Why Entrepreneurs Can't Sleep

I have thought about this before, and I can confidently trace it back to two causes in my own life.

1) This was happening even when I was a developer and not just an entrepreneur. It is because when you are working on a problem, you want to reach a "save state" before going away. So you can pick up where you left off in the morning. Sometimes you think the "save state" is just an hour away and it turns out to be 3 hours or more. Basically you have the context in your head NOW and it's annoying to have to serialize it into something and unserialize it later. You want to at least finish a subtask. As a result, the "bedtime" of a developer is indefinite, unlike in 9-5 careers where you can clock out and stop thinking about things.

For entrepreneurs, this is a smaller problem, but for developer-entrepreneurs, it is a combined problem. The entrepreneur might be puzzle-solving at night as well, and doesn't want to have to serialize/unserialize in some arbitrary state. Also their brain gets used to problem solving and can't stop. Kind of like this: http://xkcd.com/356/

2) Now, the second reason is that we are probably young, in our 20s or early 30s. As a result, we came out of a college environment and late night partying is important to younger people. Late night anything, because one again, that is the time that young people have for themselves and they don't want to put a definite curfew on it. You can be more irresponsible earlier in life, drinking and socializing until late. In addition, many young people have to study in college and aren't gonna get fired if they don't show up at 8 AM to work, so once again we have this "I don't want to put this book down until I've finished the chapter" thing.

As you get older and have a family, if you have to wake up early, then your habits will change.

I also have a theory that young people have ALWAYS been more nocturnal than their elders, who become morning people at 70 :)

Working on a problem late can sometimes be beneficial. I've been up late with a problem in my head and went to bed with little downtime. It's hard to go to sleep, definitely. However, I've actually dreamt the solution a few times, and woke up the next morning knowing exactly what to code.

This happened two nights ago. I was coding something fairly complex and had a hard time connecting everything together. It was something I had been struggling with for two weeks. In a dream, I figured out how to make things much simpler. The next morning I deleted 1000 lines of code, re-structured things, and got it working succinctly.

But you definitely don't sleep very well when you do it. :)

OP here. I've been using F.lux for several years now. I really can't understand why anyone would not use it. It's so easy on the eyes.

If you like F.lux and you're an OSX user, I'd also recommend using it with Toggle Screenshade [http://screenshade.en.softonic.com/mac]. It doesn't change the color composition like F.lux does. It just reduces the brightness of the monitor well below OSX default minimum. It's shocking little light that gets through. Give yourself 2 minutes to adjust in a dark room, and you'll still be able to see the monitor, but with much less light intrusion on your body.

Second, if you're getting hardcore on this. You should also buy a orange plastic screen shade from Low Blue Lights [https://www.lowbluelights.com/products.asp?cid=16] or make one yourself. I have one rubber-banded to my monitor at night. It ~triples the effect of Flux.

I challenge you to find someone who regularly brings their TV into bed with them and watches it under the covers.

Yes, obviously there are many non-hackers who have this problem. Just thought it was funny it wasn't one of the hypotheses listed, given that it's directly related to the cause of this guy's insomnia.

As I understand it, it isn't so much less light or warmer light as much as it is a lack of blue light. The amount of blue light during the day time in the sun is huge. F.lux works by reducing the color temperature which greatly reduces the amount of blue light coming from the display and shifts it to red light.