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.
> 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...
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.
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?"
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).
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."
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.