I'm a mix of both
Early riser or night owl? New study may help to explain the difference
121–130 of 358 posts
Re: Early riser or night owl? New study may help to explain the difference
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nearly everywhere in US society where productivity comes up, the “early bird” is held up as the standard of efficiency. Thus, those people who instead prefer a schedule that doesn’t begin pre-dawn have been chastised in books, talks, and in media despite there not being any proof that that they are “lazy” but rather are simply naturally attuned to a different schedule.
Interestingly, this early=virtue thing goes back more than a century. Before electric light, the common sleeping mode was in two chunks, first and second sleep. Moralizing busybodies, kin to the anti-alcohol movement, decided that second sleep was self-indulgent and unnecessary. The history podcast Backstory had a great set of segments on sleep a while back: https://www.backstoryradio.org/shows/on-the-clock-4/ Even a…
As the olde englysshe prouerbe sayth in this wyse. Who soo woll ryse erly shall be holy helthy & zely.
The Book of St. Albans, 1486
Re: Early riser or night owl? New study may help to explain the difference
#123I've been a night owl my whole life, with the exception of that period during secondary school where I was so depressed in the evenings I went to bed early and as a consequence woke up super early. I have followed every advice, meditation (1yr), excercise (3*1.5hrs per week for 18 months), staving off screens after 18:00 (8mo), no caffiene, no sugar, no food of any kind, I also tried: too much food, cooling my body d…
I made the switch. Not intentionally; it just kind of happened. I think there were a lot of things that made it work, like taking up running (in the mornings), avoiding stimulants, and good sleep hygiene. But the one that finally made the difference surprised me: it's that I'm not a responsible lightswitch user. I built an automated lighting system such that dawn in my house comes at 6 am and gets gradually brighter.…
I don't have an elaborate setup as yours but I have found the most dramatic improvement by getting one of these:
https://www.philips.ca/c-p/HF3670_60/smartsleep-connected-sl...
It's a sunrise and sunset alarm clock. I wake up at 5:15 AM on a daily basis and 20 minutes before, the light starts with increasing brightness. At 5:08 AM, I have selected ocean waves for the sound and at 5:15 the loud alarm comes on.
It's been a dramatic change for me with this. I would normally get 7 to 7.5 hours of sleep but would have a very hard time waking up and more often than not, would go back to sleep.
With this arrangement, it's been really wonderful. I now tend to be mostly awake before the main alarm comes on and I am able to just get up.
I know this is not a inexpensive option but there are other models without the bells and whistles.
Re: Early riser or night owl? New study may help to explain the difference
#124I accidentally shifted from mostly night to mostly day, by starting to sleep with my curtains open. I sleep in a room with a large south facing window right near me, and a good sized east facing window not too far away. I found that this resulted in my naturally waking up refreshed near sunrise. I also found that I started doing segmented sleep [1], as was common in pre-industrial times. As with getting up near sunri…
I was never a night owl but I've found that allowing the sun to naturally wake me leaves me much more rested and refreshed in the morning.
Sure there's those "sunrise lamps", but nothing compares to the real thing.
Go to bed with your blinds open or get ones that are translucent.
Re: Early riser or night owl? New study may help to explain the difference
#125I'm confused, so an early riser is one that operates on a 20-hour cycle? Does that mean they sleep more than a night owl? I always thought it was the opposite.
Re: Early riser or night owl? New study may help to explain the difference
#126To interject some science into the anecdotes, if the timing of your sleep impacts your daily life (i.e. you may have a "sleep disorder") the following may be of interest:
* General category of "Circadian rhythm sleep disorders": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circadian_rhythm_sleep_disorde...
* "Night owl" a.k.a. "Delayed sleep phase disorder" (often related to teens & adults) : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed_sleep_phase_disorder
* Extremely early riser a.k.a. "Advanced Sleep Phase Disorder" (often related to the older people) : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_sleep_phase_disorder
* Sleep/wake cycle "a day" significantly longer than 24 hours: "Non-24-hour sleep–wake disorder" : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-24-hour_sleep%E2%80%93wake...
Note that in additional to issues directly connected to sleep disorders, there are often significant impacts from cultural/societal attitudes to when individuals sleep that lead to secondary effects (e.g. shame, guilt, depression)--particularly for people who are unaware that sleep disorders exist and have not yet been diagnosed.
(Similar dynamics affect people with, for example, executive function-related disorders such as ADHD/ADD. Additionally, interactions between sleep disorders & ADHD/ADD mean that aids such as supplementary Melatonin need to be taken at different times and/or e.g. smaller doses.)
I am not a doctor, nor a sleep specialist but I do believe people (& their families) who are affected by sleep disorders deserve to be informed and not subjected to the feeling that their inability to sleep at a societally mandated time is a character flaw or evidence of them "just not trying hard enough".
Re: Early riser or night owl? New study may help to explain the difference
#127I've been a night owl my whole life, with the exception of that period during secondary school where I was so depressed in the evenings I went to bed early and as a consequence woke up super early. I have followed every advice, meditation (1yr), excercise (3*1.5hrs per week for 18 months), staving off screens after 18:00 (8mo), no caffiene, no sugar, no food of any kind, I also tried: too much food, cooling my body d…
Wait, is waking up at nearly 9am late? I wake up between 8 and 10 daily (I have very flexible working hours atm) I optimised my home for a short commute and have never had a job where arriving before 10am was required
Yes, by the standards of most employers and schools it is very late. I am fortunate in that I can often sleep until past 8, and I'm much saner and healthier for it. But all through high school I had to get up at 6:30. Since I was _also_ an extreme night owl and used to do all my schoolwork after everyone else in my house was asleep, I'd usually get to bed by 1:30 or 2:00, which meant I was severely sleep-deprived all through high school.
I've had to take various contract gigs where I had to start my commute at 7, or be at meetings that started at 7, and it's terrible. Employment arrangements like this wind up getting a version of me that is at my lowest, least-focused, least-productive ebb, no matter how much coffee I pour down my gullet.
These days I still get my best, most focused programming work done between about 4:30 p.m. and 8:30 p.m. It's a constant strain because it means my time at home with my family is foreshortened every single weeknight.
Re: Early riser or night owl? New study may help to explain the difference
#128I've been a night owl my whole life, with the exception of that period during secondary school where I was so depressed in the evenings I went to bed early and as a consequence woke up super early. I have followed every advice, meditation (1yr), excercise (3*1.5hrs per week for 18 months), staving off screens after 18:00 (8mo), no caffiene, no sugar, no food of any kind, I also tried: too much food, cooling my body d…
I've done everything too, and the only thing that works for me is sleeping pills. I think it's a very unpopular view nowadays (esp. after Why We Sleep), but a small dose of a benzodiazepine changes my life completely. I'm in the midst of a full diagnostic course including cerebral scans, a sleep study and blood analysis, but my neurologist told me there's a good chance that nothing actionable will be revealed and tha…
I’ve upvoted your comment but I would disagree with saying “your clock is messed up”. The OP’s clock is fine and acting as it it’s ‘programmed’ to. What’s messed up is the way society places a higher value on the circadian rhythms of early-risers over those of night owls.
I recall hearing a theory that having individuals with differing circadian rhythms within the same social group provided an evolutionary advantage as not all members of the group would be asleep – and consequently vulnerable to external dangers – at the same time.
Re: Early riser or night owl? New study may help to explain the difference
#129Like others, I was a night owl since my teenage years. I was also pretty sure my circadian rhythm was about a 28-hour cycle, so I'd go "out-of-phase" staying up later every day and sometimes skip or drastically shorten a night's sleep to get back in phase.
However, it's now an effort to stay up past 10-10:30, and I wake up consistently around 6am.
What changed?
- 6 days/week with 6am meetings (remote work and timezones) - bright light (light box, much brighter than room lighting) and exercise early so I could function in those meetings - prioritized consistently going to bed and sleep early (often harder for me than getting up early) - and time passed
post hoc, ergo propter hoc, but consistency with those habits made it easier to function in those mornings, and it got easier as time passed.
Re: Early riser or night owl? New study may help to explain the difference
#130For those interested, Internal Time [1] does a good job at explaining chronotypes. People that say they "changed from night owl to early riser" (or vice-versa) have never been night owls in the first place, but something else was the cause (diet, screen time, etc). Chronotypes are genetics-based so no amount of wishful thinking will make you a night owl or an early riser (though obviously you can try and force this w…
Thanks, I am definitely going to check out Internal Time.
> Early birds and night owls are born, not made. Sleep patterns may be the most obvious manifestation of the highly individualized biological clocks we inherit, but these clocks also regulate bodily functions from digestion to hormone levels to cognition. Living at odds with our internal timepieces, Till Roenneberg shows, can make us chronically sleep deprived and more likely to smoke, gain weight, feel depressed, fall ill, and fail geometry. By understanding and respecting our internal time, we can live better.