Late sleepers are tired of being discriminated against
vox.com
vox.com
My parents still look down on me sleeping until noon, as if I somehow sleep for fourteen hours a day, but nobody considers the ton of productive time I have at night, when everyone else is sleeping.
The irony is that I'm a morning person and I live here for family reasons. I'd love to work from 8 am or so ;-)
My mom struggled with this as a nurse on shifts. Alternating between 8 and 12 hour shifts as well as evening/night made it tough for her to sleep.
Since I'm a Site Reliability Engineer we don't get the freedoms some developers get in regards to working times (I'm sure there are some companies which are fine, but coming in a midday all the time would probably not go over well anyway.)
I wonder why nightowls get such a bad rap, and why every human must do things at the same time, it's a strain on public transport and places to buy lunch etc; it reeks of an awful inefficiency for the sake of consistency and little else (maybe social interaction? I don't socially interact though..)
I'm guessing the earth will melt first.
The standard advice is:
- no caffeine after noon
- no screens after 8PM
- no big meals after 7PM, (but make sure you're not hungry at bedtime)
- no more than 2 alcoholic drinks with and after supper
- make sure your room is cool and your bed is cozy
Those are the easy fixes. However, the most common cause of sleep problems is stress. That's why your Mom told you to count sheep. If counting sheep isn't enough to turn your mind off, then perhaps seeking professional help for stress is your best option.
If you aren't stressed and the above steps didn't work, please seek medical help.
If you're still in your teens or twenties, it may get better as you get older.
What you fail to understand is that at 9:20am in the morning, like it is now, that my brain is swimming in serotonin and it feels like I got kicked in the face.
I DO NOT have the same neurochemistry that you do. So while all of that helps, it doesn't magically turn me in someone that gets up at the asscrack of dawn all bright and cheerful.
There are strong parallels between people who give this kind of advice to delayed sleep sufferers and people who think they can cure homosexuality.
You probably can normalize your sleep pattern by forcing yourself forward with sleep time a bit every day (if you want to of course).
I have to wake up at 7am for the last 5 years or so, and it's always a torture. I have to force myself to go to bed at 11pm to tolerate it.
When I can afford to wake up at 10am, I am bright and happy and can go to bed at 3am easily.
And there is nothing particularly "normal" in waking up early.
Either way, you're not going to be getting your "scheduled" sleep so might as well spend the time on something other than lying around agonizing about it. And, the right kind of relaxing activity actually helps me get to sleep sooner than I otherwise would have.
So do you want me writing 20 minutes of lousy code every morning and having 7 hours to fix it, or do you want me to write 2 hours of lousy code and only have 5 hours to fix it? It's your choice, Sport, but choose wisely.
it would seem a third way is being chosen.
I've seen it go the other way too. One guy used to show up at 6:45 and his bosses were not amused that he was nowhere to be found at 4:15 pm.
If we're being perfectly realistic here in this thread, some guys just want minions. If you're getting dinged for something it may have nothing to do with that thing. You're being kept in your place and/or raises are being controlled by getting you to agree that the things that make you different from everyone else are bad and you should feel bad.
If they run out of things that actually matter, they'll declare that every team member should be exactly as good at every responsibility of the group as every other team member, and everyone who isn't exactly average will have work to do (and get a smaller raise).
One of my favorite bosses derisively called this "punishing people for their weaknesses instead of celebrating their strengths."
If there's every anything interesting wrong with you, like soft tissue damage, GI issues or neurochemistry, you're going to learn a whole lot about internal medicine, and you're going to find out the doctor is often making it up as they go.
If you get a good doctor, they are going to suggest things that nobody else even mentioned. If you get a passable doctor, essentially you will be in charge of determining your treatment and dosages (at 3 points in my life the physician was effectively letting me write my own prescriptions, because they couldn't see inside my head or experience my physical symptoms. They're going to set boundaries but you have some responsibility for your own fate. The bad ones are just going to talk to you about how your side effects are expected, or how you'll have a limp for the rest of your life, and you should just suck it up and deal.
(And by the way, if you have anything physically wrong with you, from 'fallen arches' to ligament damage, I can't recommend enough that you get a referral to a sports medicine clinic ASAP. General practitioners and osteopaths know fuck all about how the human body works mechanically, and they're going to tell you to cope with things that are completely fixable, sometimes without surgery. Meanwhile a sports medicine or rehab specialist will teach you how to avoid reinjury, which is something a 'doctor' will -never- do and is actually the most important part of your recovery - staying well).
All the life adaptations make DSPD manageable. Any 'helpful ideas' I've probably thought of. I've spent time completely off of caffeine for months. I've lost 40# and exercise -- that's good for other reasons but it doesn't fix my sleep. Exercise at night is generally counter-productive and wires me awake. Weightlifting is completely counterproductive since the 'burn' from torn muscle fibers will give me insomnia. Nothing really works to deal with flushing out the sleep chemicals in the AM (I used to ride my bike to work in the morning and I'd hit the coffee machine when I got there just as hard -- even having cars nearly kill me on the road didn't wake me up).
I almost said the same thing in another post, but thought it was too controversial. Kudos to you for saying it - I agree the mindset feels similar.
Same problem occurs with introverts and all the extroverts that want to cure us.
What is odd is that while at the office we're worrying about health insurance for trans individuals there's about zero awareness of discrimination over sleep issues and introversion.
What I would love to see is some company based in the west coast with UK/EU remote employees who started mandating 8am (PST/PDT) standup meetings every day to get sued by DSPD suffering employees and lose. HR departments might start taking notice if they started being vulnerable to lawsuits.
The person who was using the Facebook Chat status API to track his friend's sleep patterns comes to mind. But also, we're getting into creepy territory if a lawyer calls you and say: "hey! You work for BigCo and you're a delayed sleeper, aren't you? I know their work policies, have you had problems with that? Don't you want a bucket of money?"
> There are night owls among us — whose whole circadian schedules are shifted later — and morning larks, who are shifted earlier. (If you're curious, you can assess your chronotype with this quiz here.) These traits are determined by genetics and are extremely hard to change. What's more, the research is finding that if we fight our chronotypes, our health may suffer.
In the morning, my drive to do anything much isn't there - it takes a few hours for the furnaces to come online.
You could argue that that's a medical condition, but I'd argue that it stems from being more mentally active as the day progresses - which is kinda the definition of an owl.
Let's go back to australopithecine principles, so we can all sleep better. Except someone will need to stay up to look out for predators.
And there you have your evolutionary basis. It's not a bug, it's a feature.
http://elitedaily.com/life/culture/night-owls-creative-intel...
Still get called lazy by the actually lazy fuckers who go to bed at 8pm and get up at 7am and spend 11 hours out of every 24 catching flies.
Now that I get more regular exercise, I need a little over 7 hours a night to maintain. And the weirdest part is that my routine works out to about 40 minutes a day including transit time. And while I spend a lot more time resting now due to post-workout fatigue, I spent a lot of time vegging before because I was 'exhausted'.
So in all, by working out I net at least an extra half hour to an hour a day where I'm awake and useful.
1) In a consulting business, what is the technique to discover clients and get a steady stream of work?
2) For a product business, how does a software developer without any business experience identify a good niche to develop a product in (I'm assuming the product would be a SaaS product) and what are some general techniques to market and sell this product?
I hope my questions were not too vague. If possible, could you share your approach to self employment as well?
I am, I believe, a late riser, but I also stayed up late so I can have quiet time by myself.
But there are also other ways to get some of this time, and I use a lot of those now. Communication hygiene is the most obvious one. Just because you send me an email doesn't mean I'm going to drop everything and answer you. But it's not enough by itself. Other things like reminders, wiki pages to dump half-cocked notions onto, pomodoro (this is a big one) and when I can manage it, working remotely one day a week from a coffee shop where I don't know anybody, all achieve some of the same effects that nocturnal coding used to do.
That said, in an environment where 24/7 operations are the norm, encouraging part of your dev team to show up at 7 am and the rest to show up at 10 is actually the saner option, as long as your truck numbers can handle it.
At 3 the early birds can hand off to the late risers, and there's still a couple hour overlap with your second shift and on-call folks before anybody has to get woken up or cancel their evening plans.
Then, I had a kid, which pushed my wake-up time to 6 a.m. (after several months of completely irregular sleep cycles). This resulted in me going to bed around 10 p.m. most nights due to really needing the sleep.
I'm still not a "morning person" now, but I'm comfortable enough with this schedule.
If you're interested in changing your schedule (even though it doesn't sound like you need to), I'd recommend slow changes. You can start going to bed a bit earlier (like 10 minutes) every night, and supplement with 2-3 mg melatonin taken 30 minutes before your desired bed time.
I had the same kind of sleep cycle when I was a teenager / young adult. I didn't have hypothyrodism or Grave's disease.
It gradually got a bit better as I aged and I'm down to needing a more normal 7.5 hrs of sleep.
Its still 9:20am in the morning, though, and I still feel like I got kicked in the face getting out of bed, which is entirely normal for me.
I had mild untreated hypothyroidism for a year and it didn't help me get to sleep earlier.
It is that every so often I indulge in too much coffee, booze, etc, and this pushes back bedtime by an hour or two. Or I get excited about something new like a book or a video game. Since the night time is quiet and I am undisturbed by others, I like it, and I don't bother to correct it.
Note that merely giving up coffee, as the doctor in the article recommended, wouldn't help. It is the irregular 'binges' that push our body clocks. The extreme case would be a hard drug user who occasionally parties for 2 nights in a row.
Of course eventually some social obligation or appointment causes me to have to get up at a normal hour one morning and then the process resets and slowly advances all over again.
Two comments about this:
(1) society may be correct to judge me, because there are addictions involved and they can be harmful.
(2) it's unhealthy because when one eats during a period which was recently 'sleep time' the body doesn't digest the food so well. The heart doesn't seem to like it, and I think I read that LDL cholesterol is elevated. This is one reason why night shift workers pay a price in terms of health.
I was in the military for 12 years and those 5am wake-ups didn't change my "wiring." I figure if that didn't nothing will.
As indicated, the world is just not built for folks like me/us. So that means I/we just have to put in more effort to work within it.
File this under the category: Things you have to do to survive in society.
I'm not, and when I try to follow them, I end up destroyed for a week.
One of my previous flatmate is. He stopped for a while and his social circle reduced a lot (while getting closer to me). Mostly, he misses the sex.
Yes, it's way easier to have sex (quantity wise) when you go out 3 times a week as he used to do. And you need to come back late as well, if you want to find a partner, you won't bring him or her at home at 10pm.
Not even mentioning if that is something that any given person with delayed sleep wants to do.
Sometimes (most times actually) you just have to suck it up.
Sometime in my late 20s after learning enough about health in general I realized that sleep was much more important than most believed and I decided my routine was unhealthy. I dealt with it with similar methods mentioned on other comments. No caffeine in the afternoon, blackout curtains, red lights, limit light when it's dark out, not eating late.
That was about seven years ago, I'm now 35 and I'm not a night owl anymore. Part of it is probably getting older, I've heard that this frequently happens to people as they age. But I noticed the changes within a few months of taking sleep hygiene seriously. A few years ago I threw out my alarm clock because I hadn't set it in a few years (I'm lucky that I really only have to be at work by 10am for a standup so it wouldn't matter if I overslept). I can't remember the last time I woke up later than 7:30am, that's late for me now. Usually it's around 6:30am. I am wide awake when I open my eyes. My main sleep problem now is waking up too early and not being able to fall back asleep. I'll then get tired and go to bed early, and wake up even earlier the next day.
I feel better than I have at any point in my life previously. It's certainly possible that many people here with sleep problems have naturally different rhythms. It's also possible that certain obese people are naturally obese and no amount of diet or exercise changes will fix it. I have personally come to the belief that having a sleep cycle which is not mostly aligned with the natural patterns is unhealthy, regardless of whether it's "natural" or not.
If anyone is interested in specific techniques I have all sorts of little hacks, although I don't have to use many of them anymore.
After my boss gave me a bit of a talking to and futzing around with sleep tracking apps and alarms that woke me up at the appropriate point in my sleep cycle for a while I realised that if I just didn't stay up so late I'd feel better.
It was a bit of an adjustment at first and I think f.lux and exercise helped to modify my sleep habits, but I've been feeling tired enough to just want to go to bed at 11pm and haven't used an alarm in years either.
Obviously I'm older than I was when I was a night owl, but given I was able to make the change in a few months, at the prompting from a former boss, I'm less convinced that it's unchangeable.
Here's how it works. If you are woken up when you are deep REM sleep you will feel tired. If you wake up when you are in very light sleep you will not. This is what happens when you wake up naturally. The sleep cycle generally repeats itself every 90 minutes or so but everyone is different. The point is there are times you can wake up when you will feel refreshed, and times when you will feel tired.
Gentle Alarm configures two alarms. It plays a very soft alarm half an hour before your real alarm (all the times and volumes are configurable). If you are in deep sleep at that time you will not wake up to this alarm but if you are in light sleep you will. If you are in deep sleep then in half an hour (or whatever period) you will almost certainly not be in deep sleep. You will then wake up to your normal alarm. The system ensures that you are awake by your alarm time.
It worked amazingly well for me when I needed it.
The problem isn't the person but the environment.
Here are some things that have helped me.
It's not just the amount of light around you that matters, the amount of light entering your eye is much more important. Staring at a computer monitor might as well be staring at the sun as far as your brain is concerned. Get off the computer at least two hours before you want to go to bed. You like coding late at night? Sorry, you will have crappy sleep. The same is not necessarily true for watching tv. It is farther away from you and not nearly as much light enters your eye. It still has the same effect, just less.
Get rid of all light in your bedroom. Blackout curtains. A single led light on a piece of electronics will now keep me up at night. Get an alarm clock that lets you turn off the display.
Never do anything in bed except sleep or have sex. Reading in bed for a little while before you go to sleep is fine, reading for hours is not. Do it somewhere else, you are not tired yet. If you have a tv in your bedroom get rid of it (this is very important).
Use f.lux. If you like to read in bed buy a red spectrum book light and read with the lights off. I use a tablet and some app that lets you turn the brightness down very low, low enough that I can't see it with the lights on.
Try supplementing magnesium (I use Natural Calm). I am also convinced that diet plays a big part in all this, but I don't have much more to say than eating healthy will make it (and almost everything else related to health) easier.
To start off, stay up late and force yourself to get up early so that you'll get tired early the next night. Keep forcing yourself to get up early. If you get 4 hours of sleep for a few nights, wake up early and then can't fall asleep at a reasonable time go see a doctor, there may be something wrong with you.
If the reason you're not falling asleep is because you're coding or playing video games or something else that keeps you stimulated, you have to stop that at night. There's just no way around it. You have to start winding your brain down a few hours before you are going to go to bed. Read, watch relaxing tv, talk with your partner or friends.
There's probably a lot more, this is all off the top of my head.
http://www.amazon.com/Philips-HF3520-Wake-Up-Colored-Simulat...
It simulates a sunrise and sunset with bright LEDs. I always wake up before the audio alarm starts. Before this I was very difficult morning riser. I may be more light sensitive than you, but it works for me, and has some medical research to back up the idea.
It's pretty nifty. They're controlled over some UDP protocol that some people have had some success reverse engineering as well.
Also, how is it different from this one? http://www.amazon.com/Philips-goLITE-BLU-Therapy-Device/dp/B...
Not my experience, and a standard complaint when commiserating with other parents is how early their kids wake up on the weekends.
My 6 year old reliably wakes up about 15 minutes earlier on the weekend than she does on weekdays.
Delayed sleep phase is extreme. Less than 1 percent of the population has it.
(I personally like to wake up late, though it's not tremendously painful to adjust to another schedule.)
If it was 1% it'd be 1 in every 100, which I'd consider fairly common.
Even 1 in every 200 or 300 is still an awful lot of people.
When I was in my twenties, I actually used to work on a 28 hour day schedule.[1] Now I've quit caffeine and hit my forties, and am one of those people that goes to the gym at 5:30AM.
1: (28x6 == 24x7) https://xkcd.com/320/
http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/P/phase.html
My employer expects me to work a roughly normal 9-5. The best compromise I seem to have worked out is that I take Wednesday morning off and I work a little longer on the other 4 days to make up for it. This gives me the ability to rotate my sleep schedule on a semi-weekly basis. Wednesday morning I can sleep in and "reset". Tuesday and Friday aren't the most productive days because my internal clock is the most detached from my working hours, but around noon my grogginess will clear up and I'm on track, so it's workable.
It wasn't until I started weightlifting the past several years where I've found myself actively going to sleep at reasonable hours (9-11pm) because not only am I tired from the exercising, but because I know my body needs the sleep to rebuild itself. My time inside the gym would be wasted without the sleep. I also track my calories obsessively fwiw.
At our company we have people who come in at 6 am and we have people who don't get in until 9. Everyone sets their schedule to what works for them and I think we're better for it. Does that make it harder to schedule meetings? Not at all, we can always find an hour or two somewhere where everyone is around.
Left to my own devices I reliably wake up at 11am-12pm, which I would venture is not acceptable in your work environment.
> We tend to assume that late wakers are the partiers, the deadbeats, the ones who are so irresponsible they can't keep a basic schedule.
> the data point to the idea that an [evening type] pattern is a risk factor for some disorders, whereas [morning type] is a protection factor," a 2012 review of hundreds of papers in the academic literature concludes.
This message is the key. But its not what is literally understood here. Being the first is the key. By first I mean, being first to finish your course work as a student, being first in finishing most of the tickets at work, being first in taking initiatives in work and life, being first in taking up more responsibilities etc. When people talk of being first, its not just time.
Also productivity is the key here. I've been both a night owl and early riser based on how the situation would demand.
As a student I was mostly a night owl. College has its day schedule charted out. I would study late into the night, and go to college in the day. Most night owl's I knew during college, we were down with all our course work in 1/4th the term and would spend most of the time in mock exams, practice and revision.
At work and in my own start up I've tried various schedule with a ridiculous amount of productivity. And never felt discriminated in either.
Don't worry about being discriminated, if you are productive you will be getting astronomical miles ahead of everybody else. And people around you will notice this.
Works for me, but I run my own company so... it's a bit easier to do. :D
Younger people tend to be late sleepers. Older people tend to rise earlier. Normally, businesses are run by older people. They get to choose, and obviously they choose what they like.
The same goes for the thermostat. Older people put on weight and wear suits.
Changing time zones might be a viable option.
I travel back and forth between Singapore, for reasonable lengths at a time, and to ease the jet lag adjustment period I choose to be a morning person in one and a night owl in the other. It works pretty well.
Is the hypothesis that your body naturally gets tired some number of hours after the sun goes down?
To all the people commenting about how this article "hits home": what is jetlag like for you? If you travel 5 time zones away do you become a morning person? Have you tried to keep that, but does it slip away and you revert to staying up late?
Though I'm not sure if that is down to exhaustion from a 23 hour journey forcing me to sleep earlier and longer for a few nights and thus re-jigging my sleep cycle.
Also, there is a quiz (which I haven't looked at). Why do you need a quiz? Couldn't you just ask what time you get up on weekends?
You can try switching meetings around, but there is only so much time in the day.
Update: I was pretty rational with this discussion and it was still down voted. Either: 1) I have people following me and down voting the majority of my posts (which I suspect is happening to some degree) or 2) HN users aren't realistic.
It's honestly not _that_ universally difficult, because in practice "completely flexible work hours" means that there will be a good few mid-day/afternoon hours during which everyone is around, and lumping the meetings into that time works perfectly well. Obviously the extreme case as described in this article would make it more difficult, but for most people I don't see why it wouldn't work and even the extreme case people would be somewhat better off.
Sorry, but you'll never convince me you get "sharper" at the end of the day than at the beginning.
I go to sleep as soon as I believe I'm able so I can wake up again. Sleep is a necessary evil, but it is necessary. So let's get it over with.
In the morning, I'm 100% the coder I am at 9pm.
So the nuance is what's your tipping point where you are performing worse due to fatigue.
When I was a kid, my parents made me go to bed around 9pm. I used to get up every half hour saying "mom, dad, I can't sleep". They figured out quickly enough that sending me to bed early was a waste of time since I would spend 3 hours sitting or laying in my bed waiting, fully awake, feeling like going playing outside.
Does sunshine get brighter or darker as the day goes on? Could it get brighter, then darker?
Do you get closer to work during the day, or farther? You're at home at the end of the day- does this mean you never go towards your workplace?
Work through this with me.
I'm "sharper" at night because that is the only time I can expect to have no distractions. That means other people not being around; typically because they're sleeping. A [ job ] without distraction will always be more productive than [ job ] with constant distractions.
Not to mention I have a 'waking period' of about 4 hours. I'm not mentally checked in until several hours after I wake up. Caffeine helps with this but unlike a large portion of society, I don't rely on caffeine to wake me up in the mornings.
What I find extremely bizarre is that many of these so-called "morning people" need a cup of coffee each morning or they're as braindead as I am. It's almost like they aren't morning people at all and are relying on a stimulant to make them more alert and "mentally checked in".
I am the most productive about 2 hours before sleep, at midnight.