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Comment by carsongross | Hacker News Reader

It is absolutely ridiculous that we make growing humans get out of bed before 8 AM. Pubescent teens should be sleeping 10 hours a night, particularly boys who are in their growth spurts.

When I am emperor dictator, no schools open before 9AM.

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But, then people will just stay up later. I know that's what I did as I went through schools / jobs. My last job I could get there around 1030am (wake at 9:45~) so I would make sure to get to bed around 2am.

I agree. I used to make the same mistake. Until I realised that it is best to go back to how people slept before electric light was invented; i.e. it is best to align your sleep cycle with the Sun's movement.

Of course, maybe it's harder to do this nearer the poles but, in the tropics we get near equal hours of day and night.

I have found sleeping early and staying away from modern tech 30-45 mins. before sleep to be _immensely_ beneficial.

Even at 60 latitude it is still possible to wake up durung winter if not after sunrise but at least at dawn if one can afford to wake up at 8:00.

For a while I had to wake before 6:00 and it really sucked at winter when sunrise here is after 9:00. This has little to do with the amount of sleeping. To my surprise I managed to switch to going to bed before 10pm. It is precisely waking up in the dark that was problematic.

Ditto here in grad school. Coincidence though the pub closed at 1 am.

Your personal experience doesn't comport with the findings of sleep researchers. Later work or school start times correlate with increased sleep. This is due to biological influences on behavior (people feel tired at night and go to bed.) To take your argument ad absurdum, if your job had started at 6pm, would you have gone to bed at 11am?

Yes. I've had such a job and that's exactly what happened.

Children need to learn discipline. School is where they learn.

Not sure why downvoted.

I had the same thing happen in college. When classes start at 3 I go to sleep at 8am.

> Your personal experience doesn't comport with the findings of sleep researchers. Later work or school start times correlate with increased sleep.

Here's a reference for that (from 2002): http://bul.sagepub.com/content/86/633/3.full.pdf

> To take your argument ad absurdum, if your job had started at 6pm, would you have gone to bed at 11am?

A lot of people that do shift work sleep and wake at odd hours. Also, during undergrad and grad school I tried to schedule nothing before ~2pm. I would sleep from 6am to 2pm. ... Not sure if any of this applies to high schoolers, though.

Well my father worked 3rd shift when I was a kid, and he slept through the day time while I was at school. So, yes?

Was he tired all the time? It's been shown that shift workers never fully adjust to sleeping during the day. Children and teens need a lot more sleep than adults, so it's particularly hard for them. As a teen I worked in a bakery and later as a pastry chef, both of which involve very early starts. I loved the work, but that early alarm never got any easier.

Just forbid alarms for the kids until they're adults. I know, easier said than done.

I think that the vast majority of people get tired and go to bed between 10 pm and 2 am. Outliers are rare.

Schools operate as if the majority get tired and go to bed between 7 pm and 10 pm. This is just wrong, in world with TV and internet and electricity.

In my college, an EE prof famously scheduled his classes at 8AM, based on the theory that he only wanted dedicated EEs signing up for his classes.

Result: nobody ever goes to class.

Nah, he still had a good crowd. He was a very good professor.

I woke up early for an 8AM class also because the prof. was way better than the 9AM one.

Middlebrook?

Teens should go to bed earlier. Parents should make sure they don't watch TV or use mobile devices late at night. Problem solved.

@downvoters: what's wrong? going to bed at 8pm or 9pm is common for childs and teens.

I really, really tried to do that as a teen. I watched little or no tv anyway do that was easy and this was before the smart phone era so that wasn't an issue either. I would go to bed and lay in bed wide awake for hours, finally fall asleep, wake up, hit snooze seven times and drag in to class 20 minutes late. Looking back I honestly think I would have done much better in school and maybe even made it through college if I could have shifted my sleep schedule a few hours. I also firmly believe that that's really no one's problem but mine, so I'm not complaining, but my anecdotal experience suggests to me that some kids really would do better with later schedules a opposed to earlier bedtimes.

Your natural sleep/wake cycle is biologically determined and known to shift later into the night in adolescence. Sending a teenager to bed earlier does not mean they will sleep well, or at all, in the period between "bedtime" and their natural sleep phase. The temporal location of sleep, not just its duration, matters.

>http://www.wsj.com/articles/teens-need-later-start-to-school...

Yes, adolescents undergo changes in melatonin levels due to puberty. This leads to delayed phase preference - teenagers naturally want to sleep from around 1 am to 10 am.

When I was a teen we didn't have television or mobile devices and I was still rarely asleep before midnight. What a mind-bogglingly simplistic perception of the world you have.

> When I was a teen we didn't have television or mobile devices and I was still rarely asleep before midnight.

So you stay up late at night and wonder why you barely wake up early in the morning? So shocking. Maybe because you stayed up too long the nights before?

There is a reason why people go with the natural day-night cycle. If you life a different life-style for what ever reason, feel free to do it, everybody has different preferences, but don't write BS and get personal. It's well known from various studies about shift workers that working a different cycle than the natural day-night isn't that healthy in the long term.

I think you will find the studies relate to placing different factors of a persons circadian rhythms in contention with each other.

Such studies show that the natural balance of the sleep portion of the wake/sleep cycle shifts towards 1-10 am for young men and becomes more resilient.

The "day/night" cycle is the external cycle that interacts only to tune the sleep/wake cycle. Suggesting that the sleep/wake cycle and the day/night cycle should be aligned, and that such is natural, is incorrect.

I'll link you some papers when I get home. However, in the mean time, I suggest you re-read some of those studies you are claiming to habe read.

I'm also interested in reading these papers.

You claimed that a removal of TV and mobile devices would solve the problem. Oh look it doesn't. How you can turn that into an implication that other people are being foolish is beyond me.

You may be imagining things - I didn't mention any problem with getting up early?

I guess I'm an outlier. I went to bed usually before 10:00 pm and got up early. I could change my schedule (for summer months, for example, I would sleep in).

But it meant I didn't know what happened on the cool TV shows and I couldn't see late-night (East coast). Not something I let bother me.

I think it's more about discipline than people give credit for. Farmers, arguably rooted in schedules that developed before electricity and TV, are up very early (even I had to adjust when I worked on a farm- but I did). We would get up near or even before sunrise so that we were ready to work when it got light.

So I agree with frik. I have a feeling this as much about discipline and self control as anything else.

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