You probably can normalize your sleep pattern by forcing yourself forward with sleep time a bit every day (if you want to of course).
I have to wake up at 7am for the last 5 years or so, and it's always a torture. I have to force myself to go to bed at 11pm to tolerate it.
When I can afford to wake up at 10am, I am bright and happy and can go to bed at 3am easily.
And there is nothing particularly "normal" in waking up early.
Either way, you're not going to be getting your "scheduled" sleep so might as well spend the time on something other than lying around agonizing about it. And, the right kind of relaxing activity actually helps me get to sleep sooner than I otherwise would have.
Commenting like this will get your account banned, so please don't do it here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
(Btw, the comment originally consisted of just the bit I quoted. The rest is fine, but the first bit is not ok.)
Please don't be personally abrasive or call names in HN comments.
So do you want me writing 20 minutes of lousy code every morning and having 7 hours to fix it, or do you want me to write 2 hours of lousy code and only have 5 hours to fix it? It's your choice, Sport, but choose wisely.
it would seem a third way is being chosen.
I've seen it go the other way too. One guy used to show up at 6:45 and his bosses were not amused that he was nowhere to be found at 4:15 pm.
If we're being perfectly realistic here in this thread, some guys just want minions. If you're getting dinged for something it may have nothing to do with that thing. You're being kept in your place and/or raises are being controlled by getting you to agree that the things that make you different from everyone else are bad and you should feel bad.
If they run out of things that actually matter, they'll declare that every team member should be exactly as good at every responsibility of the group as every other team member, and everyone who isn't exactly average will have work to do (and get a smaller raise).
One of my favorite bosses derisively called this "punishing people for their weaknesses instead of celebrating their strengths."
If there's every anything interesting wrong with you, like soft tissue damage, GI issues or neurochemistry, you're going to learn a whole lot about internal medicine, and you're going to find out the doctor is often making it up as they go.
If you get a good doctor, they are going to suggest things that nobody else even mentioned. If you get a passable doctor, essentially you will be in charge of determining your treatment and dosages (at 3 points in my life the physician was effectively letting me write my own prescriptions, because they couldn't see inside my head or experience my physical symptoms. They're going to set boundaries but you have some responsibility for your own fate. The bad ones are just going to talk to you about how your side effects are expected, or how you'll have a limp for the rest of your life, and you should just suck it up and deal.
(And by the way, if you have anything physically wrong with you, from 'fallen arches' to ligament damage, I can't recommend enough that you get a referral to a sports medicine clinic ASAP. General practitioners and osteopaths know fuck all about how the human body works mechanically, and they're going to tell you to cope with things that are completely fixable, sometimes without surgery. Meanwhile a sports medicine or rehab specialist will teach you how to avoid reinjury, which is something a 'doctor' will -never- do and is actually the most important part of your recovery - staying well).
All the life adaptations make DSPD manageable. Any 'helpful ideas' I've probably thought of. I've spent time completely off of caffeine for months. I've lost 40# and exercise -- that's good for other reasons but it doesn't fix my sleep. Exercise at night is generally counter-productive and wires me awake. Weightlifting is completely counterproductive since the 'burn' from torn muscle fibers will give me insomnia. Nothing really works to deal with flushing out the sleep chemicals in the AM (I used to ride my bike to work in the morning and I'd hit the coffee machine when I got there just as hard -- even having cars nearly kill me on the road didn't wake me up).
I almost said the same thing in another post, but thought it was too controversial. Kudos to you for saying it - I agree the mindset feels similar.
Same problem occurs with introverts and all the extroverts that want to cure us.
What is odd is that while at the office we're worrying about health insurance for trans individuals there's about zero awareness of discrimination over sleep issues and introversion.
What I would love to see is some company based in the west coast with UK/EU remote employees who started mandating 8am (PST/PDT) standup meetings every day to get sued by DSPD suffering employees and lose. HR departments might start taking notice if they started being vulnerable to lawsuits.
The person who was using the Facebook Chat status API to track his friend's sleep patterns comes to mind. But also, we're getting into creepy territory if a lawyer calls you and say: "hey! You work for BigCo and you're a delayed sleeper, aren't you? I know their work policies, have you had problems with that? Don't you want a bucket of money?"
What you fail to understand is that at 9:20am in the morning, like it is now, that my brain is swimming in serotonin and it feels like I got kicked in the face.
I DO NOT have the same neurochemistry that you do. So while all of that helps, it doesn't magically turn me in someone that gets up at the asscrack of dawn all bright and cheerful.
There are strong parallels between people who give this kind of advice to delayed sleep sufferers and people who think they can cure homosexuality.