mother has been through her life AFAICT.
I used to be a night owl but switched to being an early riser in the last 3 months. I didn't intend to switch and am not sure why it happened, but here's what happened that probably contributed to it:
- Started working out 1-2 hours per day (trail hiking/running)
- Stopped reading my iPhone in bed at night, now I just read my backlit Kindle
- Company switched to all-remote (used to commute to SF)
- Had a daughter (~9 months old now, so not coincident with the sleep switch)
- Almost all of my job responsibilities are management now (previously I was still doing more IC-like work)
- Cut down on sugar intake
If you asked me 3 months ago, I would have sworn I'd be a night owl for the rest of my life. So, this is quite a (pleasant) shock to me. Posting this in case it's helpful to anyone who's a night owl and thinks it's impossible for anyone to switch.
The largest factor was having a kid. It happens to all of us. When you have a kid, suddenly sleeping in an extra hour isn't an option anymore and your body adjusts. It's also much easier to fall asleep early after getting up early to take care of the kid!
Yeah. When she was under 6 months, being a night owl was a huge benefit because it was easy for me to do the overnight wake-ups and feedings. Now she is (crosses fingers, knocks on wood) usually sleeping pretty well through the night, so there aren't overnight feedings anymore.
That’s awesome. Reminder that for some people nothing will work. I’m diagnosed DSPD; I feel like the laundry list of life changes folks tout contributes to a lack of understanding and empathy for legitimate medical issues.
I had a similar experience, and starting to run was what did it. These days I wake up at 5am and run for 1-2 hours. I've been on this schedule for over a year now, and it's completely changed my life. I don't know how I used to function waking up 15 minutes before work.
I started a new job, started walking to/from work (c.2 miles/3km each way), started IF, reduced my caffeine intake dramatically.
For the first 2 months or so I was able to sleep early and wake earlier. Now I've got used to the exercise - that's my theory - I've shifted back to being more wakeful at night. Which is fine for work hours as that's flexible (but perception of early risers is that late risers are lazy, so still a little problematic). But, I'd like to shift my pattern to match my kids' schedules better.
This is what does it for me. Refined sugar in most forms, and excessive fruit will keep me up at night.
That having been said, I'm not productive in the mornings. I don't write good code, or create good solutions before 10 am still. Early morning have become my time to catch up on administrative work, or reading.
Yeah, I see way too many people watching an hour of tv on their phone or iPad in bed before going to sleep and then complaining they cant go to sleep. I find that I sleep a lot better if i put away screens for an hour before sleeping.
To interject some science into the anecdotes, if the timing of your sleep impacts your daily life (i.e. you may have a "sleep disorder") the following may be of interest:
Note that in additional to issues directly connected to sleep disorders, there are often significant impacts from cultural/societal attitudes to when individuals sleep that lead to secondary effects (e.g. shame, guilt, depression)--particularly for people who are unaware that sleep disorders exist and have not yet been diagnosed.
(Similar dynamics affect people with, for example, executive function-related disorders such as ADHD/ADD. Additionally, interactions between sleep disorders & ADHD/ADD mean that aids such as supplementary Melatonin need to be taken at different times and/or e.g. smaller doses.)
I am not a doctor, nor a sleep specialist but I do believe people (& their families) who are affected by sleep disorders deserve to be informed and not subjected to the feeling that their inability to sleep at a societally mandated time is a character flaw or evidence of them "just not trying hard enough".
> Additionally, interactions between sleep disorders & ADHD/ADD mean that aids such as supplementary Melatonin need to be taken at different times and/or e.g. smaller doses.
Do you have more information or links about the interaction between ADHD and sleep phase disorders (specifically non 24-hour sleep-wake disorder), as it relates to melatonin?
I like the fact they present it as an either/or choice.
My natural sleep cycle seems to default to a 28 hour day (eg I go to bed slightly later every evening then morning) which makes interfacing with reality pretty difficult. This seems to be something shared with a number of geeks I know.
I've been on a 28-hour cycle for the last 7 or so years. Since it lines up into a 6-day week I can still be awake for more-or-less business hours on weekdays (sleep at 4pm mondays, wake at noon fridays).
I'm pretty sure 28 hours isn't quite what my body naturally wants, but it's a lot closer than 24. After a week trying to stick to a 24h cycle I'm basically a walking zombie.
They tried to put me on melatonin when I was a kid. First dose sent me to hospital with an allergic reaction. After that we were pretty hesitant to try other remedies. My life was miserable until I went onto the 28h cycle and I realised it was possible to NOT be tired all the time.
Don't listen to all the "oh, you just aren't doing X right" people. Find a solution that works for your body and your life.
27 hours checking in here. Melatonin can help but generally I tend to go in stages of not getting enough sleep, some forms of biphasic/polyphasic sleeping, and basically going to bed early when not getting enough sleep to buy me a few normal days.
I'm probably not the best person to ask - I've been medicated for 7 years and have kept the current job for medication -2 months. More than happy to talk about it off list - {HN-username}@gmail.com :)
I will inform the couple of awful sleepers I know at my hackspace so they can respond too.
I'm like that too. Melatonin helps me fall into 24-hour rhythm.
I take 1 mg in slow-release form, 2-3 hours before desired bed time. My bed time is still pretty variable, shifting 2-3 hours back and forth but at least it's not hopelessly drifting forward every day.
Relevant quote for non-24-hour sleep–wake disorder:
And what about non-24-hour sleep disorders? I think the goal in treatment here is to advance your phase each day by taking melatonin at the same time, so that your sleep schedule is more dependent on your own supplemental melatonin than your (screwed up) natural melatonin. I see conflicting advice about how to do this, with some people saying to use melatonin as a hypnotic (ie just before you go to bed) and others saying to use it on a typical phase advance schedule (ie nine hours after waking and seven before sleeping, plausibly about 5 PM)
For those interested, Internal Time [1] does a good job at explaining chronotypes.
People that say they "changed from night owl to early riser" (or vice-versa) have never been night owls in the first place, but something else was the cause (diet, screen time, etc).
Chronotypes are genetics-based so no amount of wishful thinking will make you a night owl or an early riser (though obviously you can try and force this with alarm clocks / melatonin... to your own risk).
Another book worth mentioning is Why we sleep by Walker. It has it's flaws but overall does a good job at explaining the importance of sleep.
Some caveats to think about for that particular book in this blog post: https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/ (I'm not a researcher in the area, so not sure how valid either side of this is!)
An interesting read, but the article comes across as an unhinged attack piece brimming with silliness. Better to get a take from a proper scientist with more balanced views.
Point number one of his list of 'egregious' errors is the idea that shorter sleep does not imply shorter life span, but all of the recently published meta-analyses make that connection convincingly (for the population sleeping <6 hrs). Anyone can look up these studies. And Walker does not advise people to sleep 9+ hrs (which is also thought to be a risk group on a population level). The author of the piece from the outset is quite evidently arguing in bad faith.
There is criticism to be had on Walker, he overstimulates his readers with fear-inducing statements which can definitely backfire.
Thanks, I am definitely going to check out Internal Time.
> Early birds and night owls are born, not made. Sleep patterns may be the most obvious manifestation of the highly individualized biological clocks we inherit, but these clocks also regulate bodily functions from digestion to hormone levels to cognition. Living at odds with our internal timepieces, Till Roenneberg shows, can make us chronically sleep deprived and more likely to smoke, gain weight, feel depressed, fall ill, and fail geometry. By understanding and respecting our internal time, we can live better.
This may be very anecdotal but might help someone in a similar predicament. After reading Why We Sleep I think I got some explanation what happened to me, but at least for my case it seems it wasn't really on the money. I _was_ able to make the switch from night owl to an early bird myself so it's certainly possible, though requires some effort and dedication.
I naturally woke up at 10 am and didn't really like mornings, and my most productive periods were definitely 1-2am. Thats when the most exciting coding solutions seemed to come to me.
Then I started going to early martial arts training. Since I wanted to go before work, I had to wake up at 7:30. For about 8-9 months it was quite unpleasant, though the training sessions themselves were fun enough for me to want to continue.
But then something strange happened. I vividly remember the day I "switched". It was spring time and we just started getting our training sessions outside. It was intense enough that the guys decided to go shirtless and take in the morning sun. And at that exact moment, basking in the sun at 8am, during a demanding physical exercise I thought to myself - wow! this is so exciting, fun and natural. It felt a bit like a Chinese kung-fu movie. A very energising experience.
And from that exact day I start feeling sleepy at 11pm and wake up at 7:30 consistently each day and would feel awesome in the mornings.
This is I know very anecdotal, but at least I know it's possible. And the recipe seemed to be lots and lots of sun, outdoor activity and a very positive emotional feedback. This I think might be the biggest reason. Currently the most positive feedback we usually encounter is in the evening - late night YouTube / tv / internet / books / friends / family, ... even intercourse. Quite a lot of the stuff we look forward to happens in the evening. It makes sense that our bodies adapt to make us most alert when it senses we get the most bang for the buck. But if you reverse that and attempt to do the stuff you really like early, your body might adopt, albeit slowly.
This is interesting. I wonder if a memorable experience like the one you describe is what creates a desire within our brain to recreate more of the same. Whether it's the fresh air/sun/awesomeness of communal enjoyment of the sunrise or the chill afterhours at night when all is quiet and there is that feeling that we could code for hours with no fear of disruption.
Found a form of exercise I was excited and willing to get up for, now I wake up around 5:45 every morning trying to drag my “early riser” wife out of bed to go start the day.
Was a complete night owl before, and my wife was constantly reminding me that it was late and time to call it a day.
Off topic, but if you don’t mind me asking, what exercise could possibly be exciting at 5:45? I ask because I’ve been trying to find exercise that makes me excited to get up and do it but I’ve been drawing blanks.
For me personally it has always be the tribal thing - having a group that all subject themselves to an early rise helped quite a lot to power through days that I didn’t feel like it and made the good times a lot more memorable.
Have in mind that 6:00am is some other timezone’s 10am. It is possible to get accustomed to living in another timezone, so thats what you’ll generally be doing - getting through the “jet lag”. How do you do it normally? Well just attempt to get into the habits of the locals and you’ll get there. You just need to find “locals” in your desired “time zone” so to speak.
It seems that sleep pattern variation is an evolutionary consequence of the survival benefit of having someone awake when others are sleeping [1]. A good combination of night owls, insomniacs, and early risers in camp probably made it far less likely a sleeper got hauled off by the hyenas. This also seems to be the reason that anxiety (sense of danger) reduces our sleep. There's a part of our brain that doesn't differentiate well between today's worries and predation risk. For this reason, I think that addressing anxiety is often the best way to improve sleep.
So my natural rhythm is working 10-2 and then a lull until 4-6, and then a lull until midnight, I wouldn't get tired until 2am.
Not ideal for a 9-5 job with kids. I'd also need a nap around 5:30-7 or so, also not wife-compatible to fall asleep at 5:30pm for an hour.
I started using a SAD lamp and it makes a huge difference, 30 minutes in the morning, I just browse my phone in front of it. It feels like a cup of coffee and a 30 minute nap.
The biggest is not needing the evening nap followed by actually being tired at midnight, and the ability to fall sleep between 10pm-midnight if I need to get up early. It makes a major difference to me, it has about a 2-day effect, I can skip the 30 minutes for a day or two, but after day 3 my clock resets.
I'd get a 4pm boost at work, I could tell the time by how productive I was being. Same thing with midnight, I'd sit on the couch from 9-midnight, and then find myself cleaning up exactly at midnight. With the light, everything is 2 hours earlier, 2pm work boost, and 10pm boost at home.
I have one of the larger lights, don't want to be accused of shilling.
I picked up this one on craigslist, Northern Light Technology Boxelite, Light Therapy Box. The effect is enough that I bought a smaller Verilux touch model for work, but it's a third of the size (but much slimmer so it'll fit on my desk in the office). Haven't remembered to bring the smaller one to work, but I'd imagine I'd need more time in front of it.
I'm a night owl, primarily because it's the easiest way to steal a couple extra hours to do things I actually enjoy out of the four-hour-life slog.
Trying to take those hours from the morning doesn't really work, because there is the hard-stop deadline of having to get ready to go to work, and the chances of somebody else interrupting me and fucking up what I'm trying to do is almost certain, whereas once the world is asleep, I'm relatively free.
Me too. I'd much rather get to work early and steal an extra hour or two of very high quality work than try to do that extra effort after a day of distractions and people.
I accidentally shifted from mostly night to mostly day, by starting to sleep with my curtains open. I sleep in a room with a large south facing window right near me, and a good sized east facing window not too far away.
I found that this resulted in my naturally waking up refreshed near sunrise.
I also found that I started doing segmented sleep [1], as was common in pre-industrial times. As with getting up near sunrise, this was not intentional. It just happened.
I've been up writing code at night since I got my first computer at 8, I'm 42 now, don't remember much about my schedule before then.
Never could concentrate much during daytime, once my surroundings wake up my productivity goes down the drain.
One thing that works pretty well for me when I'm allowed to set my own schedule is taking a 2-3h snooze in the afternoon/early evening. Then I can go on and work until 3-4am and still get up early without feeling like a zombie.
Since there are a lot of people with various experiences here, I thought I'd ask.
My problems falling asleep are not due to being tired so melatonin and various things I've tried (like drowsy allergy pills) don't work. My mind is too active, and it prevents sleep. Even to the point where the 'sleep' part proceeds, my mind is racing, and I start to dream (hallucinate) while half awake. Then I will see a spider or something that is not there and snap wide awake, full of adrenaline. Repeat until about 2 hours have passed and then maybe I can sleep.
So rather than pills or treatments to induce sleepiness, is there something that reduces mind chatter? I know some people talk about meditation which is something I'd like to look into. My mother also has sleep problems and has been diagnosed with ADD in her 60s (along with my sister in her 30s). So that's another potential avenue. I use a white noise machine which is required as a baseline (tiny noises distract and awake me out of all proportion), rather than a help.
I had good experience with the Headspace app for this. This kind of meditation especially is a learnable skill, so after a few weeks you probably won't need the app anymore.
I can relate to this a lot, I love my current job and arrive at work around 7am at least 1 hour before my nearest colleagues, and just work on fun stuff and learn new things. I did not think that would have such an impact. I always thought I was a night owl.
There's quite an interesting array of anecdotes here. Mine is a bit different: I was always a night owl, staying up late and sleeping late into the day if left to my own devices.
In the past couple years that has been completely stood on its head. Now, I regularly collapse into bed around 10 in the evening, and wake up – very reliably – between 5:30 and 6:30 in the morning. I haven't set an alarm in the past two years, except once in a while when I have to get up early for something important. And even then, more often than not, I wake up before the alarm goes off.
I am not sure what triggered this change. Perhaps it's age related (I am 66 years old). But really, I have no idea. The change is easy to live with, though, so it doesn't freak me out; but it does make me wonder what happened.
Huh, I always woundered why I live a 28-30 hour day. My sleep schedule continuously drifts as a result - luckily I live a lifestyle where it's possible to get away with this.
I did used to do a 9-to-5, but what ended up happening was that I slept less and struggled to keep in control over the weekends. Luckily the people I live with would wake me up (just by carrying out their own routines).
These days I typically sleep ~4 hours a night to keep some osrt of schedule. As others have mentioned, diet, exercise, etc, etc, no change seems to break this habit. To the surprise of many, I am also able to remain productive for all but a few of the last hours - some days I have commit streaks spanning something like 18 hours.
I’ve struggled the exact same as the poster above, and I’ve been reading up on ADHD. It seems to fit so many issues I have, but I really don’t want to take stimulants, which seem to be the drug of choice for ADHD
Yeah, I think there's a large subset of people with ADHD who have some kind of alternate circadian rhythm. Mine seems to be 36 hours; for almost 35 years my peak working hours have been 4pm to 5am, with the ability to hyperfocus until I collapsed if I'm really into what I'm doing. Not for lack of trying to have a "normal" schedule...oh god I try really hard multiple times a year. It's just not natural.
You should know that stimulants are only one type of approach for treating ADHD. Your best resource, you may have discovered, is Russell Barkley; I cannot recommend him enough. Also check out the YouTube channel How to ADHD.
Fair warning: You may discover some of the things you've done for your whole life without second guessing are actually typical ADHD symptoms. And if you're like me, this might thoroughly shake your snowglobe.
> [...] I’ve been reading up on ADHD. It seems to fit so many issues I have [...]
If you're feeling like that I strongly recommend that you consider consulting a competent medical professional with experience diagnosing ADHD/ADD and undergo an evaluation.
While your concerns around pharmaceutical-based approaches to assisting people to live with the affects of executive function related disorders (such as ADHD/ADD) are understandable, such decisions are a step beyond where you currently are.
ADHD/ADD is known as a disorder where (unlike most) simply having a diagnosis can have a significant positive impact on a person's ability to deal with it. This is in part because a diagnosis provides a new lens/perspective through which to view one's life and because the negative secondary effects (e.g. shame, guilt, depression, interpersonal & employment difficulties) of living with un-diagnosed ADHD/ADD have so much impact.
My understanding is that a combination of medication & therapy has been shown to be the most effective tool in helping most people live with the effects of ADHD/ADD but medication is by no means the only option--and there are some non-stimulant options also.
But with regard to "stimulants", the word itself & people's understanding of how they work leads to a lot of moralizing, misinformation & misunderstanding. To some degree the effect of a "stimulant medication" is similar to that of water to a house plant: if the plant has insufficient moisture in the surrounding soil then "stimulating" it with additional water from a watering can brings it up to a level of moisture required for a fulfilling life--but if the plant already has sufficient moisture then adding additional water may cause negative effects. But being "underwatered" is not a positive state of affairs.
If you would like to read further about ADHD/ADD (particularly the under-diagnosed "Primary Inattentive" subtype) I recommend considering "Driven to Distraction (Revised/Second Edition): Recognizing and Coping with Attention Deficit Disorder" by Edward Hallowell and John Ratey. One of the aspects I particularly appreciate is how much emphasis they put on the importance of a precise & accurate diagnosis as a starting point--e.g. they spend a chapter each on "things that are misdiagnosed as ADHD/ADD but are actually something else" & "things that are misdiagnosed as not ADHD/ADD but are in fact ADHD/ADD".
Good luck!
Edit: Oh, yeah, two other things:
* "Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria" is a common but less discussed aspect of ADHD/ADD.
* If comics are more your style, you might find a read of ADHD Alien enlightening: http://adhd-alien.com/
I'm unsure, I certainly show the symptoms, but never got myself diagnosed as I was investigating the possibility of a military career. Thinking about it, quite a few of my family members also have ADHD.
There's a neat chart on this page that shows how various well-known writers over time balanced sleep with writing, and it widely varies: some worked very early while others almost never slept or only worked overnight:
> Some people are early risers, wide awake at the crack of dawn. Others are night owls who can’t seem to get to bed until well after midnight and prefer to sleep in
I am neither one of those? I hate waking up early and I dislike going to bed late. My preferred hours awake are 8:00AM-10PM; I found this to give me the most optimal amount of physical and mental energy throughout the day. Not sure why 10 hours of sleep works best for me, but I've experimented with that number and always come back to it.
Side note: I do have sleep apnea and sleep with a CPAP, but my AHI is below 3 on average (down from 43 before treatment!).
There might just be some people who need 10 hours, but I would still look at sleep quality issues. The CPAP thing sounds like a good step, but there could be other causes.
Do you wake up feeling well-rested? I know that when I used to always sleep 10 hours/night, I still wanted more sleep when I got up.
Somehow I managed to change that, though, and now I wake up after 6-6.5 hours. And I feel more well-rested than I did before after 10+ hours. I'm not completely sure of the reasons, as I wasn't seeking it out, but the timing correlates well with starting to exercise regularly. Finally getting a mattress that works for me might also be part of it.
At any rate, the main thing is that it happened. I didn't really know it would or could, which is why I didn't aim for it, but I'm glad it did. And I'd hope for the same for anyone else in a similar position. Sleep quantity only goes so far to make up for quality, and life is too short to be struggling to get proper rest.
Only after about 10 hours yes. I get by with 8 hours, but feel exhausted by around 8PM. Anything less than 8 hours makes me feel physically ill, irritable, and nauseous for most of the day. More than 10 hours makes me very sleepy. I told my sleep doctor about this, but she just shrugged and suggested some people need more sleep than others.
If left to my own devices I'll tend to go to bed towards 3-4am, plus sometimes I'll be anxious and gloomy in the mornings and my mood will pick up during the day, which makes me thing I'm a natural night owl.
However, the most productive times in my life have most definitely been when waking up and getting to work early. I don't like working at night, just slacking off.
I've read a lot of articles in this vein, but I never see myself quite represented.
I am simular enough in the sense that if I can make it to the office early in the morning (usually from just not bothering to try sleep anymore) I can get a lot done because of the solitude, I focus a lot more when left alone with no distractions, which probably adds to the mental energy at night preventing sleep.
Of course there is a limit though and tend to eventually crash. Which is not healthy at all either.
I'm pretty similar. Left to my own devices, I usually go to sleep between 2-3AM. I definitely relate to the feeling of anxiety and gloom in the mornings. My mood picks up as the day goes on but I think it may also have to do with a few factors in my routine (coffee, using a daylight lamp, etc).
I'm a night owl who's started waking up earlier. I guess that makes me an early owl? Or a night riser, which makes me sound like a zombie.
I started waking up earlier because I realized I had a much better work day if I did something I enjoyed before working. I start work at 10am, but I wake up around 7:30, walk the dog for ~2 miles, then relax and play a game, lift, do some blogging, read Hackernews etc. It's made my work day far more productive, I will say that. I also have a little one on the way so starting to acclimate my body to waking up earlier is better done sooner rather than later.
I recall reading a while back an article that stated people had more productive and overall positive work days if they did something enjoyable before starting work. I work from home most of the time and so it became more important than ever for me to actually _use_ the time I wouldn't be spending commuting. I definitely recommend it to everyone, particularly those who don't have a commute to "wind up" and decompress from their work day!
Long story but I recently got very sick. I was told not to eat past 6pm. I found this really helped me with falling asleep. Turn on some music around 10 and lay in bed. Read a book. I keep some Tums next to my bed (acid reflux also impacts my "sleepiness"). I guess what I'm trying to say is that changing how I ate and just chilling in bed under the covers at an earlier time really helped. I'm still a night owl for sure, but this does combat the ratio of staying up till 2am to being asleep by 12. If I really tell my mind with my internal monologue "Look, I know we want to play videogames and do the dishes, but let's do that in the morning" and also craving breakfast before bed (so you are excited to wake up early to eat) helps.
Like others, I was a night owl since my teenage years. I was also pretty sure my circadian rhythm was about a 28-hour cycle, so I'd go "out-of-phase" staying up later every day and sometimes skip or drastically shorten a night's sleep to get back in phase.
However, it's now an effort to stay up past 10-10:30, and I wake up consistently around 6am.
What changed?
- 6 days/week with 6am meetings (remote work and timezones)
- bright light (light box, much brighter than room lighting) and exercise early so I could function in those meetings
- prioritized consistently going to bed and sleep early (often harder for me than getting up early)
- and time passed
post hoc, ergo propter hoc, but consistency with those habits made it easier to function in those mornings, and it got easier as time passed.
I made a lot of changes to my habits to recreate some of the aspects of a “boot camp”. It’s helped my sleep a lot, and I end up just waking up at 7 every morning.
Basically the idea is you always wake up at a consistent time and do exercise immediately. Preferably outside in the sunlight. I’ll run a few miles or on rainy days use the exercise bike. By 11 that night I’m wiped out and sleep like a baby. Even if I have one rough night of sleep for whatever reason, I still try to wake at 7 and do this routine. Over the long haul it’s dramatically improved my sleep.
This might get lost in the flood of comments, but I'm still very much a night owl. However, I don't find it difficult getting to work at 9AM and making it through the day anymore. Really the largest change for me was just not doing as much after work.
I used to work on projects where I'd be up anywhere from 1AM - 4AM. I really hated to do it, but I started a new job with new responsibilities so I had to be on top of my game during the day. It REALLY makes me yearn for a 32 hour work week because now I'm missing out on the side stuff I used to do.
I've been a night owl my entire life, have been unsuccessfully trying (or kind of trying) for years to shift my schedule to wake up earlier. Whenever I tell myself to go to bed early, I feel like I'm wasting an evening that I will not get back...I know it isn't really logical, but it's strong enough to derail the progress I make.
One approach that I've found successful (in bursts) is if I focus on getting to sleep at a reasonable time on Sunday night. This seems to naturally put me in a good groove for the rest of the week.
It sucks that a German industrialist decided we should work 9-10 hours, and then it further sucks that 7-15, 8-16, or 9-17 are deemed the "respectable" shifts for work. I get that some companies are flexible on this, but honestly, I've been held back in life by being a night owl. Classes at 8-10 am were so much harder to focus in, getting to work early is a burden, and working into the evening is not an option at many jobs.
It's just straight up better to be a morning person in our civilization.
I like to leave things at a milestone before going to sleep. I can't leave things in the middle of nowhere. I'm always late to bed, always late to wake, always late for work.
For a theoretical perspective of how much your clock can be "phase shifted" as a function of the period of your internal clock, check out this nice paper from scientists in Berlin:
The theory is basically thinking of humans as coupled oscillators that are entrained by sunlight.
I recently moved to a new apartment that has a window above my bed, that I keep open, so that natural light falls on me and gradually wakes me up such that I am fully awake by 8:30am whereas previously it was pretty dark in my room at all times and I had trouble getting out of bed at all. My guess is that the lighting situation before I moved messed up my circadian rhythms and made more more of a night person, but now that's changing?
The problem I've always had as a night owl is related to the gym. I would always get the best workouts in the evening, with the downside being that I wouldn't be able to sleep that night. Though I was technically exhausted my mind was still buzzing from the adrenalin.
I've reluctantly forced myself into doing morning workouts now, but if any other night-owl there has any advice in making evening workouts work, please share.
I'm rather surprised to see this statement: "...our planet has operated on a 24-hour clock for the entire span of evolutionary time".
My understanding is that during the Cambrian, the day was less than 23 hours long. At the emergence of the first eukaryotes it was 21 hours. Much shorter still when life first appeared.
That makes the uniformity of this protein across the major branches of life quite fascinating.
I've found throughout my life my sleep cycle almost always follows the sun. I sleep in longer in the winter and wake up early in the summer. If I wake up with the sun I almost always feel refreshed and ready to go. I'm usually falling asleep by about 10PM (22:00) though, whatever I'm doing. After that point, laying down anywhere usually puts me immediately to sleep.
I've always been a morning person. 5 years old waking up at 5am to watch Thunder Cats. Highschool, waking up at 4am to finish up any homework and then get video game time in. I sleep in more now than ever before, typically up around 5:50 to 6:30. My most productive coding time is 5 or 6am to around 11am. Typically, I'm tired around 8pm, and in bed before 10pm.
My impression is that people who stay up late and sleep late are more productive, while people who get up early are more social and/or do more planning work.
Is anyone aware of scientific research that looked into the possibility of awaking early vs. awaking late being different, but equally useful evolutionary strategies?
My maternal grandmother (may she rest in peace) and I shared eerily similar night owl clocks. Left to our own devices, we'd go to sleep and wake up at exactly the same hour (roughly 3am-noon), whether we were in the same place or not. I've long been convinced that it was genetic.
I live by a "night owl" rhythm, but my feeling is that the real reason behind it is that my sleep cycle has just never been really adjusted to the 24 hours days. For me a perfect day would be somewhere between 28 and 32 hours, and then a good 9h sleep.
I am the classic Night Owl. Left to my own devices I would stay up till 3-4am every night and sleep until noon. Unfortunately I have to be up at 5am Monday-Friday :-(
Fortunately I'm so exhausted from getting up at 5am that my body starts shutting down around 8pm.
There's this coming soon with what seems to be pretty good material from people with solid background in the space of sleep: https://bestsleepsummit.com/
My early riser father in-law likes to give me a hard time about sleeping in until ~8 a.m. (in a very “Meet the Parents” passive aggressive way) - he then proceeds to take naps throughout the day... and seems to have zero ability to focus.
Once I stopped eating snacks after 7pm, no coffee after 11am, no booze after 8pm had a significant impact on my sleeping patterns. Anyone can stay up until 3am if you feed them soda every 45 minutes after dark.
How disappointing that the NIH's own blog (with Dr. Collins' own byline, though I doubt the director actually wrote it) should have such a clickbait headline.
The observation that genetics leads people to different circadian clocks is decades old. We already know what enzymes are involved.
What's news is that somebody has worked out some of the structures of the enzymes in some people with genetic sleep problems. That's one clue in figuring out how those enzymes actually work and how they evolved.
"Helps" is science writers' crutch for "here's a minor improvement in an ongoing thing, but we're going to pretend that we just solved it". I expect that from the clickbait love-science's-butt sites, but not from the NIH director's blog.
I'm surprised at all the night owls. I thought it would be a more even split. I'm a morning lark and usually in bed by 10pm and wake around 3am. 5 hours is enough, right?
I've always been skeptical of the early-riser v night-owl dichotomy. When I was younger and in highschool, I had to be to school early every day, so I was on the early-riser schedule of sleep at ~10 PM wake at ~6 AM. When I later went to college, I adjusted to a sleep at ~2 AM wake at ~10 AM schedule. Anyone who is on one of these schedules is going to naturally have difficulty if one random day of the week they need to, say, be at work extra early or be out extra late, that's usually where this kind of thing comes up. I feel like this has much more to do with whatever routine you're currently in than it does with any instinctive preference.
I think most cases are going to be like that, but people with "advanced" or "delayed" sleep phases are not in the same boat - they will have trouble adapting to any fixed schedule, and no matter what they choose they will feel "jet-lagged" after a while as their "natural" sleep phase goes out of sync with it.
Yeah I definitely think there are probably some people like this with messed up cycles that they can't do anything about it. But in general, it does kind of annoy me when people who are late to stuff in the morning blame it on being a nite owl, kind of disposing of any responsibility as if they have a real medical disorder or something when I think for most people it has more to do with enjoying doing stuff late at night or just getting in a habit of staying up late from trying to stretch the day before having to go to work.
Your ability to shift between 10pm and 2am is someone else’s 1am to 5am or 6pm to 10pm. Just because you personally had ease falling asleep at these times has no relationship to when other people find it easy to fall asleep. It’s not a binary state night owl or morning bird.
hello, i am in the same boat for the last 7 days.
ive been a Night Owl, for the last 10 years.
now for the last 7 days...
i moved to live outside the city, but i didnt expect that i have to wake up with the village at 4-5-6am
it is killing me.
no sleep for the last 7 days.
and even i try to push myself to go to bed 20pm or max 21pm i just cant sleep well.
i used to work 6-12h a day.
now i barely do 3-4h per day.
i never thought about early riser or night owl...
I'm confused, so an early riser is one that operates on a 20-hour cycle? Does that mean they sleep more than a night owl? I always thought it was the opposite.
The linked paper gives evidence that genetic differences resulting in changes to the CK1 enzyme or the PERIOD protein play a role. Occupation and behavior may affect sleep but here there are demonstrated factors innate to someone's DNA.
I have followed every advice, meditation (1yr), excercise (3*1.5hrs per week for 18 months), staving off screens after 18:00 (8mo), no caffiene, no sugar, no food of any kind, I also tried: too much food, cooling my body down before I go to bed, valerian root, sleeping pills, codeine, running before sleep.. absolutely positively everything.
Why? because there is a strongly negative view society has on me for waking up at nearly 9am every day, or staying at work longer into the evenings.
At some point I have to call it quits, it's not working.
(FWIW my brain "wakes up" at night, I get the majority of my best work done between midnight and 4am, and for 6 years now I have avoided being awake during that time for any reason.. but recently I let it happen for one night and the output was insane compared to my daily hours)
EDIT: Based on the comments here, I just need to have a kid.