hello, i am in the same boat for the last 7 days.
ive been a Night Owl, for the last 10 years.
now for the last 7 days...
i moved to live outside the city, but i didnt expect that i have to wake up with the village at 4-5-6am
it is killing me.
no sleep for the last 7 days.
and even i try to push myself to go to bed 20pm or max 21pm i just cant sleep well.
i used to work 6-12h a day.
now i barely do 3-4h per day.
i never thought about early riser or night owl...
Early riser or night owl? New study may help to explain the difference
151–160 of 358 posts
Re: Early riser or night owl? New study may help to explain the difference
#152I'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…
If you haven't already, I strongly recommend consulting a competent sleep specialist. > FWIW my brain "wakes up" at night This suggests to me that researching Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome might be helpful.
> a competent sleep specialist
You mean there are sleep specialists who can do more than schedule a sleep study and then say that it was inconclusive because you couldn't fall asleep during the study?
Re: Early riser or night owl? New study may help to explain the difference
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
Out of curiosity, do you have ADHD?
I’ve struggled the exact same as the poster above, and I’ve been reading up on ADHD. It seems to fit so many issues I have, but I really don’t want to take stimulants, which seem to be the drug of choice for ADHD
> [...] I’ve been reading up on ADHD. It seems to fit so many issues I have [...]
If you're feeling like that I strongly recommend that you consider consulting a competent medical professional with experience diagnosing ADHD/ADD and undergo an evaluation.
While your concerns around pharmaceutical-based approaches to assisting people to live with the affects of executive function related disorders (such as ADHD/ADD) are understandable, such decisions are a step beyond where you currently are.
ADHD/ADD is known as a disorder where (unlike most) simply having a diagnosis can have a significant positive impact on a person's ability to deal with it. This is in part because a diagnosis provides a new lens/perspective through which to view one's life and because the negative secondary effects (e.g. shame, guilt, depression, interpersonal & employment difficulties) of living with un-diagnosed ADHD/ADD have so much impact.
My understanding is that a combination of medication & therapy has been shown to be the most effective tool in helping most people live with the effects of ADHD/ADD but medication is by no means the only option--and there are some non-stimulant options also.
But with regard to "stimulants", the word itself & people's understanding of how they work leads to a lot of moralizing, misinformation & misunderstanding. To some degree the effect of a "stimulant medication" is similar to that of water to a house plant: if the plant has insufficient moisture in the surrounding soil then "stimulating" it with additional water from a watering can brings it up to a level of moisture required for a fulfilling life--but if the plant already has sufficient moisture then adding additional water may cause negative effects. But being "underwatered" is not a positive state of affairs.
If you would like to read further about ADHD/ADD (particularly the under-diagnosed "Primary Inattentive" subtype) I recommend considering "Driven to Distraction (Revised/Second Edition): Recognizing and Coping with Attention Deficit Disorder" by Edward Hallowell and John Ratey. One of the aspects I particularly appreciate is how much emphasis they put on the importance of a precise & accurate diagnosis as a starting point--e.g. they spend a chapter each on "things that are misdiagnosed as ADHD/ADD but are actually something else" & "things that are misdiagnosed as not ADHD/ADD but are in fact ADHD/ADD".
Good luck!
Edit: Oh, yeah, two other things:
* "Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria" is a common but less discussed aspect of ADHD/ADD.
* If comics are more your style, you might find a read of ADHD Alien enlightening: http://adhd-alien.com/
Re: Early riser or night owl? New study may help to explain the difference
#154> Some people are early risers, wide awake at the crack of dawn. Others are night owls who can’t seem to get to bed until well after midnight and prefer to sleep in
I am neither one of those? I hate waking up early and I dislike going to bed late. My preferred hours awake are 8:00AM-10PM; I found this to give me the most optimal amount of physical and mental energy throughout the day. Not sure why 10 hours of sleep works best for me, but I've experimented with that number and always come back to it.
Side note: I do have sleep apnea and sleep with a CPAP, but my AHI is below 3 on average (down from 43 before treatment!).
Re: Early riser or night owl? New study may help to explain the difference
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 be…
My wife got one of those (or a similar model), and it was very helpful for her, especially during the toughest part of winter here when it's completely dark for 17 hours. For me on the other hand, I just made a deliberate mental switch when I was around 35 years old when I decided, for efficiency reasons, to stop working late evenings and doing all-nighters, and tried to catch the early bird instead. The switch was surprisingly easy for me, but YMMV of course. And I've since started working late evenings for a bit again, but my sleep habits have stuck.
Re: Early riser or night owl? New study may help to explain the difference
#156If you were able to "no longer be a night owl" after changing diet, through exercise or by other changes in your behavior, you were in fact never an actual night owl but simply someone with bad sleeping habits. You read the same thing whenever there's a discussion on clinical depression. People push their anecdotes about mindset changes but fail to acknowledge they were never clinically depressed in the first place.
> If you were able to "no longer be a night owl" after changing diet, through exercise or by other changes in your behavior, you were in fact never an actual night owl but simply someone with bad sleeping habits.
Is there an established strict definition of "night owl" that supports this conclusion? I always thought a night owl meant anyone who for whatever reason prefers to stay up late and sleep in, which doesn't really presuppose a genetic cause.
Re: Early riser or night owl? New study may help to explain the difference
#157If you were able to "no longer be a night owl" after changing diet, through exercise or by other changes in your behavior, you were in fact never an actual night owl but simply someone with bad sleeping habits. You read the same thing whenever there's a discussion on clinical depression. People push their anecdotes about mindset changes but fail to acknowledge they were never clinically depressed in the first place.
I have a very hard time believing that this stuff has to do with anything other than having the discipline to have a proper sleep schedule. It's possible to adjust your sleep schedule. People do it all the time when they change timezones. I didn't read the article, I'll go read it and update if I change my mind..
Re: Early riser or night owl? New study may help to explain the difference
#158How disappointing that the NIH's own blog (with Dr. Collins' own byline, though I doubt the director actually wrote it) should have such a clickbait headline.
The observation that genetics leads people to different circadian clocks is decades old. We already know what enzymes are involved.
What's news is that somebody has worked out some of the structures of the enzymes in some people with genetic sleep problems. That's one clue in figuring out how those enzymes actually work and how they evolved.
"Helps" is science writers' crutch for "here's a minor improvement in an ongoing thing, but we're going to pretend that we just solved it". I expect that from the clickbait love-science's-butt sites, but not from the NIH director's blog.
Re: Early riser or night owl? New study may help to explain the difference
#159I've been a night owl all my life. Now I wake up by 7 before my alarm even rings. All it took was getting into the habit of trying to get a little person to sleep by 10 in the evening and falling asleep with them. I'm still at my most productive at the end of the working day however and early morning is still not great.
>>little person to sleep by 10 This. I regualrly slept between 1-3am for many years. After having a baby (6 month old), I'm ready to sleep whenever, and definitely can't stay up past 11. Huge win in terms of sleeping early and waking up early. Have a baby. Fix your schedule.
Just FWIW this doesn’t always work. I’m more of a night owl, and having kids didn’t flip my schedule, it just left me really exhausted. My wife and I ended up working out a sort of arrangement where she usually goes to bed earlier and gets up earlier, while I stay up later and sleep in more. When our kids fail to sleep through the night, it’s often a wake up around 11-midnight where they want milk or need to use the bathroom or something, so since I’m still awake I can field those without my wife having to wake up. Thus it works okay, but it’s not perfect.
Re: Early riser or night owl? New study may help to explain the difference
#160Huh, I always woundered why I live a 28-30 hour day. My sleep schedule continuously drifts as a result - luckily I live a lifestyle where it's possible to get away with this. I did used to do a 9-to-5, but what ended up happening was that I slept less and struggled to keep in control over the weekends. Luckily the people I live with would wake me up (just by carrying out their own routines). These days I typically sl…
> I always wondered why I live a 28-30 hour day. You may wish to look into "Non-24-hour sleep–wake disorder".
Woah, thanks for the heads up, I had no idea. I'm relatively lucky (at least so far) not to suffer effects of sleep deprivation.
(I was looking here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-24-hour_sleep%E2%80%93wake... )