Ask HN: how to become a morning person?

I feel like my body just can't accept a static bedtime on a 24 hour cycle. I remember many a summer where I would operate on something closer to a 27 hour day which is pretty awesome but messed up in terms of integrating with the rest of society, which I assume most of us need/want to do. Also, I've never been a morning person - the closest thing I've had to a regular sleep schedule is like 3:30am to around noon.

Anyone else experience similar issues and shift their schedules accordingly? What helped out, and what kept it sustainable long term?

Getting lots of exercise makes it easier to fall asleep at night. The ultimate solution, however, is to have a small child.

In my experience being a morning person is mutually exclusive to integrating with (most of) the rest of society.

I was born a morning person, but high school and college forced me to abandon that lifestyle. Eventually my body caught up to me (10 years later) and I had to go back to being a morning person again. It was a simple thing to fall back into... I just started going to sleep around 9 or 10 in the evening. The nice thing is I now wake up without an alarm after 8 hours. Getting some early morning exercise and a decent breakfast help, too. Cutting back on caffeine as well - I dropped coffee for a few blends of tea, mostly green.

(The one thing that doesn't help is being up at 12:30 AM on a Saturday morning waiting for the cross-compile of a linux kernel for my used-to-be-Nook to finish. This is almost as slow as bootstrapping Gentoo from stage1.)

Have a wind down period in the evening. Monitors and TV screens seem to activate my brain and I have trouble falling asleep if I use them late into the evening. Shut off every monitor at least 10 hours before you want to wake up. Relax in a warm bath for 30 minutes and then perhaps read or write down your thoughts in a journal.

That said, not everyone is a morning person. If you feel better being a nightowl, just try to adjust your life to it as much as possible.

Upon waking in winter: "does my clock say 5:30 or later"? -> GTFO of bed. In spring/summer/fall: "is the sky no longer pitch black?" -> GTFO of bed.

I will cheat if I went to bed > 12:00.

Why rise at insane times? Because there are far too many awesome things I want to do that day, and as soon as I wake up they pop into my head. Between 6 and 9 I do whatever I want, so I use it to read about interesting tech stuff, perhaps do a little planning, check Facebook without being stalked, etc.