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Early riser or night owl? New study may help to explain the difference

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Re: Early riser or night owl? New study may help to explain the difference

#301

Post by [deleted] »

dijit wrote: post #83
dota_fanatic wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cooling your body down before going to bed will have the opposite effect if your goal is to go to sleep. By cooling your body it will start to try and warm itself and trigger a stress reaction. Eating and working out before bed will similarly raise your heart rate and sympathetic nervous system activity, the opposite of what you want. Sleeping pills are also bad for sleep, ask any sleep doctor. They are great and kno…

Rising body temperature is correlated with tiredness, that's why you feel exhausted after you've been home for 5 minutes. Meditation itself was 'mindfulness', some of it was guided, most of it was not, guided meditation was once a week (I'm not counting the yoga, which was also meditative), I spent 5 minutes in the morning, 5 minutes at lunch, 15 minutes when I got home and 5 minutes before bed. (and I'm pretty well…

[deleted]

Re: Early riser or night owl? New study may help to explain the difference

#302

Post by Arcsech »

mFixman wrote: post #162
Arcsech wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Waking up early does have a practical advantage: your free time is before you go to work, so then you have energy to do important things. This doesn't make any sense to me. I have zero energy or drive in the morning, it's a struggle to do anything. My brain turns on at about 11am - I can be active before that, but serious creative work or figuring out something that requires mental effort is going to be much less e…

Doesn't work tire you down? I'm not able to do anything productive after leaving my office.

Sure, sometimes if it's a particularly hard day. But except for really crushingly busy days, I'm always in a better place to get stuff done after work than in the morning, even if I got plenty of sleep.

Edit: This might be different, of course, if I worked in a physically demanding profession. I work as a software engineer though, so that's not the case.

Re: Early riser or night owl? New study may help to explain the difference

#303

Post by hermitdev »

sokoloff wrote: post #241
mindcrime wrote: post #234

Earlier 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…

I was a hard-core night owl for years (all through college and my first 20 years of working). Then I had a kid, then another. They're 10 (+/- a bit) and I now reliably wake up sans-alarm at 5-5:30 every day, after years of doing that for [or because of] the kids. They even sleep later than that now, but I'm easily up by then. It does mean that I'm tired by 11 or midnight, but even when left entirely on my own schedul…

What I've found has helped me to change patterns is to pull an all nighter, then go to sleep at the target time. Its worked for me a few times, until I slowly drift out of sync (I'm definitely not an inherent morning person).

May not work for everyone...

Re: Early riser or night owl? New study may help to explain the difference

#304

Post by bilekas »

hnick wrote: post #298
giancarlostoro wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Used to have nasty insomnia, now I've sorta forced myself to sleep earlier cause I know if not I will not function at work. However, my wife's a night nurse so when she has days off and on weekends, it screws with my sleep schedule. I wish I could just function on less sleep honestly, but I can't anymore. One thing I read from a fellow insomniac though was that sometimes when you just can't sleep, laying down on your…

Yes there's value in just lying there with your eyes shut and one of the books I read supported that. Throw in some meditation if you're into that too. The common refrain is to avoid it because you'll associate the bed as a place of not-sleeping, but that ship has sailed for most of us anyway. The same book said "rituals" (such as getting up and reading a book instead) can be harmful as the habits become normalised a…

> Yes there's value in just lying there with your eyes shut

I never read the book you mentioned, but I do this almost every morning, as a way of mental preparation for such a simple thing as getting up. It sounds so stupid saying it out loud but I completely live this.

Re: Early riser or night owl? New study may help to explain the difference

#305

Post by notabee »

LameRubberDucky wrote: post #273
mindcrime wrote: post #234

Earlier 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.

People's circadian rhythms change over the course of a lifetime very considerably. Trying to keep all age groups on the same schedule is actually a pretty bad idea. Check out the book Why We Sleep. I think especially how we treat adolescents, who are usually late shifted by 2 or 3 hours compared to adults, is going to look barbaric in another 30 years. People think that 9 AM is a "late start" for high school, but it should probably be more like 11 AM. Even the ratios of NREM versus REM sleep change a lot over different age groups.

Re: Early riser or night owl? New study may help to explain the difference

#306

Post by eq_sd_ »

GuB-42 wrote: post #217
archarios wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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..

Sure, you can change timezone, but you usually feel like shit in the process. The idea seem to be that it takes about a day per hour to adjust. Now the idea (somewhat supported by the article) is that night owls have a natural cycle longer than 24h. It means they are in a constant state of jet lag. The (unrealistic) solution to get in sync with the rest of the population would be to always go west. Early birds are in…

You're confusing delayed sleep phase disorder with non 24hr sleep wake disorder.

Re: Early riser or night owl? New study may help to explain the difference

#307

Post by scarejunba »

jodrellblank wrote: post #239
Raphmedia wrote: post #84

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. 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.

"Anyone who is cured, was never really ill" seems a position full of problems; is that really what you're saying?

I think the position is different. Symptoms can have many causes. You can undo symptoms due to some causes by doing some things. That means you can cure the condition that's expressed via a symptom by doing the thing. However, that doesn't mean you can cure the symptom by doing the thing.

A personal example is shortness of breath. My friend and I both had that when we were kids. However, I had it because I got bronchitis for a bit. He had it because he was asthmatic. Imagine if I said "Oh, I don't understand what the problem is. All I did was rest and it went away". Well, that won't help my asthmatic friend, will it?

Re: Early riser or night owl? New study may help to explain the difference

#308

Post by wayoutthere »

hnick wrote: post #299

Since there are a lot of people with various experiences here, I thought I'd ask. My problems falling asleep are not due to being tired so melatonin and various things I've tried (like drowsy allergy pills) don't work. My mind is too active, and it prevents sleep. Even to the point where the 'sleep' part proceeds, my mind is racing, and I start to dream (hallucinate) while half awake. Then I will see a spider or some…

I had good experience with the Headspace app for this. This kind of meditation especially is a learnable skill, so after a few weeks you probably won't need the app anymore.

Re: Early riser or night owl? New study may help to explain the difference

#309

Post by hnick »

bilekas wrote: post #304
hnick wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes there's value in just lying there with your eyes shut and one of the books I read supported that. Throw in some meditation if you're into that too. The common refrain is to avoid it because you'll associate the bed as a place of not-sleeping, but that ship has sailed for most of us anyway. The same book said "rituals" (such as getting up and reading a book instead) can be harmful as the habits become normalised a…

> Yes there's value in just lying there with your eyes shut I never read the book you mentioned, but I do this almost every morning, as a way of mental preparation for such a simple thing as getting up. It sounds so stupid saying it out loud but I completely live this.

I think the book was The Sleep Book:

https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/B00LT8ODM8/ref=pe_1007802_16638...

Reviews are mixed, it's written in a worksheet format to help you get a grip on your thoughts and habits to change or accept them as necessary. Didn't help me a lot but it helped a lot of others.

Re: Early riser or night owl? New study may help to explain the difference

#310

Post by hnick »

wayoutthere wrote: post #308
hnick wrote: post #299

Since there are a lot of people with various experiences here, I thought I'd ask. My problems falling asleep are not due to being tired so melatonin and various things I've tried (like drowsy allergy pills) don't work. My mind is too active, and it prevents sleep. Even to the point where the 'sleep' part proceeds, my mind is racing, and I start to dream (hallucinate) while half awake. Then I will see a spider or some…

I had good experience with the Headspace app for this. This kind of meditation especially is a learnable skill, so after a few weeks you probably won't need the app anymore.

I keep seeing and ignoring recommendations for Headspace. So I figure it is time to install it.

Turns out it's already on my phone from before! I guess it's time to give it a proper try.

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