31–40 of 43 posts
So when do you go to bed? How about social activities, you just leave at 8p.m?
You can plan earlier social activities. A 2pm bbq for instance. A 12pm hike.
Um, no. Getting up early might minimize distraction, but it doesn't give you extra time. The amount of sleep you need is, to very good approximation, a conserved quantity. And to get up at 4:30 or 5, most people would need to go to bed between 7:30 and 9. Hello, sunrise; goodbye, social life.
"Never hit snooze." I love it! I don't understand snooze. If you're going to snooze, just set your alarm 5 minutes later. Otherwise, just get up.
Then it's off to boil water for coffee. and I leave Snooze on for a while to remind myself of the passage of time in the morning, so I can make sure I'm out the door in time to catch the train.
I suppose the key is that the Snooze is not so close to the bed that I can press it hassle-free.
"But I'm a night owl!" I'm glad the author of the post recognized that it is possible to switch from being a night owl to an early riser. Anecdotally, I am a night owl... if it were not for work and kids, I would sleep late and wake early. That feels natural for me. But, when my daughter was born, I was forced to switch and it has been fairly painless. If you're a night owl, it's worthwhile to at least experiment wit…
However, I've found my creativity was 'willing' late at night when I was my natural night owl. When I was working as a reviewer, I woke up at 10am and could get copy out in no time. I once did an entire rewrite in under half an hour, including entirely new references with cross checking the media. My editor was amazed. IIRC the timestamp between my emailing to say I'd handle the rewrite (rather than there be a delay and have someone else do it, which would have put us behind deadline) and my delivering it was less than 35 minutes. I even got an email back that evening saying he was amazed, and also sending me the word document with the corrections on, which ended up being purely comma placement (which was a long running joke between us, as comma placement is generally where the author would naturally pause and we both had very different speaking styles, which often descended into a "changing comma position changes sentence meaning" debate).
However, over the christmas break I automatically switched back to night owl. Every day I was up between 9/10am and was in bed around 4am. It was great, although my creative productivity didn't see a spike. I'd learnt to cope with my early bird, which meant I'd essentially killed that normal creative peak I used to get from 10pm-4am (which often finished with a sleep-deprived collapse into bed).
Take advantage of all that extra time. Um, no. Getting up early might minimize distraction, but it doesn't give you extra time. The amount of sleep you need is, to very good approximation, a conserved quantity. And to get up at 4:30 or 5, most people would need to go to bed between 7:30 and 9. Hello, sunrise; goodbye, social life.
Disclaimer: I'm not an early riser. At all. This is really just a guess.
"But I'm a night owl!" I'm glad the author of the post recognized that it is possible to switch from being a night owl to an early riser. Anecdotally, I am a night owl... if it were not for work and kids, I would sleep late and wake early. That feels natural for me. But, when my daughter was born, I was forced to switch and it has been fairly painless. If you're a night owl, it's worthwhile to at least experiment wit…
I have worked on a early schedule many times and I'm basically on autopilot for half the day. I am never tired before 3:00-4:00AM and dispite my best efforts, if I have to work on a day schedule I simply can't get up at a decent hour without feeling absolutely miserable.
"But I'm a night owl!" I'm glad the author of the post recognized that it is possible to switch from being a night owl to an early riser. Anecdotally, I am a night owl... if it were not for work and kids, I would sleep late and wake early. That feels natural for me. But, when my daughter was born, I was forced to switch and it has been fairly painless. If you're a night owl, it's worthwhile to at least experiment wit…
I am skeptical it is possible. Kids and teenagers spend years being yanked awake against their circadian rhythms, and they don't switch but instead their grades suffer as does their health (http://www.gwern.net/education-is-not-about-learning#school-...). As well, people suck at self-assessment - 'what do you think you know and why?'
Sleep debt takes up to a month to pay off (http://preview.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15892922); people don't realize this. People sleep in 23 minutes a day on the weekend (http://blog.myzeo.com/sleep-by-night-of-the-week/); people think they sleep longer. People restricted to 4 or 6 hours of sleep may claim they have adapted to it; they haven't and their mental performance still suffers (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/17/magazine/mag-17Sleep-t.htm...).
Why do you and the OP think you can switch, and have? (What do you think you know, and why?) Because you didn't notice anything bad. I see...
I've read reports that messing with the body's circadian rhythm is bad for the health of the aging brain. Presumably this is to do with the secretion of the hormone melatonin, which I understand is affected by light. Whether natural light exposure can be simulated adequately by the computer monitor during waking hours and a blindfold during sleeping hours, or whether getting up at dawn is required, I would like to kn…
Computer and electronics have been shown to damage melatonin secretion in the evening (all the blue light they emit), so it stands to reason that they could act like a light box in the morning.
"But I'm a night owl!" I'm glad the author of the post recognized that it is possible to switch from being a night owl to an early riser. Anecdotally, I am a night owl... if it were not for work and kids, I would sleep late and wake early. That feels natural for me. But, when my daughter was born, I was forced to switch and it has been fairly painless. If you're a night owl, it's worthwhile to at least experiment wit…
So when do you go to bed? How about social activities, you just leave at 8p.m?
That's the thing I miss in all these guides. For me it might be possible to switch for weekdays, but the next weekend would desynchronize everything. Starting over by getting up on next Monday at 5 AM after few hours of sleep would make me give up. Knowing that I won't even give it a try.