Here is an excerpt from the book "Why we sleep" (which BTW is written by a neuroscientist and psychology prof working at the Center for Human Sleep Science )

> An adult’s owlness or larkness, also known as their chronotype, is strongly determined by genetics. If you are a night owl, it’s likely that one (or both) of your parents is a night owl. Sadly, society treats night owls rather unfairly on two counts. First is the label of being lazy, based on a night owl’s wont to wake up later in the day, due to the fact that they did not fall asleep until the early-morning hours. Others (usually morning larks) will chastise night owls on the erroneous assumption that such preferences are a choice, and if they were not so slovenly, they could easily wake up early. However, night owls are not owls by choice. They are bound to a delayed schedule by unavoidable DNA hardwiring. It is not their conscious fault, but rather their genetic fate. Second is the engrained, un-level playing field of society’s work scheduling, which is strongly biased toward early start times that punish owls and favor larks.

EDIT: This is just one argument against the generalization that humans are hard-wired to sleep early. The book is filled with countless research pieces and experiments; science seems to suggest otherwise. Highly recommended read!

I started seriously tracking my sleep a few months back, and two months ago I started to use "Sleep as Android", which has a neat feature that shows you a graph of the times you are asleep.

This is mine for the past 2 months: https://i.imgur.com/PHohyO6.png

I was myself shocked by how consistent the drift is.

Anyway all that to say, I often experienced pretty much what that excerpt describes. Very frustrating.

Wish society would be more accepting of that.

I'd likely be way more productive if I could just do that, and wouldn't have the sleep dep days that I do when I just power through it on zombie mode for a day or three until I can get back on the 24 hour schedule.

I find 5 mg of melatonin taken an hour before I got to bed combined with learning to use a sleep mask helped a lot. I still need to go to bed listening to something (that isn't too interesting to me) in order to derail my thoughts as well. Plus not eating late, and something in junk food (MSG/salt?) tends to keep me up all night almost in hot sweats. But with all that it has just become manageable so that I can hold down a job.

Do you have any experience changing the size of your melatonin dose, and if so, could you share any findings?

Mostly under "2. What is the right dose of melatonin?", but you should probably read the whole thing.

> The second unexpected—and more profound—result was that their reliably repeating cycles of wake and sleep were not precisely twenty-four hours in length, but consistently and undeniably longer than twenty-four hours. Richardson, in his twenties, developed a sleep-wake cycle of between twenty-six and twenty-eight hours in length. That of Kleitman, in his forties, was a little closer to, but still longer than, twenty-four hours. Therefore, when removed from the external influence of daylight, the internally generated “day” of each man was not exactly twenty-four hours, but a little more than that. Like an inaccurate wristwatch whose time runs long, with each passing (real) day in the outside world, Kleitman and Richardson began to add time based on their longer, internally generated chronometry.

1) Getting out every day, even when I don't have to.

2) Using alarm for going to sleep, not for waking up.

3) I think this is the main one - I've got some social obligations, so I needed to be awake during the day.

So, simple solution - Don't be a farmer. Be a night guard or something.

This is really like the kind of problem we have today. We only have some 5 most popular professions in the world, so people are rigged to cater to the customs of these 5 professions. Everyone else is just "lazy"!

Given those constraints it makes sense that there was massive societal pressure to maximize the hours the sun did shine. Looking at the charts on that site also brought home how relatively recent the shift to non farm based employment really was (a couple generations). Even that probably fails to account for large behavioral changes: for example my great grandparents had a "garden" that was at least an order of magnitude larger than any suburban garden I've seen in the last decade. They weren't "farmers", just poor and the extra food they grew and canned was a huge help.

1 - https://ourworldindata.org/employment-in-agriculture

This mentality is eminent, especially after the fact that we're taught bullshit like this from day 1:

> Early to bed and early to rise makes and man healthy, wealthy and wise

But I recently spent the better part of five months going to bed at 9:30pm and waking up at 4:30am. Despite getting less sleep overall, I've never felt as well rested or alert throughout the day as I did during those five months and I've never had an easier time getting to sleep. The key, for me, was also modifying my eating schedule and screen usage (computer, phone, TV). I often wonder how many people who simply accept that they're naturally nite owls are using blue-light-emitting screens late into the night and eating their last meal of the day so late that their body isn't ready for sleep. Because I know that once I adjusted those aspects of my life, my sleep schedule magically responded.

The difficulty in maintaining that schedule has been societal pressures. Those five months were spent living outside of a city where noise, light and social norms around dinner time all make it very difficult to maintain while having any sort of social life. I'm still searching for a way to reconcile my sleep schedule with my intended lifestyle.

EX: I have started to get up around 6am even if the room is dark and I am not getting enough sleep. I find it annoying, and nothing changed but my age.

I'm also not trying to generalize to everyone, I'm only surmising that there may be a lot of people like me. It's arrogant to assume your personal experiences apply to specific other people, but it's equally arrogant to assume you're a snowflake and that other people's experience is irrelevant to your situation. Everyone is their own unique blend of the many human commonalities.

In the modern era, there is no question that sleep hygiene is lacking for some, but it isn’t universally sleep hygiene, or universally scheduling, or universally a set amount of hours. It seems that we’re often dealing with different things for different people.

As I briefly mentioned in comment further up, the solution for me was a 9am wake up, and this seems to work consistently and easily with almost any amount of sleep. I can be just fine with 5 hours or 10. It just works. Prior to arriving at a career situation where I could set my own schedule, there were no combinations of solutions which allowed me to wake up at 6am and not be on autopilot and zombified for the first half of the day. And I tried just about every iteration and combination with diligence for years. Luckily I realized early enough in college to just never take classes before 10am or I would have almost certainly struggled.

If we can figure out ways to allow for flex schedules on positions which have no need for timing rigidity, I could easily see our collective productivity rising in measurable ways. And at the very least we won’t be needlessly forcing entire segments of the population to perform at half optimum levels for half of their days.

It really is a shame that so many in the world seemingly assume that we’re just not trying to sleep in the proper ways or that we’re not trying with enough conviction. Once I was lucky enough to be in a position where I could set my own schedule, my performance jumped significantly. I was no slouch prior to slightly altering my wake up time, but the changes after are remarkable.

Again, I am genuinely happy those changes worked for you, but for some of us, the same things just aren’t impactful in any meaningful way, sadly.

I can confidently say that multiple years of waking up early as a high school student did nothing to make me a morning person. 10-15 years later I find it more difficult to sleep in to 12-1pm when given the opportunity.

As a kid, I seem to remember my grandmother always waking up obscenely early. I feel like I've watched my mother transition from a "normal" morning person who will sleep in an hour or two extra on the weekend to waking up obscenely early consistently.

Matthew Walker alludes to this in his book on sleep; however, in his description it's not so much older vs younger people, it's just genetic differences that make some people sleep earlier and some later, with a fairly stable 60/40 or so distribution. Thus, the "dangerous" period (where everyone sleeps) gets reduced from 8 hours to, say, 3 hours.

Well, now you've introduced more variables into your anecdote. Any one of those could have been responsible for your feelings of 'well rested' and 'alert'...

tbh, i doubt the time that students are required to be at school has much to do with their ideal sleep schedules. only about a third of women are stay at home moms these days, so you can consider parents to fall into one of two groups: shift workers and 9-5 office workers. shifts can start/end at any time so they can't really be planned around at the level of an entire school system. so by default, the schedule gets planned with the assumption of both parents working 9-5s. if both parents have to be at work by 9:00, the kids need to be at school by 8:00, so the parents can drop them off or at least make sure they get on the bus.

also, a lot of school districts only have enough buses to transport all the lower, middle, or high school students at once, so their arrivals must be staggered.

given that school also serves the purpose of gov't sponsored day care, i'm not sure what they could really do better aside from granting tardiness allowances for students with bona-fide sleeping disorders.

This tends to be how suburban elementary schools are, but high schools require more resources per school (for all the facilities for sports and enrichment programs), so there are fewer, larger high schools.

Having one high school serve only a 1-2 mile area would only work out if you have a bunch of 100-story condos in the 1-2 mile area. Otherwise, where are all these kids even coming from?

I grew up in a town of 50,000 people. The population density of it, according to Wikipedia, is 1,082/sq mi. The town has three high schools to serve its population, and they're all just about full. If it had more schools, though, then each school would have less than 200 students apiee. Where would the budget for these schools' facilities come from?

We were unambiguously a suburb. 1/6th that density would have been nightmarish sprawl. Berkeley, also mostly suburban, is 12,000 per square mile! That’s my point.

i mean, according to the general sentiment of HN at least, there is something horrifically wrong with urban planning in the US. in the meantime, the schools need to settle on a "least terrible" schedule.

Ok, agreed. Now what?

But seriously, this is the state of affairs for much of the country.

Remote school. Lot of things could be learned and done from home. Then you can stagger your buses from 11am to noon for those who require communal food then group activities (art, sports etc.).

I ask as a person who's been on both sides of the fence, from 8pm nights and 4am mornings to 4am nights and 1pm "mornings" (and, of course, all manner of ranges in between). I've had months where I'm alert and out of bed 15 seconds after the alarm rings, and months where it takes me 2+ hours to rely wake up (although, on the whole, I'd still consider myself a "morning person", since I tend to feel better and get more done when I'm on the early shift).

I've found that, no matter what time I'm waking up, my ability to start moving in the "morning" is dependent in huge part (55%) on a consistent wake up time, and in small part dependent on getting enough sleep (20%) and getting up immediately instead of snoozing or otherwise staying horizontal (25%). Percentages are non-scientific estimates.

I do acknowledge, it's hard as hell to transition to being a "morning person" when I haven't been for a while, because it's just SO hard to force myself out of bed for the 1-2 week period I need to aclimate. Especially since in a half-awake state I don't have much mental capacity to push through the sleepiness. And it would be harder if I'd never experienced easy mornings to know they're possible.

For the record, to preempt a rebuttle along these lines: I also don't dispute that some people, for whatever reason -- genetics, life circumstances, etc -- may just not be able to make the switch. I am curious whether whether it's a matter of "I've done the above and it had no effect on me" or "The above is just impossible for me."

- I can't eat any junk food pretty much at all (pizza is a particular trigger food -- salt/MSG, i dunno?)

- I can't eat anything late

- I have to take a melatonin an hour before bedtime

- At least 20 minutes before bedtime I have to put on a sleep mask and just start really winding down. Often this is more like 60 minutes before bedtime. This is just lying on my back and not really trying to sleep.

- Then I have to find some program to listen to, quietly, that derails my train of thought, but isn't actually interesting to keep me awake otherwise my internal dialog will keep me awake.

- Then it takes me about 20 minutes of actually trying to sleep to sleep on a good night.

And even given all that sometimes the slightest bit of stress will completely screw up my sleep schedule.

Exercise can help, but not right before bedtime, earlier in the day, probably through addressing stress. Too much exercise and sore, hot muscles will keep me up all night.

So, yeah, we've all collectively heard nearly everything that you can suggest, and it takes all of that just to barely make me functional.

And napping is usually awful and leads to staring at the ceiling until 3am. So if I miss sleep one night I'm usually powering through the next day on sleep dep. Then if its stress that is keeping me awake I may still get not enough sleep the next night. The stress from not getting enough sleep can cause stress at night that keeps me awake. Ultimately it tends to 'break' and I get a good night of sleep and the stress drops off and I start getting back to normal again.

And I'm probably fairly well adjusted for being a sufferer, there's a lot of people out there who are more clinically diagnosable.

Have you heard it suggested that insomnia is frequently a symptom of ADHD?

I have ADHD. It was undiagnosed until I was 22. And, through my whole life until that point, my sleep was "delicate" in the way you're describing, requiring careful set-up to avoid insomnia.

Then I was diagnosed with, and medicated for, ADHD. Sleep is pretty easy now. No care required.

One reason for that might be the way the medication (which I take in the morning) affects me as it's wearing off in the evening—it creates a feeling which is sort of the opposite of insomnia. With insomnia, there's a grating sensation that comes from the fact that you're still awake and a weariness demanding you sleep, but your brain won't shut up, so you can't. With the stimulant dose end-phase, meanwhile, there's no sensation of tiredness at all, but your brain is very quiet, not spontaneously thinking anything (in fact it's rather hard to spontaneously think), so you can fall asleep, even though there's no compulsion to. You just decide to, and then... you do.

Another reason might be that ADHD is apparently the brain being stuck in a state below the average behavioral-arousal set-point—essentially, being always half-asleep. As such, you don't get tired when you "should", because your brain wasn't working as hard. A car that stays in neutral half the time will still have a half-full gas tank at the end of the day. (This is also why people advise exercise for insomnia, but physical exercise doesn't really cause a brain with ADHD to engage any more than usual.) Whereas, a brain with ADHD that is fed a stimulant, will have its behavioral arousal level modified toward the normal level, expending more metabolic energy throughout the day, generating more waste products, and thereby reaching a point where it demands to enter a maintenance phase (sleep) sooner.

No matter the reason, I have to say that it works.

Interestingly, according to my psychiatrist, even if you don't think you have ADHD, other neurologically-founded sleep disorders (e.g. narcolepsy) are mostly thought to be disorders of behavioural activation as well—and, as such, are treated with stimulants, just like ADHD. They may as well all be different presentations of the same underlying pathology, given that the treatments for them are interchangeable.

The obvious solution is to prep for bed early on meds but why waste that precious, fleeting neurotypical window of mental clarity flossing my teeth when I need it to perform cognitively during the day. This is on 50mg/day

I wish my brain was neurotypical. I'm a slave to these pills now cause stopping now literally leaves you in bed for days and you never really recover and bounce back after 5+ years of dopamine down-regulation in your brain.

(Really, it lasts long enough for a person of average metabolism that what you experience in the evening isn't even the withdrawal, but just the tail-end of the dose, where there's slightly less of it. To experience the withdrawal, you have to stay up ~18 hours after taking it. Even then, from the few times I've had to stay awake for other reasons, it's still what I'd describe as "gentle"; but it does do interesting things to your dreams when it hits while you're sleeping, until your brain gets used to it. Personally, my dopamine-crashes-during-sleep gave me dreams with the exact visual character of Zdzisław Beksiński paintings. Oddly, no emotional affect associated—such visuals are not scary or unsettling, as they "should" be—they're just... what your brain is doing, trying to suddenly elevate noisy sensory data to salience and ignore the model saying "you're sleeping, that stuff is meaningless." Like an extremely low-light picture causing noise on a camera sensor, crossed with DeepDream processing.)

What you describe can be mostly from physical stress of being stimulated all day. Dexedrine, Vyvanse, or methylphenidate might give you a better ratio of cognitive to physical effects. Supplementing with a non-stimulant medication might help with your symptoms in the evening and also let you take a lower dose of amphetamine during the day. There's evidence that some supplements, like magnesium, can reduce adverse effects from stimulants. You probably already know this, but it's important to eat enough throughout the day and often hard to do that.

Magnesium is great, I take it throughout the day. L-theanine helps with the come down as well.

Unless you think you'd never resynchronize after moving across the world, it's pretty obvious that your wake and sleep time would have to be a lot more malleable than you suggest.

I used to travel from London to the Bay Area for work with some regulatity. The first few days were amazing, because the combination of westwards jet lag plus night owl meant that I was getting to the office nice and early every day. As the jet lag went away, and I started to acclimate to the timezone, it usually took me less than a week to be back to a night owl routine, even without the usual stimuli.

And it takes all those tricks for me just to maintain a 24 hour sleep cycle. What I'd like to be able to do is what I did in college and shift my sleep schedule forward an hour or two every day. Instead I have a sleep mask, I start prepping for bed at least an hour early, I take melatonin, I make sure not to eat at night, and I lie down in bed with the sleep mask on for at least 20-30 minutes and listen to programs that help me to relax. Then it takes me 20-30 minutes after I really decide to go to sleep in order to go to sleep.

And right before bedtime is when I'm most alert. Even if I stay up all night, at about 9:30pm I won't be able to sleep.

What is really bad is when I'm seriously sleep depped and I get to sleep at say 7:30 or so, and I can easily wake up after 2-3 hours and then be stuck awake until >3am in the morning.

So I use every single trick in the book and then can just barely manage to stick to what the rest of society thinks is normal and its a constant fight.

> Unless you think you'd never resynchronize after moving across the world

The synchronization is to the sun and its light, not to human clocks. That it seems to be the same is because the latter mimic the former, not the other way around. So you can't just use an arbitrary clock, not with any reasonable effort.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Kleitman and Richardson were to be their own experimental guinea pigs. Loaded with food and water for six weeks and a pair of dismantled, high-standing hospital beds, they took a trip into Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, one of the deepest caverns on the planet—so deep, in fact, that no detectable sunlight penetrates its farthest reaches. It was from this darkness that Kleitman and Richardson were to illuminate a striking scientific finding that would define our biologicalrhythm as being approximately one day (circadian), and not precisely one day. In addition to food and water, the two men brought a host of measuring devices to assess their body temperatures, as well as their waking and sleeping rhythms. This recording area formed the heart of their living space, flanked either side by their beds. The tall bed legs were each seated in a bucket of water, castle-moat style, to discourage the innumerable small (and not so small) creatures lurking in the depths of Mammoth Cave from joining them in bed. The experimental question facing Kleitman and Richardson was simple: When cut off from the daily cycle of light and dark, would their biological rhythms of sleep and wakefulness, together with body temperature, become completely erratic, or would they stay the same as those individuals in the outside world exposed to rhythmic daylight? In total, they lasted thirty-two days in complete darkness. Not only did they aggregate some impressive facial hair, but they made two groundbreaking discoveries in the process. The first was that humans, like de Mairan’s heliotrope plants, generated their own endogenous circadian rhythm in the absence of external light from the sun. That is, neither Kleitman nor Richardson descended into random spurts of wake and sleep, but instead expressed a predictable and repeating pattern of prolonged wakefulness (about fifteen hours), paired with consolidated bouts of about nine hours of sleep.

And THAT is the point. Do you want OP to get away from the sun, so that it does not reset his zeigebers?

> generated their own endogenous circadian rhythm in the absence of external light from the sun.

I mean, you even quoted it yourself.

Reminder: Topic still is OPs post and the reply to it that told him it's no big deal to adjust to 6.40, "proof" being there are other time zones.

But you gotta realize, just having the time clock (suprachiasmatic nucleus) synchronized and working perfectly in no way implies that OP will sleep early.'

Some people are hard-wired at DNA level to sleep late.

I made that comment in hopes make this point.

It is a big deal.

Not everyone has a flexible sleep cycle.

If I had to guess, I'd wonder if school conventionally starts early because pre-teens are up early.

Speaking as someone who suffers from the same as OP and heard this suggestions over a million times.

The worst part of this is that society sees those with sleep "disorders" as being lazy and undisciplined, even when their grades (or whatever other measurable output) are higher than their early bird counterparts.

But to be fair to your comments about "no size fits all", there is nothing stopping schools from offering two different schooling times. The school I went to offered classes from either 07:15 to 13:00 or from 13:15 to 19:00. The ratio of early/late students was about 50/50 amongst the younger and 70/30 for high schoolers.

FWIW: I used to feel this way before I entered my 40’s.

This resonates with me.

I change my life by changing my words.

Edit: No idea if this is applicable/useful for others, since we are also more complex than simply linguistically programmed machines. It's simply part of my own self-programming experiments. I'm not making claims this will work for all or anyone else; I'm simply sharing my truth. I'm curious if aligning beliefs with intrinsic motivation to change sleep patterns and changing thought/behavior patterns toward morning rising could lead to it.