Comment by deergomoo
2 years ago
I really hoped I’d grow out of wanting to sleep ~3-11am but it’s just never happened. No matter how tired I am during the day, I get a second wind around 8pm and have to force myself to go to bed at a reasonable hour during the work week because I won’t get sleepy, even if I stay away from screens.
Unfortunately I really enjoy night time, so I regularly completely fail at that task. I can’t remember the last time I woke up feeling rested, and yet here I am on Hacker News at 1:48am. At least I can sleep in tomorrow.
Getting up at 11 sounds workable though. I have a colleague that regularly starts at 11, may be having sleep issues (they mentioned something but I don't know if that's always the reason), nobody seems to mind. My problem is that, during holidays, 13:37 seems to somehow be a very common time for me to get out of bed (suspiciously often around that minute, making me think it's a bias rather than coincidence)... so more like going to bed when the sun and birds would otherwise get annoying to fall asleep with
People speak of teenagers having a different sleep cycle but I'm now suspecting that, rather than that you'd grow out of your body's schedule, it's just that you don't complain to your toddler and expect them to understand and shift your job of entertaining them to later in the day. Same story at work; also a factor most teenagers don't have in the same way. So you suck it up and fall into a new rhythm that kinda works too
Looking back, I think that I was chronically exhausted as a teenager. I was always on 5 or less hours of sleep. At that age, you have the metabolism to wake up and have a full day without feeling sleepy. But I've always wondered about why militaries deprive their recruits of sleep, except right before battle, or why school systems do - and I think it's simply that people are more malleable when they're chronically tired. Yes, you can get used to it, and your adrenaline will still kick in when necessary. But you're not performing as a fully cognizant human being. Teenagers, however, don't need to be fully cognizant of anything anyway... so it all works out.
For me I think the only way I could make it work would be to be self employed and work a shorter day. My job wants me online from 9am, and my wife keeps a “normal” schedule so starting an 8 hour work day at 11 would seriously cut into our time together in the evening.
I think everyone gets a second wind in the late hours.
I used to have a schedule where I would start nodding off at 8PM and had to sleep, then wake up within 10 minutes of 4AM the next morning. My whole day was on such a routine, I never had to check the time. I could tell by temperature, sun, what I was doing, how I felt (hungry, tired) what time it was. I would be at my highest energy for the first hours after waking up. Then my energy would plunge during midday. Then it would build back up leading into the evening until I couldn't keep my eyes open anymore. Maybe 4 to 8PM I would be at good energy until I hit the abrupt cliff. I guess I was sort of a morning AND night person. I had to train my body to get on this schedule.
If you're going 3-11, that's 8 hrs...
I'm the king of getting a second wind, but it's usually alcohol-driven. Curtailing food and booze about 3 hrs before sleep, watching a little Mentour Pilot or reading a book, I'll conk out before I planned to. Avoiding the second wind is a discussion in itself.
Problem is the rest of my life is incompatible with waking up at 11. My job wants to me available from 9am and even if that wasn’t the case my wife—perfectly understandably—would not be too happy with me working until 19:30 or 20:00 as that would massively cut into our time in the evenings. Hence why I wish I’d grown out of it.
+1 for Mentour Pilot, love his videos
Methods that work for me, a lifelong “natural” (lol, nope) night owl:
1) No nighttime lighting brighter than a single-digit count of candles. No glowing screens after dark, either. Within a couple days I was no longer a “night owl”. Go figure, it was all fake, all those years.
2) A few mg of THC edible 90 minutes before I want to be asleep.
I have found that, when I do succeed in forcing myself into bed at a normal time, I can “brute force” tiredness quicker by reading on my Kobo with low brightness. Honestly the part I struggle most with is actually just going to bed, there’s a strong psychological aspect to it.
As for your two points, they’re not super practical for me, at least not for a big chunk of the year. From now until about February it goes dark around 5pm, so that would effectively mean no lights, video games, movies/TV, or browsing on work days. And while weed will succeed in knocking me the hell out, it’s illegal for recreational use here, and very difficult to get a medical prescription, so it’s not something I have regular access to.
Do you still get noticeable REM sleep with the THC? In my own experience, albiet with higher dosage and smoked so significantly shorter half life, is that I have subjectively instant sleep latency but I do not dream (unless I take magnesium, in which case I have anxiety-type dreams that I can remember very brief flashed of). Do you notice anything in the morning, like maybe a dull sort of haze?
They work great for me, good sleep quality and no grogginess.
I’d tried prescription sleep aids in the past and did have issues with grogginess. Between that, needing timing to be pretty precise for the grogginess not to be even worse, and having to choose between “glass of wine” and “be able to sleep”, those had enough down-sides that it didn’t really work out (the “still feel shitty in the morning” bit was definitely the worst part)
Do you drink any caffeine?
Usually just one cup of coffee on weekday mornings, but in general caffeine does not seem to perk me up, keep me awake, or have any noticeable effect besides jump starting my digestive system. I could (and have done, in the past) have a coffee at 2am and go to sleep around 3 no problem.
In my adult life I have ranged between 5-6 cups a day when I used to go into the office and none at all during periods where I just fell out of the habit of making any.
>> besides jump starting my digestive system
lol. Same here. Keeping your digestive system on track with your sleep cycle deserves a whole separate discussion. For those of us who've discovered coffee and cigarettes, usually the sight of one or the other is enough to get ya goin'
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