The author's experience is very similar to my own–my parents called me 'the sleepless wonder' when I was a kid, and by high school getting out of bed for morning classes was excruciating. In college I mostly chose classes that started later in the day and wound up doing much better academically.
Since college I've made a point of taking jobs that offer flexible hours, which thankfully seems to be increasingly common. I have no interest in going back to having that conflicted feeling around midnight, knowing that if I stay up much later the morning will be torture, but feeling wide awake, productive and creative.
In recent years I've found myself tending to wake up earlier in the morning, but regardless of when I wake up my brain is still fuzzy until 10 or 11am. It turns out that this makes the mornings an ideal time for me to get some exercise, which I've discovered to be a great way to start the day.
> by high school getting out of bed for morning classes was excruciating. In college I mostly chose classes that started later in the day and wound up doing much better academically.
I spent high school thinking I was exceptionally prone to getting songs stuck in my head. It turns out that I just get them stuck in my head when I'm extremely tired, and that state was so continuous that I never noticed there were times it wasn't true.
That's a relatively harmless example, but I do seriously wonder how I spent ~8 months/year for 4 years getting 2-6 hours of sleep per night. Getting that amount of sleep distorts everything from my personality to my ability to drive safely, and it's more than a bit alarming to me how little attention we pay to what it means to have teens spend most of their developing years shockingly sleep-deprived.
Interesting that you wrote this. I find the more sleep deprived I become, the more intense are my earwigs (and also, the worse they become in terms of what I'd rather not hear).
I also am stuck with keeping an 8a to 6p schedule in a city with bad traffic. Because of the detriment to my motor functions, I sold my motorcycle as it didn't felt safe to ride anymore.
No matter how little sleep I've had, by five or six in the evening, I usually feel fine, and full of energy and things I'd like to do, read, think about.
I once read that DSPS only affects 1-2% of the population, which makes me discouraged that it will ever be something that people recognize as a reality for some. Everyone seems to get too little sleep, so it's not really a point of sympathy that I don't either. Doesn't matter than <4 hours is a lot different than <7
I lived on 4hrs/night when I was 15-16. I had so many wonderfully interesting things to do, discover and work on. I don't recall ever feeling tired at that age, and I wish I could go back to that level of drive and energy.
1) I was much like you. My performance in college suffered as I couldn't rouse in the morning. I recently discovered I actually did have a medical problem affecting sleep quality (partially obstructed airway from childhood injury). Can't help but wonder how things would be different if I'd figured it out sooner.
2) Had a kid, and sleeping in late is simply no longer an option. Which makes me think that despite how I covet late nights and sleeping in, it really was never the natural order of things, at least for adults.
* My eyesight was a bit poor, got glasses for the first time
* Snored a lot, got a mouth guard as a sleeping aide
On top of that going through a period with vitamine suppliment really boosted me. My take from is if you don't wake up when the sunrise (if you went to bed in ok fashion) and feel somewhat rested, start to look at your sleeping behaviour/daily stress.
> it really was never the natural order of things, at least for adults.
Incorrect. We survived a million years of nocturnal predators while possessing neither claws nor fangs nor, for most of it, fur.
How did we do that? The night owls guarded the early risers in their sleep, and we took turns, one person staying up extra late and one getting up extra early.
Similar here. I tell my boss I can show up any time he wants but I won’t do anything good before 10:15 and I’m leaving after eight hours.
And my best work is from about 1:15 to 3:30 (4:30 on a great day). So if you really want a bad employee, make me show up early and then schedule meetings all afternoon.
Based on the title, I was hoping it was about something else, something I talk about frequently with people who think they have sleep problems: human sleep is naturally biphasic.
I know a lot of people who think waking up in the middle of the night means they have a disease, insomnia. When the truth is that before electric light, normal sleep was going to bed when it got dark, being awake for a while in the middle of the night, and then sleeping more until first light. A nice look at it is in this history podcast: https://www.backstoryradio.org/shows/on-the-clock-4/
(Especially the segments "Friday Night Lights" and "'Til Morning is Nigh".)
When I mention people to this they're generally both shocked and relieved. The problem often wasn't with their bodies or their minds, but their expectations.
I recently listened to an interview with Matthew Walker (author of "Why We Sleep" book mentioned in article). Dr. Walker stated the scientific consensus is now trending toward historical biphasic sleep being a social trend rather than how we're "supposed" to sleep.
Matthew Walker's excerpt on biphasic sleep:
https://delanceyplace.com/view-archives.php?p=3524
TL;DR: There's evidence of cultures untouched by electricity sleeping 7 hours at night with a 30-60min afternoon nap, which he calls biphasic sleep, with some tribes switching to monophasic in cooler months. All humans have a hardwired dip in midafternoon alertness.
Isn't he claiming the opposite? (But I don't have the book to dig into the sources):
This brief descent from high-degree wakefulness to low-level alertness reflects an innate drive to be asleep and napping in the afternoon, and not working. It appears to be a normal part of the daily rhythm of life.
I've always understood it to be related to the hottest part of the day, not so much a post-lunch thing. Probably why GP mentioned air conditioning preventing it.
This was apparently limited to victoria england. Most hunter gather cultures slept one block at night and then napped in the afternoon, according to matthew walker.
My night time wakings have a very clear and strong association with those periods of time when I’m working on my side-project/startup. The bbc article mentions ‘meditating on your dreams’ as an activity for this time, however I’m likely to have a mind racing with all permutations of technical problems that I’ve evidently not managed to clear from my brain. Does anyone have experience-based advice on whether it’s better to try to do a few hours work at 3am vs. getting out of the bed and e.g. reading fiction (which I believe is the best advice to break the cycle of negative association that can build up if you are lying in bed awake and annoyed)
Personally I find that trying to work at 3am is a bad idea. The backlighting (no matter how much blue-light filtering you have) will wake you up, and even if you solve the problems that are keeping you awake now, you're almost guaranteed to get back in bed with new ones to be thinking about.
Insomnia probably isn't limited to a simple reflection of a biphasic sleep-related problem. As an example, someone with naturally high anxiety could get on the most biphasic sleep schedule possible and still suffer from insomnia due to their anxiety about what tomorrow brings, etc.
I sleep biphasically during most weekends. Partly because I work and work-out a lot during week days. By the time it's Saturday, I'm both mentally and physically exhaust. So, I need more resting and sleeping a few hours after lunch works well. In order not to make my sunday night hard to sleep, I sleep a bit less (6 to 7 hours) and then sleep a few more hours (~3 hours)
I heard about this through my interest in the French Middle Ages sociology.
I was always wondering, though how this worked in summer when the nights are short and one can hardly afford a meaningful break in the middle (if not napping in the afternoon)
As someone who also has atypical sleep patterns ( late sleeper, early riser ), there were some interesting points in here.
I know there's been research done as well on the number of hours of sleep required rather than 'when' it occurs, but those haven't seem to have reached a consensus yet.
I will say some of these articles sometimes read satirically.
Notably, they have a diagnosis for people who can't sleep at 'normal' hours: Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome. Then the kicker at the end, "The term “chronotype diversity” is starting to find traction, as business managers explore concepts like team energetic asynchrony". At this point, I stopped and looked up at the URL to make sure I wasn't on a parody site.
But all joking aside, it would be interesting to explore what societal as well as productivity improvements could be had if people's sleep patterns were viewed as varied rather than forcing everyone on the same schedule.
Yeah, I'm suspicious of putting people into big buckets based on an easily observable characteristic. I think it erases useful complexity.
Personally, I shifted from being a night owl to an early riser years ago. I think it had a lot to do with a complex series of changes I made in my life. Trying to force it by just changing my wake time wouldn't have done anything good, but improving other things eventually resulted in a mode of life I like more that happens to be early rising.
I shifted to being an early riser around 30. All it really took was for me to move into a place with unobstructed east-facing windows. Within a matter of months I was waking up at sunrise and bedtime had shifted from 2am to 10pm without any effort on my part.
Honestly, the only difference in my day to day has been when I do stuff. I'm still sleeping the exact same amount. I'm not more/less rested or alert during the day. I just do the same stuff in the morning that I'd have done in the evening previously.
The only benefit is that I no longer use an alarm. Work has flex hours and I don't have to be in until 10am, so I just wake up whenever I wake up and don't worry about it because there's plenty of time.
Is that complex series something you'd care to elaborate on? I'm sure I'm not alone in trying to understand what really makes us sleep the way we do, and every data point helps!
It was a bunch of stuff. One strand was about me recognizing that my baseline level of stress and anxiety was too high and working to lower that. Another was about improving sleep quality, so I was sharper during the day. A third was recognizing that I was an irresponsible electric light user; I automated my home lights to follow a consistent day-night cycle. [1] And a fourth was around physical exercise; over a few years I went from the stereotypical hates-exercise guy to somebody who regularly runs races.
And possibly related, of course, was that I got older during this period.
Note: I pounded this out pretty quickly and don't have time to proofread. Sorry for any grammatical errors.
I will say some of these articles sometimes read satirically. Notably, they have a diagnosis for people who can't sleep at 'normal' hours: Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome.
I have been struggling with being unable to sleep during normal hours my entire life. My parents would yank the covers off of me in the morning, or maybe my mother would start vacuuming my room at 8 AM frustrated that I wasn't already up. All through my school years, from elementary to HS I was barely functional. I was often late or missed the bus because I was a walking zombie, struggling to get dressed and out of the house without falling asleep.
Keep in mind that I'm 45, none of this was due to too much TV time or smart phone use. (One TV in the house, no such thing as notebooks, ipads, or smart phones back then).
No matter how much I struggled through the day to just stay awake, and how much I was looking forward to going to bed that night, at 9 PM I would be fully awake. I laid in bed night after night watching the click tick by as I tried to unsuccessfully "just go to sleep". Then, when my alarm went off I'd be exhausted again and struggle to get up and out the door. I was a terrible student to say the least.
You're told for years that you're lazy, unmotivated, a slacker, etc.
During my High School summers, I would get into a pattern of going to sleep at between 3 and 6 AM, waking at noon. I was a fully functioning human being. I had the most creative and productive days (evenings) of my life as an artist. I was naturally alert and creative Ispent the wee hours of the morning drawing, painting, reading.
Then I'd be plunged back into misery when the school year began. I once again drove my teachers crazy. I got in trouble for falling asleep in class. I was told again that I was a lazy slacker. I don't know how many times I was spoken to by faculty about not living up to my potential.
When you're told your whole life that you're only problem is that you're lazy, and you can't figure out why you can't find the motivation to do the things you want to do, you start to believe it.
After HS, I had a few menial jobs, stumbling into one where I worked from 8 PM to 4 AM. It was great, except for the fact that my mother still harassed my by trying to wake me up at 9 AM because... I don't know. I guess she just didn't want some lazy slacker sleeping the day away?
Later I worked my way into tech and had jobs requiring normal office hours. I was self medicating by drinking most nights, trying to get to sleep to maintain a normal-ish schedule. It didn't work all that well.
I was working at a company as a technical lead that I'd help get up and running with a couple of friends from school, and even though we were supposed to be "flex" hours, not surprisingly the morning people kept setting up 8 AM meetings that I was almost always late for and sometimes missed.
Out of frustration I spoke to my Dr about it, and he sent me to a a medical sleep center. I had a couple of sleep studies done, electrodes glued to my head and all that. The Dr told me I had DSPS, something I'd never heard of, nor sought a diagnosis of. This was roughly 20 years ago. I looked it up, and found that it was a real thing.
So, I told my friends that I'd started that company with what was up... I had thing thing called "DSPS" and what it was, how it worked and all that.
And I'll never forget how my best friend looked me square in the eye and told me he basically had lost all respect for me, for coming to them with some kind of bullshit made up medical diagnosis, trying to excuse my inability to keep the same schedule as everybody else. The relationship between the two of us quickly went down hill.
I spent some time after that out of tech, working jobs that were more amenable to later hours. For the last 6 I've been back in it, and it's still a frustrating struggle to stay on "normal" hours. In an effort to go to sleep when I should, I take benadryl and melatonin almost every night. Sometimes it works, sometimes it seems to have no effect.
I know that I'm not as effective at my job as I could be, my mind is often in a fog during the day. And again... I spend the whole day looking forward to climbing into bed at 9 PM to get a good night's rest, only to have my brain begin firing on all cylinders that night. I get tremendously motivated to do all of the things I was too tired to accomplish all day, and I have to try to shut it down by taking that benadryl and melatonin cocktail so I don't stay up all night. Then I get into bed and toss and turn, unable to sleep usually until 1 or 2 AM.
My paternal grandmother had it. I have it. One of my four children has it.
The article linked to here says that genetic mutations have been found that are linked to it.
And still, you make a comment illustrating society's skeptical attitude toward DSPS. You obviously don't believe that it's real.
That's what we deal with, and I don't expect that it will change any time soon.
My more charitable reading of dtien's comment was that instead of society understanding that different people have different preferred behaviors and that some of those preferences are going to have a genetic reason for them, we end up creating pathologies for normal behavior with names like "Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome". This name does sounds like it would come from a satirist, not the medical establishment.
The quotes around the word normal to me is the clearest indicator of dtien sympathetic view toward people with 'DSPS'. In a better world, people with late night preferences are just people, not labeled people with DSPS.
>some of those preferences are going to have a genetic reason for them
It's hard coded for you, that's understood. The argument is that it's silly to have a distinguisher for everything that doesn't fit into society's majority notions, or for everything that falls outside a "normal" range (or, what we perceive to be normal, even if it's not a true reflection of the average population). Everybody has preferences that help them function-- some preferences have a genetic basis, others don't, but in either case preferences help people function and it would be productive to shift the notions held by society that being flexible towards such preferences is going to lead to a happier populace.
If there is anything I have learned from being an owl, it's that larks are self-righteous jerks.
The reality is that the first person to wake up sets the schedule, because they can prematurely awaken anyone that is still sleeping. If you go around clattering around in the kitchen making coffee and bacon smells at 6 am, you can wake me up and I have no recourse. If I wake a lark up at 2 am, before going to bed myself, they can take revenge by staying awake and preventing me from sleeping at all. They have us by the clocks, and they know it.
I've struggled with the same thing all my life, sleepless nights and foggy days. I once thought about it and determined that there were years where I DIDN'T have this issue and came to the realization that was when I was involved in high school sports or college athletics. If I don't get a 5-7 mile run into my day or 45mins of swimming or weightlifting, etc.. why should I be tired? If all I've done all day is breathe and walk around there's no way I'm going to be able to sleep until like 2-3am. So perhaps absent hard exercise I'd fall into the 25-27 hour day cycle that others have described here in tis thread. but If I want to be on the same clock as most others I'd better make strenuous exercise a priority.
Honestly, I've found marijuana functions better as a sleep aid than benadryl/melatonin/etc. It might be something worth looking into, as it's probably the most powerful 'sleep-aid' available which doesn't cause long-term dependency or health issues.
Long term benadryl use is pretty bad for your brain/body. Long term use of anticholinergics in general has been strongly linked to the development of various severe health issues, including alzheimers and dementia. Beneadryl specifically has been linked to the development of prostate issues as well.
I appreciate you and the other poster pointing out that long term benadryl use isn't good. I really wasn't aware of that.
I appreciate the marijuana suggestion too, but I find that I'm unable to sleep after partaking. I get intermittent erratic heartbeats that make it impossible
:(
I've experienced what you're describing, and have observed it in friends. It's usually indicative of heightened anxiety levels, due to the THC.
THC itself is certainly prone to triggering incredible amounts of anxiety, especially in the high-concentrations found in modern weed. In the quest for increased potency, many strains have been heavily modified to have the highest THC content possible, sometimes up to even 50x normal levels.
THC is only part of the equation, though. The "other" (there are many, but these two are primarily what people care about) cannabinoid, CBD, is linked to the 'calming' and 'pain relieving' effects associated with marijuana.
I would suggest trying to find a strain with a very high CBD:THC ratio before giving up completely. From personal experience, high CBD strains alleviate the anxiety I used to experience whenever all I could find was high-THC sativas.
Strains are usually split into three categories, sativa, hybrid, and indica. You can research these more yourself if interested, but usually indica strains are more associated with 'sleep' and 'relaxation', whereas sativas typically cause a more energetic head high.
tl;dr You might want to try a high CBD indica/hybrid strain before giving up on marijuana alltogether. The effect profiles are dramatically different between different strains, and a high CBD indica strain could be life changing when it comes to pursuing consistent sleep.
This may be more than you wanted to know, but as somebody who has also struggled with often debilitating sleep issues and has tried __every__ sleep aid, marijuana allows me to sleep better than anything non-dependency forming.
The only sleep-aids I've found to be more effective than marijuana are GABAergic drugs such as benzodiazepines (klonopin) or z-drugs (ambien). The main problem with these is that they are HEAVILY dependency forming, and once dependency is developed, can actually straight up kill you from withdrawals. They are incredibly powerful tools which will certainly allow to you sleep, but considering their addictive potential should be relied upon as a last resort. For short-term treatment of insomnia however, they can be literally life saving.
Hey Krapsna, my satirical read was in regards to the hyper scientific labels of "Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome", "team energetic asynchrony", and "chronotype diversity".
After several years of melatonin use, I developed an irregular heart rhythm I could hear/feel, and you could see on an echocardiogram. It dissipated within a week of stopping.
Long-term inability to work is also not healthy. Obviously the parent commenter does not want to have to use these drugs as they are, but they are making a difficult choice based on the circumstances of their brain and our society. I wish they could find work that allowed them to be as healthy and productive as possible.
"what societal as well as productivity improvements"
In my experience it is likely to give some sort of decrease.
I have worked in places with very flexible working hours and my team leader was always in later than me (officially we were supposed to be in by 10 am, but 11 am was more normal for him. I on the other hand got woken up by my girlfriend for her job, so i started at 9 like most other people).
Basically if I had something to ask him in those two hours I had to wait, which ended up being a bit of a pain in the arse overall.
I also get a little eye-rolly when they went into the whole "we see things differently" bit. The whole "I'm so special and unique thing" just grates after a while. If you're like roughly 30% of the population, that whole "seeing things differently" means you see things like 30% of the population. Which ain't too shabby.
What really bugs me is the self-righteousness of the early riser. There's definitely some kind of power dynamic going on. Perhaps the joke should be: How do you know if someone gets up at 5am? Because they tell you.
When it comes to work (or other morning activities), I think there are actually two aspects to this that often get confused.
One is what you're talking about: the way people regard waking up early as virtuous.
The other is that, how early or late you arrive to an event sends signals about your attitude toward the event. Or at least it is interpreted that way.
For example, if you are very excited about seeing a particular movie or a concert and it has general admission, you will arrive early to get a good seat. Someone who is ambivalent about the movie will not make such an effort. Therefore, arrival time correlates with enthusiasm, and people know this, and they reason backwards.
There's also probably some stuff behind why people don't want to be the first to arrive at a party. Arriving fashionably late can show you only want to experience the best part of the party, which in a sense is a power move indicating you think you are more important than some of the other guests.
I think people sometimes have these perceptions in the business world too. If you have a later schedule, they're not sure if it's because you are aligning your work schedule with your productive hours or because you'd rather not be there. Ideally, people wouldn't make assumptions, but it happens.
Showing up a little late to a party is more courteous as the hosts have just a little more time to set things up without needing to entertain people.
Showing up early on the other hand often put's people who are not ready on the spot. If you regularly host parties who will get annoyed at people that show up 30+ minutes early unless they are willing to help.
To be fair these expectations vary wildly between cultures and countries. Where I come from the starting time of a party/event is regarded as actual starting time. You’re welcome, not expected, to arrive at that time and while there might be some minor preparations left, you’re in no way expected to help by being on time.
However there was a reddit thread (or was it HN?) a few weeks back discussing this very issue and if i remember correctly being on time was considered almost rude in brazil as well as a number of other countries,
This varies a lot from country to country as we noticed working with a very international group of friends in Spain.
My friend basically sent out an invite to her party with staggered start times based on nationality. Spanish Greeks were asked to come two or three hours before the real start time, French one hour and Brits and Germans were given the actual time.
> Isn't what you saying exactly the problem mmaunder talked about?
I was trying to make a distinction between perceptions of character and perceptions of attitude.
Though not everyone agrees, many people see waking up early as a valuable part of being self-disciplined and hardworking. That's a perception about character.
But that can't account for perceptions people have around events that happen in the afternoon or evening, and yet people still read things into arrival time for those events too. So there is a second factor in perception.
> This has nothing to do with me being unable to do a job or being not intersted in it.
I agree that it's absolutely possible for this to be the case. But perception doesn't always reflect reality.
Often people really do understand and just like to tease others who don't fit the mold. But sometimes people make assumptions, so basically I'm trying to be aware of what assumptions they might make and why just in case it happens.
There are, of course, some early risers who don't do this. But yeah, the ones who do are pretty unbearable. I had a neighbor who boasted of how she woke up at 4:45a to work out. Of course, she fell asleep in front of the TV at 8p...
And if she had bragged about getting the right amount of sleep, I wouldn't have cared. But she just went on and on about the superiority of early risers: how this successful VC or that successful CEO wakes up very early, and how in fact most successful people in SV wake up early.
as an early riser myself, what bothers me about this is that I personally feel like I'm only talking about because someone else is making a big deal out of it. I don't think I go out of my way to bring the topic up, but I'm constantly getting people saying things like "omg I saw when you sent that email/made that commit/whatever, do you ever sleep", and then I gotta say something like "well I was up at 5 so I knocked it out before I drove in..." and now it's a thing we're talking about and I'm the crazy guy.
It feels like a much bigger issue to late-risers than early-risers.
I really wish I could sleep by 2am. It would make life possible.
My natural sleep pattern is 5am-12. I've literally spent the last decade trying to solve it. Until, I gave up.
it's been a conscious effort on my part and I'm still very susceptible to falling off the wagon for a week at a time. I don't think it's very natural for people tbh. I was always a late worker and still kind of am when the shit really hits the fan, but I am a believer that when I have to put in the extra hours, I'm usually more efficient in the morning that late at night. That motivates me to keep trying.
Move to a new time zone and that 'natural' 5am-12 would shift to match that time zone. So, it's really not about biology it's about how you set up your environment.
That said, as long as it's working for you great! Just don't assume it's impossible to change if it's causing you problems.
This is not your fault, as you really do not know the lengths and depths and tears and effort it has taken for me to change my sleep pattern to be consistent. But there is no "assumption here".
A main problem is - even when i've had to be awake at 9am every day (yes awake at 9am, not working at 9am) it causes me to fall really ill. Mentally and physically your body feels wrecked and it doesn't matter how tired you are, you wake up at night.
I now, after a decade, manage a sleep cycle that doesn't change every day by a few hours and I can just about function enough for meetings.
I can just about get to 1pm meetings and it's taken so much effort just to be able to get here!
I've written nearly 4 articles covering the different strategies i've used to be able to wake up early in the morning. I've slept through some of the most important things - which led me in my final exams to just stay up all night to get to 9am exams incase I wouldn't wake up.
What has worked is accepting that it is a genuine disability and problem. And as you say, adjusting my environment to suit my sleeping issues. Unfortunately, changing time zones doesn't work. But it's a nice theory (I've already tried this).
I'll be posting my articles soon which documents every strategy i've tried over the last decade, in hope it might help someone find a solution for them.
I personally know someone that lived on a 28 hour day for a while (6 * 28 / 7 = 24). He was able to keep a fairly normal workday during the week but over the weekend he was crashing in the day. It only worked because he was religious about managing light levels at home with blackout blinds and sunlamps on timers.
If your willing to try just about anything it might be worth a shot, but you end up making a lot of sacrifices and must keep a very tight schedule.
I've been on a non-24 hour rhythm :). My sleep would change every day by 4-6 hours.
I've had shutters for my windows so no light could get in the evening, light simulation alarm clocks, only used the computer for a maximum of 8 hours a day and got rid of my smart-phone so I had an old fashioned phone, to reduce phone use. I don't drink coffee or tea. Melatonin, sleeping tablets, waking up every day at the same time and going for a run.
Fyi, waking up every time at the same day makes me ill because I still can't sleep early even if i've had a lack of sleep for several nights before.
You can't crash at weekends either. Because if you crash at weekends it messes up your sleep cycle completely and you'll start Monday having slept at 6am on Sunday night.
A tight schedule means you have to do it every day. Then there's the other problem that happens when you crash out - you're really groggy for days.
When I was in school, I'd crash out at 4pm on a Friday night and wake up at 7am the next day. I'd have headaches and feel so drained. And I'd still go to my weekend job.
It's not a lack of motivation.
If you know anything about this guy and the strategies he uses, please do share. Always looking for suggestions.
You might be able to tweak it 45 minutes though by living at the edge of the time zone. But you have to figure out if you’re staying up with the sun or your work schedule.
If you stay up until the sun is nearly up then the eastern edge means the sun is up longer before you have to be at work. But if it’s N hours after you get home, then you’ll see more daylight on the western edge which might be more healthy for you.
For me I don’t want to move if the sun isn’t up yet. I need to move farther south so my winters aren’t as rough.
Does this change at all when the clocks go back / forward? How long does it take you to adjust then?
In my opinion the 2am is just a conceptual thing and there is nothing concrete about it - we change it twice a year and most people adjust fairly quickly.
It should be a bigger deal to late-risers because, you know, a typical schedule of work and socialising isn't compatible with rising late. This is particularly galling because it appears that late-risers are not uncommon.
Early risers speaking on the issue don't have anything interesting to say.
Just goes to show that as careful as we ought to be to make sure what we say is reasonable, we should also be careful to keep our interpretations charitable.
Lately I’ve been toying with running my own company, and if I did (which I probably won’t)...
Everything is 24/7 these days. It’s fucking ridiculous that we’re trying to have all of our employees in the office during exactly the same hours the same five days a week, and then outsource to a place 12 time zones away which can cover most of the rest of the day, except that you can’t even have a meeting without inconveniencing literally everybody. It’s stupid, wearing a clown suit backward.
We should have heterogenous shifts. Say 9 days a fortnight with the 9th being a weekend. 25% of the staff is available on any weekend day, and everyone has one weekday off per week, and some fraction of the staff is available for extended hours the rest of the week.
That might mean that Scrum and scrumbut don’t work but I’m perfectly fine with that.
As much as I dislike having to play the game, late-in-late-out people can benefit by saving some email replies until the tail end of their workday...it always feels gross to me to do it intentionally, but I've found it'll often placate the types of busybodies who conflate arrival time with productivity.
I had a coworker who ended up working an hour more on average than everybody else because he would show up at 6 and try to leave at 3. But shit usually breaks around 3 and that’s plenty of time for people to complain about how you’re never around when we need you.
I tried to convince him to either work out or do a side project in the morning, or take at least an hour lunch every day. I wish I could remember what he ended up doing but it might have been “work somewhere else”.
I think there's a lot of selection bias in your assertion that early risers are self righteous. There are people I have known for many years before finding out they were early risers. One of the biggest surprises was from a guy I had been working with for about 10 years who was notorious for coming in late, usually after lunch. I was on the local news at about 5am one day and he asked me about it. Of course my first response was "What the (&# were you doing up at 5am?", and he said "Oh, I'm always up that early, I just don't feel like going in to work until later."
How about everyone knowing what the word 'nocturnal' means, but they can't think of the word describing the opposite behaviour and resorting to using the word 'normal'.
nocturnal - Done, occurring, or active at night. [0]
diurnal - 1. Of or during the day. 2. Daily; of each day. [1]
crepuscular - Resembling or relating to twilight. [2]
My natural wake time is 5:30 - 6:30 am and I am definitely a morning person. I can assure you that my being a morning person has more to do with me being too tired to stay awake beyond 10:30 pm than anything else.
I've found that people who stay up late also tend to tell you [edit: and brag] about it. For example, if a friend is out late partying you're almost guaranteed to hear about how late they stayed out the next day.
I think it goes both ways because people want to justify why they are not at 100% energy. Partly to not offend others when you're being abnormally unenthusiastic. A type of social defense mechanism.
"Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise."
The virtue of getting up early dates from the days when everybody was a farmer. Farmers who got a head start on the work that needed to be done even befode the sun came up outfarmed late risers.
These days it is considered a mark of professionalism and respect for the job to show up for work on time or early, at 8 AM or before.
You sound like the guy at my office who gives me shit for leaving at 2:30PM. Maybe to him my exasperation sounds like self-righteousness. I never can tell why some people are so interested in my sleep schedule.
You are never gonna make leaving at 2:30 work, mate. There are too many mid afternoon fire drills and you walking out the door while people are trying to solve really bad problems is never going to fly.
You are also going to be constantly having people trying to talk you into committing code after 2:00 (a perfectly reasonable time) but then getting pissed because you broke the build and went home.
Have people started talking about Core Hours yet? They will.
Very situational. I've been making 2:00-2:30PM work for 25 years. Maybe it's different in shops primarily filled with young people who show up late, work late, and have a philosophy of move-fast-and-break-things.
How do you know if someone gets up at 5 AM? They schedule all their meetings at 7 AM and think they're doing you a favor by imposing their schedule on you. See also: public school start times.
Love this article! There is some really interesting research on the sleep patterns of indigenous tribes. Researchers found that while studying the tribe for like a 3 month period there was only around 30 minutes where the entire tribe was asleep. Humans are built to live together in communities to create the greatest likelihood of survival. Its most advantageous for someone to be awake to make sure that lion doesn't eat us after all. So while industrialization and the workaholism of Americans has pushed us to all wake up earlier - based on our chronobiology - its probably pretty unhealthy for many.
>According to Dr. Walker, about 40 percent of the population are morning people, 30 percent are evening people, and the remainder land somewhere in between.
I'm not a sleep expert or a neuroscientist, but I take issue with being branded into a sleep-band that is "hard-written" into my DNA. I perform at my worst when I wake at times other than my current habit allows for - whether that is early or late.
I don't believe this leaves me in the 30% of in-between people. It just means that my habits are most telling of my performance. Don't assume my chronotype.
It's not some random commenter that assumed the cronotype though, it's scientists.
So, you can take it with them.
Or you could an outlier, but it's not like this flexibility you mention is statistically true for most people. What has been studied is statistically true.
> It's not some random commenter that assumed the cronotype though, it's scientists.
However, what is actually known about the human body is often a lot more fuzzy and uncertain than how the popular press, or sometimes scientists, would have use believe. If the second paragraph of the Wikipedia article on the chronotype is to be believed there is plenty of room for believing that environment and habits play a role in your Chronotype as is the case for most behaviours.
> The causes and regulation of chronotypes, including developmental change, individual propensity for a specific chronotype, and flexible versus fixed chronotypes have yet to be determined. However, research is beginning to shed light on these questions, such as the relationship between age and chronotype.
It is understandable that my ethos is not on par with Dr. Walker's, and that my anecdote would indeed make me an outlier.
With that being said, I am legitimately unable to find any conclusive research that says there are effectively three "cronotype" bands, and 100% of the population falls into one of these three bands, and that these bands are completely DNA-driven and non-dynamic. Every source of this information seems to be behind a "buy my book" paywall from some inspirational speaker like Daniel Pink.
The article says:
"For further proof, researchers at Rockefeller University last year announced the discovery of a gene mutation that apparently accounts for D.S.P.S."
In that study, the author says, " According to the new research, the mutation may be present in as many as one in 75 people in some populations." While there might be more genes which lend themselves to DSPS, the numbers from the study don't exactly lend extra credibility to the argument.
Can you help me to understand where it has been statistically proven that 100% of humans fall into roughly three equal bands of morning/evening/between, and that this has been solidly linked to genetics rather than environmental/habits or a combination of both? Most studies on humans don't make such bold claims because genetics are so diverse across populations that the study population itself would need to be enormous.
Can someone convince me that this problem isn't in your head?
I used to consider myself a "night owl" until I observed something:
I was travelling in Chile and went up to Peru. There was a two hour time difference despite being at more or less the same longitude (I think Chile shifted its clocks in summer while Peru didn't, and there was a one hour difference on top of that).
Guess what? I got used to it in a few days.
Likewise Spain is an hour ahead of the UK, despite being both being similar longitude. We shift our sleeping patterns by and hour a couple of times each year with daylight saving. It usually only takes a couple of days to get used to it.
I enjoy my sleep and the answer seems to be going to bed earlier, and not convincing yourself that you can't sleep because its too early. The time of day is a social construct.
First of all, I wouldn’t consider someone who sleeps from 2a.m. To 10a.m. A night owl, everything before noon is stil morning for me :) And why do those articles never mention daylight saving time or the fact that that there is a 3 hour difference between sunrise in winter and summer? I’m pretty sure DNA doesn’t care about fixed time schedules but that it rather synchronizes to natural sun and moon light. I’m convinced that a shifting sleep cicle (compared to a fixed time, but fixed to the sun or moon or some overlap) is the most natural and healthiest one, that’s also how our ancestors took shifts, D.S.P.S. just being a fancy new name, while in reality nature selects a few people being in tune with moon light, another few with sun light and some being in between, or maybe even that changes during the year, so that there are fair overlaps for everyone while watching out for those sabre tooth tigers when others sleep, those tigers don’t attack just at night ;)
I've had DSPS for my entire adult life and it has been incredibly difficult to manage. For me the biggest improvements have come with maintaining extremely strict sleep hygiene: F.lux or the equivalent on all my devices, setting a "start getting ready to go to bed" alarm on my smartwatch, generally avoiding caffeine and alcohol entirely, wearing blue blocking glasses when I'm going to bed, and maintaining the same bed time and wake up times even during the weekend. As well as using a light based alarm clock as my primary alarm. It can still be a challenge to be well rested but I do a vastly better job of it than I had previously. I don't always make it to work at the time I want but compared to the "bad old days" where I might come to work on only 3-4 hours of sleep one day and I might roll in at 1pm, 2pm, even 3pm some days it's like a quantum leap improvement.
The other major factor is getting regular exercise.
>When night owls are forced to rise early, their prefrontal cortex, which controls sophisticated thought processes and logical reasoning, “remains in a disabled, or ‘offline,’ state,” Dr. Walker writes. “Like a cold engine in an early-morning start, it takes a long time before it warms up to operating temperature.”
My friends and I call this "poo brain." We all had the same rhythm back in highschool which did not give with the 7:15am first bell. By about 2pm we'd be zombies, capable of no kind of creative thought.
To this day if we're visiting each other and suffering jet lag, inevitable accusations of poo brain get thrown around. It feels like every part of the brain works except the part that thinks - that's a swamp.
I believe a big part of the problem is that the old larks, and with them their belief about lark superiority, simply don't retire as they used to, thus keeping young people and fresh ideas from moving up the "chain of command".
Being a hard night owl myself, I'm happy to work at a place with flexible hours, but then again most of my company is <40-50 years of age. People in BigCos often aren't as lucky and to make it worse "office politics" with the competitiveness associated there (and mentioned in the article) effectively kill off any motivation to chsnge.
This is the worst sort of ageism. In my professional experience there is no correlation between youth and fresh ideas.
Big companies with competent leaders are perfectly capable of rapid change when survival is at stake. The classic example is the pivot from desktop software toward the Internet that Bill Gates led at Microsoft.
> This is the worst sort of ageism. In my professional experience there is no correlation between youth and fresh ideas.
Look into politics, no matter the country, or any big corporation - it is usually an old-white-men club (exceptions confirm the rule). And they are hell-bent on keeping the situation so that they benefit, and the younger generations suffer for it.
The social contract was that at reaching ~65 (here in Germany) years, you retire, and someone younger rises to your position. The current situation with people working way past their 80s, either due to stubbornness (rich old white men) or due to economic need (poor old people, PoC), breaks that contract, and young people are locked into lower-paying positions because they cannot rise up.
To provide my claims with data: average age of DAX company boardmembers is 61, with some companies at 70 (!!) [1], only 7% of CxO posts are held by women [2]. In addition, the government commission "Deutscher Corporate Governance Kodex" actually has literally asked for "fresh blood" in boards [1].
When I start to feel like I'm not performing like I used to, I worry that my sleep patterns are the culprit. Then I worry that worrying about sleep patterns is causing performance problems...
I'm the only person I've encountered that naturally runs on a 25 hour clock. I get the same amount of sleep per day (~8 hours) but I follow it with 17 hours of wakefulness so my clock moves forward by an hour every day. To my knowledge there are no adverse health effects, but it's certainly out of the ordinary. I often wonder if more people are like me since sleep problems are so common, but they cannot follow their natural rhythm since it does not fit into the traditional 9-5 work week.
There seem to be various incarnations of it: it's pretty common among blind people, though not all have it.
Some people just seem to have a really long day, 26+ hours, so that they need extreme light exposure to entrain to the sun's rhythm.
I tried that, and apparently it was something else - I suspect a defect in the suprachiasmatic nucleus (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suprachiasmatic_nucleus), which is a part of the brain responsible from interpreting the signals from the eye that keeps the daily clock in sync.
I've mostly fixed it using the Ketogenic Diet (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketogenic_diet), which tells me it has something to do with the sugar metabolism in the brain. Because that's what the ketogenic diet addresses eg. in epileptics.
Ever since finding out I had this "incurable" condition and fixing it within 3-4 days of keto, I've been just a regular night owl. I like to go to bed at 2am and wake up around 10am, though I have to make due with 12-8 for work :-/ It's not the same though. In my experience, sleeping at the correct time makes an enormous difference.
I've been "symptom free" from Non24 for almost 3 years now using keto, and I know of 2 other people that have had success.
Should your SCN not be the problem, but you simply have an extremely long circadian rhythm, you can try extreme morning light exposure. This giant article explains tons about DSPS and what he calls the "farmer's lifestyle": https://www.supermemo.com/en/articles/sleep#farmers_lifestyl.... (He's wrong about Non24 always being an extreme form of DSPS - it does exist).
It is worth experimenting months at a time and solving this. You'll spend 1/3 of the rest of your life sleeping, finding out how your body wants to sleep is a huge investment. I found out in my 30s that I had an "incurable condition" and had it accidentally fixed a year later.
Funny, I thought living with a 25 hour day was a nearly universal desire for people under 40. Certainly most of my close friends in my teens and 20s would regularly discuss that this would make our lives better.
Once I experienced the pain of needing to wake up for a small child, I was forced out of my historical sleep pattern. Fortunately I, like my parents, need less and less sleep as I get older, so 24 hours with an early rising child is more tolerable now than when I initially experienced it.
I suspect there is a pattern -- have kids, learn to wake up earlier. For me it was self-reinforcing; the act of putting the kids down for bed at 8:30PM is like drawing a line in the sand, with quiet hours afterward. It makes it sensible to go to bed earlier and wake up earlier.
I've come to the same conclusion about myself, but I pegged it closer to 26 or 27 hours. For a while I've thought about just letting it rotate through the 24 hour day, to the point that I'm awake all night and sleep all day, until it realigns, to see what would happen. Sounds exactly what you're doing, though. I'm scared that it would have adverse psychological effects... and no doubt it would make working in the "real world" more difficult. Interested to hear more about your experience, how long you've been doing it, etc.
In the end, my wife is a lark, so I'd rather be awake with her :)
You're not the only one. When I was younger (20s), I used to say I thought days should be about 25 hours long. Now that I'm in my 40s with kids, 24 hours seems plenty.
Apparently that’s pretty common when your light exposure isn’t dominated by natural light (insufficient exposure to natural light during the day and/or significant exposure to artificial light at night): https://www.circadiansleepdisorders.org/info/cycle_length.ph...
I have a coworker like that. We have flexible hours, so it's not too bad for him, though we do have core hours where we expect people to be available for meetings, etc. Luckily for him, his boss is pretty laid back about such things, and we can also often video conference in from home. So worst-case he gets up for a meeting, calls in, then goes back to sleep. But others like you definitely exist!
If it's any consolation, my roommate in college had the exact same 25 hour circadian rhythm. At the time it was frustrating to me because the hours that he would sleep were more often than not out of phase with my own, but it was interesting none the less.
Tangentially related, I am regularly waken up by garbage trucks at ~2am and ~4:30am, and then sometimes again at ~6am.
(I live in San Francisco).
It's becoming unbearable. Unfortunately there are a couple of commercial activities nearby, and my understanding is that there's no way to force these trucks to come at a more decent time.
Any of you have any idea on how to fix this? Sorry if this is a bit off-topic, but not sleeping well for months is something that deeply affects your well being...
Marpac Sound Machine and perhaps add some heavy, heavy curtains over the windows. Other than that, I suspect moving somewhere with better soundproofing or away from commercial traffic may be the only viable alternative.
I moved to a very noisy part of the city and found that practicing a different reaction to noise actually helped me. I just decided to treat it as not such a big deal and I'm able to sleep quite well now. White noise helps too.
So little research, so many anecdotes. There are MDS and scientists dealing with these issues. The trouble is not so much when you sleep, but whether you're well in the end. And as someone mentioned, our sleep cycles used to be vastly different. Not to mention that people who take a nap during the day might have a completely different type of sleep cycle.
> I have it fairly bad. My body naturally wants to go to bed around 2 a.m. and rise around 10 a.m.
That was my cycle as well and I wouldn't describe it as "fairly bad" it's definitely later but not egregious.
The SSC article recommends .3mg melatonin 7 hours before desired sleep and it worked like a charm for me (along with rituals for earlier sleep and better sleep hygiene).
Within a few weeks I was going to bed at 10pm and naturally waking up at around 7am. Now I regularly operate on this schedule and I was kind of surprised at how quickly I was able to adjust.
Did you need to use melatonin only for those few weeks that it took to adjust your schedule, or have you had to continue using it indefinitely to maintain this schedule?
I only started a few weeks ago so I'll let you know, but I can say so far I haven't been militant about using melatonin every day and already I'm still able to go to (and fall) asleep at the earlier time.
Yes, at a minimum because I'm not scrambling to get ready for work because I've already been up a few hours and have time to handle my own personal projects in the morning as opposed to in the evening when I'm too tired to make the effort.
I've never been able to figure out my sleep schedule and have always conformed to these positive ideas we associate with early risers, but this article, despite its weird elitism, has given me some hope.
I like to go to bed late, but I also like to wake up early. Sometimes I can't wake up until noon. Sometimes waking up at noon feels like shit. Sometimes I'll spontaneously awaken at 7am and feel amazing until about noon. Sometimes I'll be dead-tired at 9pm. Sometimes I'll set my alarm for 9am and wake up at 8am-- sometimes its the opposite.
It makes no sense because I go to bed at pretty much the same time every night (between 1 and 3 am, usually 2am).
I feel inspired to monitor my natural sleep now and figure out what's going on, rather than constantly trying (and failing) to conform to 10pm-6am.
I've noticed if you are passionate about something, you don't track time, you don't care about your surroundings and lose yourself in what you are doing. That's when productivity happens and it doesn't respect sunlight always. However, it is easier on most human beings to have a circadian rhythm aligned with sunlight and workout first thing in the morning to jump start the day. It is more sustainable in the long run to do that to have a healthy routine from my perspective and backed by research. Shawn Stevenson has some good insight on that to get you started.
Or... this could be ADHD hyperfocus or bipolar II hypomania. Not everyone is the same, and not everyone experiences periods of just losing themselves in their work completely without any knowledge of time passing.
Wow, what a quick jump to pathologize someone's behavior based on some pattern you spotted that bares some resemblance to a mental disorder. Psychiatry is not an exact science, and this labelling does more harm than good when used out of context. A person can be classified with a mental disorder _only_ when that behavior starts having negative effects to their lives, and not merely by satisfying some of the symptoms. Someone can act hypomanic or depressed and that can fluctuate through their life but until that starts having severe negative effects that they can't escape from on their own, it is simply the expression of their character and their uniqueness as a human being, rich and complex. Otherwise you can classify with a mental disorder pretty much everyone.
Where did "time flies when your having fun" come from? Time seems to move faster when you are actively doing something that envelopes your faculties, even if it has something to do with tracking time, like completing a complicated algorithm with a limited time to do it. Maybe you don't like general statements even if they are not implied to cover all cases?
I’ve been having this problem too. It’s the worst. Going to bed at 10 and waking up at 3 when your alarm is set for 6; exhausted but weirdly alert too. Then feeling like a zombie all day, collapsing into bed, and doing it all over again.
I’m waking between cycles, not because of apnea; and apnea shouldn’t prevent getting back to sleep afaik - it just prevents deep sleep and leaves you less rested. I think my sleep hygiene’s been ok. The one cause that seems most likely to me is a decrease in exercise (due to an injury).
Since college I've made a point of taking jobs that offer flexible hours, which thankfully seems to be increasingly common. I have no interest in going back to having that conflicted feeling around midnight, knowing that if I stay up much later the morning will be torture, but feeling wide awake, productive and creative.
In recent years I've found myself tending to wake up earlier in the morning, but regardless of when I wake up my brain is still fuzzy until 10 or 11am. It turns out that this makes the mornings an ideal time for me to get some exercise, which I've discovered to be a great way to start the day.