However, there has to be something that the human society should cling to. And that is the natural sunrise/sunset cycles of our environment. We cannot please everyone, but could you agree with me on this ?
How else could we structure our universities and workdays if not according to our natural environment? I sadly cannot think of a way that does not include layers and layers of renduncancies and around the clock university lectures which would cater to everyone, and ultimately to noone. As we would open a pandora's box of people waking up at 6am, 9am, 13am, 3pm, and imagine the complexity of catering to ALL of those cases.
> However,
That's kind of how a lot of society works for the disabled: "I'm really sympathetic to your disability, however..."
100%. Everything should open/start at noon and close/finish at midnight.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_hygiene
I note that plenty of the things I'm told not to do, for sleep hygiene, are coping mechanisms for bad sleep. If I'm tired, then standing and sitting upright are unpleasant, so I'd rather do things lying down. If I can't get to sleep but am tired, then I'd like to do something to occupy my mind while I'm in bed. This creates an obvious confounding mechanism that would generate correlations (of the type "Bandages cause injuries!"). I also note with amusement "There is support showing positive sleep outcomes for people who follow more than one sleep hygiene recommendation"; if this isn't done by randomized assignment, then probably the people who follow multiple recommendations are (a) more motivated to fix their sleep, (b) less impaired in their ability to do difficult and inconvenient things, etc. One would hope that people would require much stronger evidence than correlations before making recommendations, but I have learned not to assume that.
Some specific things have been proven. For example, there have been studies where they had people sit in a relatively dark room, with an LED of varying color, and measured the amount of melatonin in their saliva, and found that blue and green light reduced melatonin significantly more than yellow and red light. But I would recommend reading the studies before putting stock in any particular costly recommendation.
I have ADHD, which I didn't know when I was a teenager in the era before the phones you're blaming for poor sleep hygiene. I have struggled for essentially my entire life with sleep routine. I can't for the life of me get to bed at the same time every day; after three decades of trying I just don't think it is something I am readily capable of doing. It works for a few days and then gets later and later and eventually it's so late that I'm ruined by 8pm and I reset for another cycle.
This is, as it turns out, not uncommon among folks with ADHD and similar conditions -- and those conditions are more likely than you would obviously believe them to be.
So, while it absolutely is my responsibility to regulate my life, I feel you can probably keep your sanctimonious encouragement to adulthood!