Rather than bed at 2am, sleep till 10, I wake up at 5:30am and fall asleep at 10 simply by being tired enough.
The result is that I get better sleep, need less caffeine, have more effective creative time for personal projects, and put my stuff first before the brain is full of work stuff. Oh and the girlfriend says I’m less cranky, more pleasant to be around, and she loves that we go to bed together.
The insight that made it happen: If I can switch to a 9 hour different timezone, why not to waking up early? Body just cares which timezone your circadian rhytm is in, not where you are physically.
There is something about the night that boosts me and fascinates me, it feels like it is my world. And it has been the case since early childhood, even before I can remember according to my parents.
And it is not just about the sun. I love the feeling of being the last one standing, the calm after everyone went to sleep.
I also asked myself the same question about timezones and also DST, why can't I be a morning person when I can naturally adjust to clock change? And I came to the conclusion that there is a lot more than the clock.
During daytime you have to be ready for a phone / doorbell to ring, a package to be delivered, a package by a neighbor who isn't there being brought to you, an e-mail reaching you, which demands attention, et cetera. It's louder outside. In front of your house kids might play, a dog might bark, traffic is heavier, gardening work is going on,... it feels like a world for extroverts and there is the risk of something demanding your immediate attention while you don't feel like it. There is a "societal" pressure on you to be functioning.
And at night, it's the opposite.
You can finally relax, focus, you know nothing of that will happen. You feel safe knowing that people around you are sleeping. No one expects anything from you during these hours, because it's the designated time for sleep. What you do now is outside of anyone's expectations, it's your time, your time alone. No commitments, freedom, and focus.
So I wonder if night owls are predominantly introverts with some form of social anxiety (whether they realize it or not) and I certainly think there's a large overlap there. I'm speculating, and I am sure it's not true for plenty of people, but it certainly describes me.
No matter how early (or late) I get up, my day is not done until 3-4am when I had time for myself without the bothering of others/society's expectations.
During the week, I'll sleep 5-6h and start to work, on the weekend I'll pay my sleep debt and sleep 10-11h.
Getting at 2-4am, feels great, like there's plenty of time and the hordes are fast asleep, or going to sleep. Finally I have a stretch of time to get some real work done
Getting up at 7am doesn't have any of that benefit. There are too many people around by then.
Waking up at 0600 instead of 0700 is one wasted sleep.
Waking up 0400 means two peaceful hours before the hordes wake up, and I am awake when they do wake up.
This is exactly why I used to stay up all night and why I now wake up early. Same feeling of aloneness and serenity, except the brain is nice and fresh full of your own thoughts instead of everybody else’s crap. Hardest part is staying away from thought pollutants for the first 3 hours of the day.
Now I am thinking to get some profet help, since others on HN mentioned that this is possible.
At night, I have no distractions and if it's cold I'm already rugged up.
And this sounds ridiculously lazy to physical workers, and even to my former self, when I woke up at 4.30 in Australia to cut the first trees at 6:00 ;) That was the only moment of my life where I wasn’t depressed. Maybe this blue light has a very palpable effect on sleep cycles and depression, after all.
I love being the first one standing. Get to the office early for that 30-60mins of quiet and peace. Most productive time of my day.
Anyway, seriously: just because our genomes stir us to it doesn't mean it's good for the individual.
As someone else mentioned, if I camped without artificial light I would get tired at eight. So I switched my evening routine to only use lamps, created a wind down routine, and now I get sleepy around ten and don’t feel good if I stay up.
Feel free to stick with your schedule. But if it is causing you trouble you are probably more adaptable than you think.
It has dominated my life choices and I wish there was a way around it.
I have a pretty annoying sleep disorder called delayed sleep phase disorder (DSPD), diagnosed by multiple clinicians. I have impeccable sleep hygiene, quit caffeine entirely, tried lots of OTC and prescription sleep drugs, light therapy, every kind of sleep supplement you've heard of and probably a few you haven't, and I still revert to going to bed around 5am and waking between noon and 1:30pm.
In the times I maintained a "normal" early-bird schedule, I actually consistently fall into a deep depression.
Our circadian rhythms are pretty powerful regulators -- not just of sleep, but of our hormones and regularity (in the poop sense) too. So misalignment wreaks havoc on our bodies in various ways, even if we're able to get enough sleep.
Anyway for some people they're more flexible and trainable than others. I'm genuinely happy for your case, but I mainly wanted to point out that not everyone will have the same results.
ed: I should caveat that some people will no doubt be able to do some kind of productive activity while wearing them, I've not yet been able to.
I wonder if this is something I unlocked during my digital nomad days. There was a period of 2 years in my mid 20’s when I moved from Europe to SFBA and back every 2 or 3 months. 9 hours difference each way, just enough to really screw up your rhythms.
I still have trouble going to sleep early. I end up staying up too late, and then am tired most of the day the next day. But I still end up staying up too late the next night, too.
I would think I would adjust my schedule, but I struggle with it.
10pm, watch goes bzzz -> lie down in bed with lights off. Even if you don’t feel like it, even if you don’t wanna sleep yet, even if it seems dumb. Invariably within 20min at most I’m asleep.
The hard part is accepting the boredom of it all. It’s sleep, you’re supposed to be bored.
I need to compensate each day with even more coffee than normally and my head's just spinning by the end of the day because I am too exhausted.
Since my rhytm cannot be forced to the early waking, on average I only sleep 5 hours each night.
It's a constant torture.
Definitely cutting out caffeine at noon helps.
One thing that made a huge difference for me was managing light levels. My sleep schedule is much more tied to ambient light than I expected. Now I automatically dim the lights in the evening and bring them up in the morning. That leaves me with a solid 10-6-ish sleep schedule. No alarm clocks, no caffeine, and generally solid energy levels.
These days if I accidentally leave on some manual lights while I'm engaged in something I'll end up staying up way too late. Turns out I'm just not a responsible lightswitch user, so now I try to leave all up to Hue.
No, sorry. I've been "fun-employed" for 3 years and I've experimented with my sleep schedule extensively. If someone wants to tell me they know my biology better than me, fine, but I'll do what keeps me productive and happy.
These days I average 7h/night and I’m ridiculously well rested. In high school and college I could go weeks on 4h/night.
How do you reconcile "it doesn’t matter when" and "The result is that I get better sleep"?
The actual sleep quality depends more on how much regular exercise I get and eating well than it does on timing. Unless I’m literally jetlagged.
So I always thought, maybe I need to wake up at 3am and fall asleep at 7pm.
Eg, they probably need money not, or they would be less likely to accept a night shift. Another one is how there is more noise during the day that could affect their sleep, etc...
Realize nearly everyone has bad sleep hygiene and self diagnoses themselves as having a disorder of some sort.
You are truly a blessed person and are enjoying one of life's greatest treasures.
But it's an amazingly safe bet that the main factor is the part where we treat people poorly and openly classify them as a bad person. This seems pretty simple.
Until the had too much of an effect on my health I medicated myself into a morning person sleep schedule. I felt worse physically, just low key bad all the time, but I miss it so much. Getting treated that much better, with absolute benefit of the doubt given to me regarding everything I did, instead of the complete opposite, was really great.
A more beneficial study than the OP would be to turn off all lights by sun down, and remove all technology. I’d wager folks would naturally wake up with sunrise over time and feel healthier, assuming they know what to do with themselves.
There's a pretty common genetic mutation that causes a delay in the natural rhythm.
https://www.verywellhealth.com/genetic-mutation-night-owl-di...
(I am non-24 and have been so my whole life. I have a 25-26h day and slowly drift out and back in to phase with the rest of the world on a few week period. I just woke up (19:00 local), for example.)
I sleep when I am tired, and I wake up when I am done sleeping. I dropped out of high school and have almost never kept a square job, but both of those things sucked when I tried them, so I was glad to be rid of an alarm clock.
Now my winter/pandemic home is in a city with more 24h restaurants and services than any other on the planet, as far as I can tell.
I have also always been a 25-26 hr a day person. But i have found that if I get vigorous exercise that day, then I am actually more like 24.
Doesn't seem to have much effect on my sleep, but I also famously ingest way too much caffeine at all hours of the day.
TBH I prefer to be awake when everyone else is asleep. Crowds and lines and traffic are all pretty terrible, but so is living in low-population-density areas without easy access to goods and services. Being nocturnal in an urban environment is the only mitigation I know of. If I could be "cured" I wouldn't want to be.
This worked well mostly, especially since at the office my boss was OK with me arriving and leaving 1-1.5 hrs early.
This was great for going shopping, as shops here close fairly early (7:30 - 8 PM usually) and leaving work at 6:30-7 just doesn't leave enough time.
But then, that means everything shifts. I'd have to be in bed by 10 PM to not feel tired in the morning, which means having dinner around 7. Which means if I want to see friends or other people with "normal" schedules, I have to "stay out late" which messes with my rhythm.
As I'm not particularly social and don't go out too often, all in all this works out fine, and avoiding rush hour for the commute is absolutely worth it. But the point is this isn't "free".
I've never encountered such strong stigma. Sound very specific to the culture you live in.
Lack of sunlight and social isolation contribute to depression, and overall lack of energy.
Before the whole "I talk to plenty of people online"
Sure, but how could you possibly have time to visit productive friends. Or interact with the rest of society physically, getting up past 9 am.
Live with the sun, coming from a guy who used to wake up at 3pm.
i don't agree that society was 'made for' i think it's mostly biological / planet rhythm on average
that said i've been alternatively morning dude / night owl.. I have no idea why or how this change
This certainly resonates with me...I've long been quite a night owl, very much so in my teens (with long periods where I was sleeping from 5am to 1pm if left to my own devices) and much less so now in my 30s, but each transition–to college or more flexible jobs–that gave me more control over my schedule and when my days would start also coincided with feeling a lot better about myself.
It is not an exaggeration in the slightest to say that many people will treat you badly, joke about you and mock you to your face if you have trouble getting out of bed before 9 or 10am. I thankfully never struggled with depression around it and have had very flexible work schedules, but I can totally appreciate how the circumstances of being someone whose sleep schedule doesn't line up with society's expectations can really wear on a person.