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.
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
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!