341–350 of 358 posts
I've reluctantly forced myself into doing morning workouts now, but if any other night-owl there has any advice in making evening workouts work, please share.
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If we define larks as those whose circadian cycle leads the day-night cycle, and owls as those whose circadian cycle lags the day-night cycle, it's easy to hypothesize reasons for lark dominance in the civic schedule. Hypothetically, say local sunrise is 6 AM, and sunset 6 PM, a lark rises at 5 AM and retires at 9 PM, and an owl rises at 7 AM and retires at 11 PM. If the lark wishes to be immediately productive on wa…
So, what do you call the creature that rises at 9 AM and retires at 1 AM? Or 11 AM and 3 AM? Or sleeps straight through to 6 PM before they rise?
If you keep going, you'll go through nocturnal and wrap back around to lark.
I assume that sleep-wake cycles plot neatly onto a population standard normal distribution. Everyone on the early-riser half of the bell curve is larkish, and everyone on the late-riser half of the bell curve is owlish. As with most things, if you live more than 2 standard deviations from the median, you may sometimes experience problems arising from your deviation from the norm.
Based on studies of people living in an actual cave with no timepieces or natural light sources, there may also be a component for the natural duration of one's cyclical body-clock. I suspect larks cycle faster than the median, and owls cycle slower, but I'm not aware of any supporting evidence for that.
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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.
I'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…
It's envy.
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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…
4 hours? You are insane (in a good way), mate. Any less than 7 hours and I literally can't even wake up. If I force myself, my body will literally not respond to my commands and getting up and straight becomes as hard as deadlifting 100kg...
Also I have an ADHD medication that I take first thing in the morning, and it wakes you up about 100x better than coffee, sort of short circuiting your biology and making you a morning person.
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I agree. Even if I don’t sleep at all, but only lie down at night with my eyes closed, I feel better than walking around at night. I mean, I still feel horrible overall. But better than when I spend the night out of bed.
I read it here on HN coincidentally but I couldnt remember by who, but I felt way better later on that day. I think the best I can do is force myself to sleep though. I'll watch shows on Netflix till my eyes start to shut down nowadays.
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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 advantag…
If we define larks as those whose circadian cycle leads the day-night cycle, and owls as those whose circadian cycle lags the day-night cycle, it's easy to hypothesize reasons for lark dominance in the civic schedule. Hypothetically, say local sunrise is 6 AM, and sunset 6 PM, a lark rises at 5 AM and retires at 9 PM, and an owl rises at 7 AM and retires at 11 PM. If the lark wishes to be immediately productive on wa…
That is not the case: if I usually wake up at 6am, I will again wake up at 6am if I had at least 4h of sleep. So a "lark" will be similarly sleep deprived in circumstances you describe (eg. in young adult life and lots of nights out).
The reason while early-risers had more success getting their schedule accepted throughout history is because they needed no artificial light source to perform whatever they needed, and artificial light was costly for a long time.
However, the solution in a global world today is simple: move to a timezone where your productive hours will align with whatever the societal norm is, and do remote work.
I'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…
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I have thought about Benzos but to be honest, all the stories of addiction and old people becoming hazi/stupid (temporarily) frightens me. I try to sleep through weed (indica). I'm not to happy about it but that works more or less.
from that why we sleep podcast, weed sleep is pretty bad sleep. the withdrawals (not being able to sleep) are pretty bad too. not that i don't use it too. they said cbd might be better, but i haven't bothered.