Hacker News Reader

Comment by LifeQuestioner | Hacker News Reader

To him a night owl is up till midnight. To me, midnight is super duper early. I struggle to sleep before 5am. At midnight I wake up and have been known to gut clean the entire house then. Even if i've been awake for over 24 hours i wake up at night. I cycle around my sleeping pattern often, i'll get up at 3am. I'll try and get it slowly to 5am wake up, then 7am - normal time. I can usually keep it there for about a week then my sleeping goes back to normal. No matter what I do, what time i woke up or went to sleep I still struggle to function before 2pm.

Camping and being in the outdoors with natural light definitely helps, but it still never solves the problem for me, i'm always the last one to sleep and wake up.

View on HN

I have a similar sleeping pattern. Over time it tends to shift a couple hours. For instance, I slept from 9am until about 330PM today. By Tuesday it will likely be closer to 11am until 5 or 6pm.

It will occasionally adjust itself to something more "normal" but never for more than a week before it starts rolling again.

I work remotely and my wife is a bartender, so it's never much of a problem for me. When I interact with clients I usually end up with a multi-sleep schedule where I'll sleep for 3-4 hour stretches. As long as I don't force it in any direction it doesn't really have an adverse affect besides the occasional weirdness of not being sure if it's 6am or 6pm at certain times of the year because the sunlight is about the same.

It normalizes for me when camping as well. I went on a 3 week road trip this summer with just under half our nights in a tent and pretty much fell asleep by midnight at the latest every night.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-24-hour_sleep%E2%80%93wake...

That makes it sounds rarer and worse than it is. I think its more a choice than a medical disorder.

Its quite normal. If you work at home and have no family or other obligations that keeps you in sync, you tend to sleep in a bit longer than strictly necessary simply because you can. Naturally you go to bed later also. Now your day has become more than 24 hours. If you are allowed to do this every day, you get very out of sync with the rest of the world and occasionally line up with it again.

I assure you, a circadium rhythm disorder is not a choice.

For some staying up late is a choice, it may be environmentally caused but for those with a disorder it's not. It's a problem from birth. I'm speaking more about delayed sleep phase syndrome though, I dont know much about non-24.

I have the same problem with a shifting sleep schedule, and I don't have it while traveling. It seems to be cured by daily extensive walking.

So, my sleep cycle was about like what yours sounds like, I'd often slip back half an hour from one day to the next... But rarely if ever had a sleep cycle under 24 hours. Tried out f.lux a month back, and... Well I'm still on a strange sleep cycle, but a different one. lol. Slept from 8pm yesterday to 3am today, snoozed until 4am. Often I've slept a bit less than normal, but starting far earlier, and waking up early. Maybe that's just a result of only using it for a month, so far.

Probably helps too that I have beige walls and a small desk lamp beside me. Using the desk lamp instead of the full room light / a completely black room helps limit eyestrain.

I have a cheap lamp pointed at the wall behind my monitors that helps immensely with the eyestrain[1]. I like f.lux, but when my schedule gets into full-on night mode, I end up turning it off - especially when working with video[2] or graphics - and forgetting to turn it on it by the time I get back to something more "normal".

1: blinking is a big deal, and I tend not to blink much when tired but focused. Eye drops help.

2: spent a few years working with a company where video is everything.

Have you tried melatonin? Again doesn't solve the problem for me and still makes waking up difficult, but it means I can generally get to sleep by 1am with good sleep hygiene and keep it there a bit longer than a week. But yea one night out and it all messes up. I also use a sunrise alarm clock, that helps with morning waking especially in winter. Again, none of these all solve the problem,but combined I'm having my first manageable year and not needed to take any time of work.

I have not. Generally I truly appreciate my schedule. It works very well for both focusing on work and enjoying my late-night social life, although I usually have no idea what day of the week or month it is. I spent two years in Seattle where I had an apartment way up on a hill with huge plate glass windows and an inescapable amount of sunlight. My schedule regulated a bit more while I was there, although when I was really into a project it would start shifting again.

I try not to fight it much without having a valid reason - like a tight deadline. And in those instances, coffee will generally put me to sleep within an hour. And if I fight it for longer than, say, a couple weeks, I end up sleep deprived. The only time coffee "works" for me is when I'm not stressed, which is to say not when I "need" it.

That wasn't the case in my twenties, though. I could work on something for 36 hours, sleep for 4-6 and do it all over again for a couple months at a time before I'd start losing my way. I was also drinking a LOT more alcohol back then.

I love the quiet of the night :). I will spend some time every few months reverting to an entirely nocturnal pattern, just to be able to enjoy the peace of the night and not have to fight against myself at all :).

Melatonin has helped me to keep a bit of a balance though (not that you need one, it depends on your life :)), living half in this real world and half in mine has helped me order life a bit and i'm no longer constantly cycling around my sleeping. It's well recommended for circadium disorders.

But I'm lucky to have a job I can start at 11am, even if that's tricky. But with the use of melatonin and loads of other things I don't have to fight myself as much as I used to and can generally get to sleep before 2am(sorry not 1am as above, that would be a miracle). Acceptance definitely helps :).

Haha, I used to do the same with working! I remember once after about 2 weeks straight working 24-40 hour stints I turned to my friend and said "I think i've forgotten how to sleep.". I realised then that sleep takes concentration and if I was overtired I don't have the concentration to get to sleep.

Being overtired can definitely be a problem as well. I'm on a bit of a stretch right now, as a matter of fact, but I'm planning to avoid my office until late tomorrow to balance it out.

On the other side of the same coin, I've learned not to bother trying if I'm not ready to sleep, and so when I do go to bed, it's because it's time. My wife gets annoyed with my ability to fall asleep about around the moment my head hits the pillow, as it takes her at least 30 minutes.

As for the job schedule, I recently rejoined the freelance world and I'm elated by the idea of going back to MY normal schedule. The company I was working with gave me plenty of [relative] slack because I was productive, but there were still a few too many meetings that kept me on a schedule that didn't really jive. I think that very schedule inadvertently contributed a great deal to my reasons for leaving.

Just curious - what do your coffee consumption and exercise pattern look like?

I don't drink tea or coffee - i'm not usually on time enough even for a morning one :).

Play badminton once a week. Street dance one a week. Bike to the train station for work every morning (only bike 15 mins each way though). Meditation 15 minutes every evening after work.

I should add that even as a baby, I was awake all night and slept during the day.

I bet your parents loved that :)

I'm in my early 40's and have been a NO for as long as I can remember. To at least 5th-6th grade, and my mom (she too is a NO to some extent) tells me even before then I was up later than rest of house. Reading books/mags, a little late TV, etc. Needless to say, school was not easy for me.. ever. Elementary school wasn't so bad as I still got enough sleep, but junior high - HS was basically a half day for me as I was a zombie until lunch. Grades reflected it.

When I saw him say "midnight" and that was his concern, I was like, "Really"? That is like the near end of my prime time most alert. I too have been known to start mopping the house at that time or change the oil on my car, then go to gym after then come home and do some client work, work on my PC, etc. I have always felt most productive when I have my time when house goes to sleep and it is quiet. It is no different than the morning one early risers claim they have. That serenity. Just different time block.

The majority of people have no idea what it is like to be a NO. It is reflected negatively and many many times in my adult life have had to brush off the topic when it comes up in gatherings. Little jabs and stuff like "I have to go to gym at 6am tomorrow, hey you could give me a wake up call". Or stuff like "what do you DO all night"?. I really feel like it is looked upon as just being lazy or associated with deadbeats UNLESS you have a direct NEED to be a NO (your job is overnight shift for example). Even then, you are still considered odd because masses just don't associate success with the NO schedule and it is considered a rut to get out of. I guess it is true to some extent because how many 6-figure+ professions are there that are night-owl's?

I am very lucky to have a wife I have been with a long time and just rolls with it. She has not always been happy with my schedule and wants us more in-line, but overall it works. My son, now five, also makes it tough to continue being a NO. It was perfect first few years as my wife and I had whole day covered without either of us being zombies from lack of sleep, but now I just feel weird coming down at 11am when him and mom been up since 8am.

The best fix I have come across though is to just travel east for like 10 days and get up to that time zone. Then come home. When I go home for summer every year it is two hours later than where I live. Even sleeping in there till 10 is 8am where I live. Doing that for a week plus and when I come home, I can't keep my eyes open past midnight for few days. I could then stick with it but I just start to slowly revert. Or one diet coke too late and I blow past the midnight till 2am once and now am ruined again.

I sometimes do wish I was early person. Just for the conformity of it and the associated praise from others that I see all around me, as if it is something regarded as accomplishment. My wife sometimes gets up at 5:30am to run 6 miles and all of our friends "wow" her and tell her how awesome that is. If I were to tell them right after that I too ran 6 miles but it was at midnight, I just get a laugh like I am goof. Just not the same stigma. Benjamin Franklin's saying "early to bed..." still has powerful influence.

My biggest issue with an off-schedule is trying to maintain a routine. So many dietary, exercise, or prescription recommendations are based upon a time-of-day routine. Intermediate Fasting seems to be based upon skipping breakfast, which doesn't jive well with sleeping twice a day. A "morning run" doesn't make as much sense at 3am, depending on where you live. Same goes for prescriptions.

I've had a few relationship troubles in the past - in-part because my hours were too weird to cope with over time. Fortunately I've married someone who not only understands, but appreciates my schedule. I'm definitely worried about what it'll be like when we finally get a family started.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed_sleep_phase_disorder

Reply on news.ycombinator.com