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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

#251

Post by pclstyle »

archarios wrote: post #157
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.

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..

Seems like an unpopular opinion, but this is my experience as well. Went from sleeping from 4-10AM to 11PM-5AM over the course of 3 years, without changing time zones. I swore I was a night-owl my whole life, but I definitely fall into the category of early-risers now. Overall happy with the switch; I love having those quiet morning hours to prepare for the rest of my day.

For me, it was about establishing new habits, setting up an environment conducive to sleeping by midnight, and having some external pressures like a work schedule, etc. I've heard this validated by external testimony as well.

Can't say there are no biological factors at play that impact individual inclinations, but it's a bit hard to believe that we're hard-wired for one over the other.

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

#252

Post by ActorNightly »

dhruvkar wrote: post #57
inertiatic wrote: post #21

I've been a night owl all my life. Now I wake up by 7 before my alarm even rings. All it took was getting into the habit of trying to get a little person to sleep by 10 in the evening and falling asleep with them. I'm still at my most productive at the end of the working day however and early morning is still not great.

>>little person to sleep by 10 This. I regualrly slept between 1-3am for many years. After having a baby (6 month old), I'm ready to sleep whenever, and definitely can't stay up past 11. Huge win in terms of sleeping early and waking up early. Have a baby. Fix your schedule.

I dunno if this is hyperbolic, but having a baby to fix a sleep schedule seems like an insanely complicated solution that carries a lot more side effects to a fairly trivial problem.

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

#253

Post by grumpy8 »

TheTrotters wrote: post #90
grumpy8 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say "You've followed every advice", but what were you trying to achieve exactly? Is it that you can't fall asleep or that you're not productive in the morning, or something else? Personally what worked best for me is just to wake up at 6am for 2 weeks without nap during the day. Most people try to adjust their sleeping time to match their waking time, but they've got it backward. Set your wake up time and listen…

Counterexample: I had to wake up at 6-6:30 am Monday-Friday for over half a year. I never adjusted and was chronically sleep deprived. Chronotypes can only be bended so much.

And just as a curiosity, were you taking nap? What about the weekend?

I'm curious as I have a few friends with a similar problem (I.e. struggling to wake up early for work). But they often party hard the week-end and wake up between 11am-3pm, so it's hard to tell if that's the reason it's so hard for them.

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

#254

Post by BuildTheRobots »

miiiiiike wrote: post #245
BuildTheRobots wrote: post #28

I like the fact they present it as an either/or choice. My natural sleep cycle seems to default to a 28 hour day (eg I go to bed slightly later every evening then morning) which makes interfacing with reality pretty difficult. This seems to be something shared with a number of geeks I know.

I haven't run into many people with non-24! If you have non-24 could you answer a few questions here: https://forms.gle/fdQWLAa6kb283SHJA I'll share the anonymized results in a week or so. My motivation is more social than scientific.

I'm probably not the best person to ask - I've been medicated for 7 years and have kept the current job for medication -2 months. More than happy to talk about it off list - {HN-username}@gmail.com :)

I will inform the couple of awful sleepers I know at my hackspace so they can respond too.

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

#255

Post by dhruvkar »

ActorNightly wrote: post #252
dhruvkar wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>little person to sleep by 10 This. I regualrly slept between 1-3am for many years. After having a baby (6 month old), I'm ready to sleep whenever, and definitely can't stay up past 11. Huge win in terms of sleeping early and waking up early. Have a baby. Fix your schedule.

I dunno if this is hyperbolic, but having a baby to fix a sleep schedule seems like an insanely complicated solution that carries a lot more side effects to a fairly trivial problem.

In case it wasn't clear (sarcasm is hard in text), this is not serious advice.

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

#256

Post by pengaru »

roosterdawn wrote: post #247
pengaru wrote: post #201

For some reason I don't get creative and productive until the hours I should be sleeping. Throughout my teens and twenties (I'm in my 40s now) I indulged this tendency and it served me well, often staying up for multiple days without realizing it and the productivity was incredible. Since then I've become more interested in preserving/improving my health and how such behaviors may be harming it, so I try to keep a re…

YMMV with amphetamines -- they seem very specific-body-metabolism specific, but you'll always be fighting your body's attempt to move to homeostasis which means it will be very probable that you'll run into tolerance, diminishing returns, side effects, and so on. As far as sleep deprivation goes: it's fascinating what happens to our brains at night. Studies show that REM sleep prunes and maintains new synapses associ…

> I've noticed myself able to sometimes get some huge breakthroughs in the late night hours.

My personal theory on this is that something dream-associated is still switching on from a purely hours-awake scheduled mechanism.

Dreams are inherently creative and cerebral, and it feels like I'm just tapping into some of that by staying up late and working while my brain is wearing pajamas.

I don't know if you've ever dabbled with more extreme forms of sleep deprivation, but at a certain point, in my experience, a full-on wakeful dreaming state is entered where fully featured dreams are playing in the visual field while the eyes are still open. The brain definitely has the ability to essentially dream while awake. Experiencing those things made me start suspecting sleep deprivation was a way to tap into the dream world for productivity/creativity/focus advantages.

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

#257

Post by BuildTheRobots »

mosdave wrote: post #197
BuildTheRobots wrote: post #28

I like the fact they present it as an either/or choice. My natural sleep cycle seems to default to a 28 hour day (eg I go to bed slightly later every evening then morning) which makes interfacing with reality pretty difficult. This seems to be something shared with a number of geeks I know.

Yeah, I think I would do really well with a 36 hour day.

I dream of a 36 hour day - enough time to actually get some work done and then a proper 12 hour sleep :)

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

#259

Post by leto_ii »

avenger123 wrote: post #191
leto_ii wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also have an older model of that. What I found however is that if my back is turned to it when it starts brightening up its effect is greatly diminished. It simply doesn't have enough power to brighten the whole room. Does the newer model mitigate this issue?

The lux level on this is 315 which I believe is the highest. For me, this hasn't been an issue as it is right beside my bed. At this point, I believe the ocean waves have become a signal to my brain that I need to start getting up. I did have to experiment with how many minutes before the alarm goes off to turn on the ocean waves sound.

Thanks for the details.

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

#260

Post by Raphmedia »

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?

My position is this: if you have a headache, do a Google search for a few minutes, "diagnose" yourself with brain cancer and then you lose the headache after drinking water, you haven't cured the cancer but you've simply fixed your dehydration.
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