#1 sleep aid for me: mitigating dust mite allergens in my bedroom
Early riser or night owl? New study may help to explain the difference
271–280 of 358 posts
Re: Early riser or night owl? New study may help to explain the difference
#272> 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 w…
There might just be some people who need 10 hours, but I would still look at sleep quality issues. The CPAP thing sounds like a good step, but there could be other causes.
Do you wake up feeling well-rested? I know that when I used to always sleep 10 hours/night, I still wanted more sleep when I got up.
Somehow I managed to change that, though, and now I wake up after 6-6.5 hours. And I feel more well-rested than I did before after 10+ hours. I'm not completely sure of the reasons, as I wasn't seeking it out, but the timing correlates well with starting to exercise regularly. Finally getting a mattress that works for me might also be part of it.
At any rate, the main thing is that it happened. I didn't really know it would or could, which is why I didn't aim for it, but I'm glad it did. And I'd hope for the same for anyone else in a similar position. Sleep quantity only goes so far to make up for quality, and life is too short to be struggling to get proper rest.
Re: Early riser or night owl? New study may help to explain the difference
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm sorry, but people who claim "they've made the switch" just don't get it. You don't really make a switch from being a night owl. I thought I'd made switches multiple times too: * Taking early classes in college * Deliberately cooling myself down and going to bed super early * Getting a puppy that forced me to wake up super early Every single method regressed to night-owl schedule within 2 months. Not to mention my…
I'm sorry, but people who claim "they've made the switch" just don't get it. Agreed. At 46, and having been a night-owl pretty much my entire life, I'm skeptical that you can just "switch" to another mode. Maybe you can, through very conscious and focused effort, manage to adapt to what appears to be a "morning person" lifestyle; but I suspect that people who do that are ultimately just faking it. That said, I've nev…
Anecdotally, at 51 and previously thought the same as you, I'm going to disagree. I'm closing in on two years of getting up at 5:00 am and it doesn't bother me anymore. I never thought it would be possible for me to adapt, but so far I have and I have no intention of changing.
Time will tell.
Re: Early riser or night owl? New study may help to explain the difference
#274I am very much a night owl and I have a really hard time getting into a routine of getting up early in the morning, even if I do manage to get my hours of sleep. It took a long time to find a balance of forcing to sleep and forcing to get up. But now I have to be very concious, if I have a late weekend I am out of sync for the rest of the week. People say its a lazy thing, but its really not.
Maybe it’s just the small subset of software engineers who frequent HN, but I swear 99.9% of the people on here are night owls, and they very much let their opinions be known on every thread about sleep.
Makes an amusing change from the percentage of people on LinkedIn who need to share morning rituals involving getting up at 4am to ensure they have time to read inspirational business stories, go to the gym, update their inbox over green tea and freshly baked bread and enjoy an hour of contemplative meditation before cycling to work to arrive before everybody else. :D
Re: Early riser or night owl? New study may help to explain the difference
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lifelong (51 years) night owl and morning hater. I got in trouble at work for being late and that was it for me. I have been getting up at 5:00 am for almost two years now. I don't leave for work until about 7:30 am. I do now enjoy the time in the morning before work and the desire to not miss that time has become extra motivation to get up in the morning. At first I did go to sleep between 9:00 - 10:00 pm every nigh…
Thanks for sharing your story. How did you manage to go to sleep? I find that if I go to bed early all I do is lay in bed until 3am wide awake anyway.
Interesting story about sleep. I tossed and turned until 3 or 4 am every night for most of my life. Horrible horrible nightmares every night. Exhausted every day, falling asleep behind the wheel on the way to work, nodding off in meetings or at my desk. I slept 10-16 hours on weekends sometimes and still felt tired. Napped every day after work.
About 8 years ago, my co-worker said he used to have the same problems until he got a CPAP machine. One sleep study and CPAP machine later, now I fall asleep easily and rarely dream. If on the rare occasion I can't go to sleep, I just accept it, get up for an hour or two, then go back to sleep knowing that I'm gonna suffer a little that day. Definitely the exception though.
Re: Early riser or night owl? New study may help to explain the difference
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm sorry, but people who claim "they've made the switch" just don't get it. Agreed. At 46, and having been a night-owl pretty much my entire life, I'm skeptical that you can just "switch" to another mode. Maybe you can, through very conscious and focused effort, manage to adapt to what appears to be a "morning person" lifestyle; but I suspect that people who do that are ultimately just faking it. That said, I've nev…
Anecdotally, at 51 and previously thought the same as you, I'm going to disagree. I'm closing in on two years of getting up at 5:00 am and it doesn't bother me anymore. I never thought it would be possible for me to adapt, but so far I have and I have no intention of changing. Time will tell.
Same. I used to be a night owl. Now I'm not. I could engineer a switch back if I wanted to, but I like this better, so I don't plan to try.
Re: Early riser or night owl? New study may help to explain the difference
#277I'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…
>Based on the comments here, I just need to have a kid.
I don’t know, my sister has 4 and still is a night owl, i can confirm it’s familial because my mom is the same and so was my grandma as i am.
Re: Early riser or night owl? New study may help to explain the difference
#278It sucks that a German industrialist decided we should work 9-10 hours, and then it further sucks that 7-15, 8-16, or 9-17 are deemed the "respectable" shifts for work. I get that some companies are flexible on this, but honestly, I've been held back in life by being a night owl. Classes at 8-10 am were so much harder to focus in, getting to work early is a burden, and working into the evening is not an option at many jobs.
It's just straight up better to be a morning person in our civilization.
Re: Early riser or night owl? New study may help to explain the difference
#279Long story but I recently got very sick. I was told not to eat past 6pm. I found this really helped me with falling asleep. Turn on some music around 10 and lay in bed. Read a book. I keep some Tums next to my bed (acid reflux also impacts my "sleepiness"). I guess what I'm trying to say is that changing how I ate and just chilling in bed under the covers at an earlier time really helped. I'm still a night owl for sure, but this does combat the ratio of staying up till 2am to being asleep by 12. If I really tell my mind with my internal monologue "Look, I know we want to play videogames and do the dishes, but let's do that in the morning" and also craving breakfast before bed (so you are excited to wake up early to eat) helps.
Re: Early riser or night owl? New study may help to explain the difference
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
There are jobs in I.T., like emergency Server Admins for hospitals who get paid extra to work the "night shift". That might be worth looking into. Or if you live on the East Coast working Remote with a company in Pacific Time Zone. The thing that finally worked for me was finding out the amount of sleep I ABSOLUTELY needed to function. Which was about 4-5 hours. My body wants 8, but I can make it through the day with…
I’d be worried about the long term health implications of missing that much sleep.
https://www.helsinki.fi/en/news/health-news/deep-sleep-clean...