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Maybe Your Sleep Problem Isn’t a Problem

nytimes.com

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Re: Maybe Your Sleep Problem Isn’t a Problem

#131

Post by non24 »

pg_bot wrote: post #25

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…

Congrats, you have Non-24-hour sleep–wake disorder (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-24-hour_sleep%E2%80%93wake...).

I have it too. Have since childhood.

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.

Re: Maybe Your Sleep Problem Isn’t a Problem

#132

Post by stagas »

InclinedPlane wrote: post #111
sebringj wrote: post #31

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…

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.

Re: Maybe Your Sleep Problem Isn’t a Problem

#133

Post by hinkley »

macNchz wrote: post #15

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.…

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.

Re: Maybe Your Sleep Problem Isn’t a Problem

#134

Post by hinkley »

gascan wrote: post #34
macNchz wrote: post #15

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.…

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…

> 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.

Re: Maybe Your Sleep Problem Isn’t a Problem

#135

Post by hinkley »

kingbirdy wrote: post #29
muxxa wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bett…

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.

Nobody ever made a good decision at 3:00 am. Keep away from the codebase please.

Re: Maybe Your Sleep Problem Isn’t a Problem

#136

Post by hinkley »

Retric wrote: post #75
LifeQuestioner wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: Maybe Your Sleep Problem Isn’t a Problem

#137

Post by hinkley »

amelius wrote: post #27
mmaunder wrote: post #22

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.

There's also an asymmetry: the person who works late can't rub it in, because the early person has already left the building.

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”.

Re: Maybe Your Sleep Problem Isn’t a Problem

#138

Post by hinkley »

mcguire wrote: post #64
amelius wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also an asymmetry: the person who works late can't rub it in, because the early person has already left the building.

"Why can't you be here at 8:00am?" "But I was the only person here at 7:00pm when the server fell over."

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.

Re: Maybe Your Sleep Problem Isn’t a Problem

#139

Post by hinkley »

rootusrootus wrote: post #65
mmaunder wrote: post #22

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.

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.

Re: Maybe Your Sleep Problem Isn’t a Problem

#140

Post by collyw »

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.

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