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 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.

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.

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.

Or 11 AM and 3 AM?

Or sleeps straight through to 6 PM before they rise?

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.

This also applies to oncall rotations at software companies!

"Why We Sleep" and "The Body Keeps the Score" are two of the most helpful books I've ever read (and both found by reading HN book suggestions).

https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/

I try to sleep through weed (indica). I'm not to happy about it but that works more or less.

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.

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.

I have taken magnesium supplements and multivitamins before (I do quite a bit of exercise), and many dietary permutations.

I do notice my insomnia becomes worse on a caloric deficit so it might be accentuated by nutrition, but I doubt it's the only cause.

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 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).

https://www.philips.ca/c-p/HF3670_60/smartsleep-connected-sl...

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.

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.

[1] https://github.com/wpietri/sunrise

Does the newer model mitigate this issue?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

May not work for everyone...

Time will tell.

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'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.

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.

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 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.

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 :)

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.

Now I wish I could find a middle ground.

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.

Personal anecdote, that won't help much. You'll still sleep at midnight, except that instead of waking at 9:00am, you'll have to wake up at 6:00am.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

It's a horrible way to live.

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.

I wake up between 8 and 10 daily (I have very flexible working hours atm)

I optimised my home for a short commute and have never had a job where arriving before 10am was required

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.

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.

https://www.helsinki.fi/en/news/health-news/deep-sleep-clean...

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.

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.

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.

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.

After doing that for weeks it was fine though.

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 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 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.

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 :)

Kids mess everything up in regard to sleep. It won't put you on a schedule :-)

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.

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.

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.

Chronotypes can only be bended so much.

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.

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.

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.

How did you manage to go to sleep? I find that if I go to bed early all I do is lay in bed until 3am wide awake anyway.

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.

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.

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed_sleep_phase_disorder [2] https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/2/27/17058530/sl...

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.

Don't. If you haven't figured out your sleep issues, having a kid will make them way worse.

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!

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.

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 say I'm in pretty good shape, and I gym around 5 hours a week and play sport another one hour, so that's 6 total.

I exercise 3 times per week roughly 90 minutes. each time.

> FWIW my brain "wakes up" at night

This suggests to me that researching Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome might be helpful.

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?

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.

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.

Took some serious effort to shift it back to something like 1030/11pm. So no, not necessarily a kid based on my experience.

And to clarify, we go to bed when she does.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

EDIT: the one I use is paid on Glo.com. Found a free one that seems similar https://youtu.be/F0jwdoSWsio

Edit: Fixed phone’s stupid autocorrect.

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.

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

It's envy.

What if you end up making the kid also the night owl :-), and beyond that, I wouldn't want to rely on the most expensive solution!

I don’t know, my sister has 4 and still is a night owl, i can confirm it’s familial because my mom is the same and so was my grandma as i am.

My 3.5-year-old wakes up at 9AM, takes 1 nap, and goes to sleep at 1 or 2 AM.

Most kids are on an earlier schedule, but don’t count on it.

Or a sick relative you have to take care of, or a physically draining job.

They make you sleepy on demand.

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.

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.

I'm not able to do anything productive after leaving my office.

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.