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Ask HN: how to become a morning person?

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Re: Ask HN: how to become a morning person?

#91

Post by jtheory »

pg wrote: post #3

Getting lots of exercise makes it easier to fall asleep at night. The ultimate solution, however, is to have a small child.

What time does your small child go to bed? (Not your point, really -- having lots to do, including lots of physical play, does a great job exhausting you... but I'm looking at many of the responses to your comment.)

I can't tell you how many parents I know that complain (sometimes bitterly) about how early their kids wake them up, and I find out they put the kid in bed at 7pm. Or 6pm, even.

My wife works best in the morning (and I work just fine whenever), so we play with our almost-2-year-old in the evenings and she generally goes to sleep at 11pm or sometimes later, then wakes up normally about 10am. She's never had a bedtime earlier than 10pm.

I don't know about every other parent (and how this would fit in with life) but this works great for us. We can go out to dinner and/or see friends in the evening when we want to (we take her along), we get lots done in the morning, and she gets her sleep.

Is there some other factor I'm missing? Why, when a child wakes up at 5:30am, is it not automatic for the parents to think "we're putting her to bed 2 hours too early"?

A possible enabler, now that I think about it -- we have great shutters on our windows, so it's dark until we open them.

Re: Ask HN: how to become a morning person?

#92

Post by jtheory »

chaosmachine wrote: post #16

I've found Flux[1] to be very useful in stopping the constant forward-shift of my sleep schedule. Now I actually get tired at night. Perhaps it was simply over-exposure to blue light all these years... [1] http://stereopsis.com/flux/

I use flux as well. I still don't get tired at night (not if I'm working on something remotely interesting...), but it does seem to help me "settle down" a bit at night, so when I decide it's time to pack up for the day, I can often be asleep within 10 minutes (this used to be harder for me).

Re: Ask HN: how to become a morning person?

#93

Post by jtheory »

cubicle67 wrote: post #24

get a daughter who's required to be at gymnastics practice at 6am :(

See, that's just sadistic. Growing kids need more sleep than anyone, and school system schedules and extra-curricular activities end up forcing them into schedules that are painful even for adults.

When I was a teenager, the schoolbus came at six f#@%ing fifteen in the morning (because they needed to use the same buses for waves of middle school then elementary school kids), to a stop about a half-mile from my house. Waking up was always a horrible experience. Though I did end up doing pretty well on the track team, with the extra half-mile sprint every morning....

Re: Ask HN: how to become a morning person?

#94

Post by salemh »

gte910h wrote: post #14

I had issues with sleeping when others do for a long while. I do not anymore (although get out of sync again about 2x a year). 1. Caffeine and you: You have a certain sensitivity to this drug. You may also be misusing it. Generally speaking, it's a late morning, early afternoon only drug. Late morning is the only place it starts working as its an adenosine antagonist, and you don't start getting adenosine in any real…

I would add natural supplements (which every person will react different too):

Melatonin (fails after a few months for myself, 1-3MG)

The trifecta: GABBA ZMA Holy Basil Extract

Really helps with ASSISTANCE to sleep, these are not medications such as Ambien, Lunesta, etc.

I post these as Assistance to sleep. The goal of supplementation is to get on a good natural sleep cycle.

Another point, do not sleep in so heavily on the weekends if your work / life schedule demands an early wakeup on the weekdays.

Eventually, your body becomes a "natural" alarm clock where you cannot sleep in past 7am, 9am.

Don't fight it, be productive :)

Edit: Snoozing has been the devil for me waking fully in the morning (meaning, get UP when you actually wake from sleep).

Re: Ask HN: how to become a morning person?

#95

Post by salemh »

rsaarelm wrote: post #27

Figure out how much sleep you need per day, and try to set up a rigid schedule where you wake up when you want to and go to bed the required hours before the time. Hacks for getting to sleep at a specific time: - Take an hour long walk, go to the gym or go running during the day to get more tired. - Try to get exposed to direct sunlight during the day, this is supposed to do something in your brain that helps it main…

Hacks for waking up: - Set an alarm 60 or 90 minutes before the time you really wake up, eat a 100 mg caffeine pill and go back to sleep. The caffeine will kick in while you're asleep and you'll wake up when it's fully effective.

Very interesting, will give it a whirl. Hydroxycut could be an alternative. It tends to give me less "jitters" when drinking 4-6 cups of coffee, and more of a longer-term boost with just a single cup.

I COMPLETELY agree that waking up WITHOUT a stimulant is highly effective (natural waking). I tend to drink coffee in the morning out of either habit, or, the love of coffee's flavor.

Re: Ask HN: how to become a morning person?

#98

Post by amandas »

gbog wrote: post #73
gte910h wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These aren't my tips. Sleep doctors say don't read in bed over and over: http://www.sleepassociation.org/index.php?p=sleephygienetips I know it's nice to read in bed, but it's bad for sleep. It's not like you have to do everything in the list up there to get sleep, but the sacrosanct "Bed is for sleeping, only" is the #1 thing for many people. I often read Before bed, but on the couch, not IN bed.

I don't know. Skimming over this page you linked I have again those thought about how the world is filled with so many different customs, people, problems, even sleeping habits. I leave in China right now and these tips look very weird, exotic from here. For example, what do they (ASA) have against a short nap? Here the countryside girls selling vegetables in local markets do nap on their lines of carrots. I bet you…

Sleeping on food that you're going to sell? Someone call the health department!

Re: Ask HN: how to become a morning person?

#99

Post by amandas »

Jarred wrote: post #87
scotty79 wrote: post #84

Take a 5 mg of melatonine at 21:30 and after thirty minutes turn off the lights and the computer, lay down in bed and close your eyes. After few days of such treatment you'll be more morning person than you've ever been. Don't try to stop taking melatonine unless you are very strong willed (which you are probably not). You may want to reduce the dose to 1 mg and 3 mg if you notice it's enough.

Melatonin's nice, but I can't sleep any more than 8 hours on it (I need around 9.5), and if you sleep less than 8 hours it makes the individual groggy.

Only children need that much sleep. Maybe you're used to almost ten hours of sleep, but do you really NEED it?

Re: Ask HN: how to become a morning person?

#100

Post by tmitchell »

thegoleffect wrote: post #18
chaosmachine wrote: post #16

I've found Flux[1] to be very useful in stopping the constant forward-shift of my sleep schedule. Now I actually get tired at night. Perhaps it was simply over-exposure to blue light all these years... [1] http://stereopsis.com/flux/

Pretty cool tool. This would not be as useful to someone doing design work that requires color accuracy though :-\.

It actually has a setting specifically to accommodate this. From their FAQ:

"f.lux was created by people who care a lot about accuracy in colors. We know you want to make sure your colors are perfect so there is an option to disable f.lux for 1 hour at a time (for example, while using Photoshop). This setting returns your screen to its normal settings. In the future we plan to allow automatic disabling of f.lux when you launch certain programs. f.lux is not designed for use during advanced color work, but it's fine for layout or HTML. Currently, we don't recommend running f.lux on calibrated systems running Windows, but we expect to have a solution for this soon."

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