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> But the truth is, it's perfectly possible for anyone to adjust their sleep schedule and become a morning person. It just takes some conscious effort and the will-power to suffer through a week or two of re-adjustment.

That's not 100% true. I've done it, and deal with a couple of weeks of pain to realign my schedule.

I then went to bed late ONCE, and slept late the following morning. My schedule had the re-sync'd back to it's original form, undoing three weeks of work.

I can't really explain it, but it doesn't matter how much effort I put in, just staying up very late ONCE, screwes up my schedule, and I have to go back to two weeks to pain to realign my clock again.

> I then went to bed late ONCE, and slept late the following morning. My schedule had the re-sync'd back to it's original form, undoing three weeks of work.

How long had you been doing the night owl schedule before that? You're trying to break a habit that you've been forming for years in a matter of weeks (for the record, I was a self proclaimed night owl until about a year ago)

> How long had you been doing the night owl schedule before that?

Probably for about 13 years (since I was ~16).

I managed to fix my night-owl schedule - but it took me years.

It was similar to giving up smoking, the first couple of weeks are very easy to relapse, after that it slowly gets better - but you are always at risk of slipping back into bad habits if you aren't careful. I slipped many times, but each time learned some lessons and built some good habits.

It took a lot of time and effort - obeying the alarm, avoiding computers at night, giving up caffeine, etc. etc. - but I think it was worth it to feel awake and alert all day instead of being an exhausted grumpy zombie out of sync with the rest of the world.

As someone who wakes up at 4AM to hit the gym, I would second all of these recommendations, and add a few:

1) Multiple alarm clocks, strewn about the room where you have to get up to turn them off.

2) A sunrise alarm clock.

3) Exercise, hard and heavy, first thing in the morning, before anything else, and every day. You'll fall asleep much faster and sleep much better.

There's a lot of misinformation here, so let's go 1 by 1. For the record, I'm a night owl, and I've been trying to change my schedule to a morning person for about 11 years now (with limited success).

1. Sure, that works, for a time, possibly even a few months. Until you begin subconsciously turning the alarms off or hitting the snooze. That leads to a self-reinforcing loop of "turn alarm off --> pleasure from sleep --> no mental block to turning it off next time --> turn alarm off".

Anecdotally, the periods where I've lasted longest as a "morning person" lacked any sort of alarms at all.

2. That's simply not true. Coffee takes about 5-7 hours to wear off, so if you're going to bed around 2100, your safest cut off would be 1400, but generally 1600 wouldn't be that bad either. I've also had coffee and had deep, restful naps just an hour later. If you're really, truly tired, coffee is not a significant inhibitor after 5 hours.

3. That is simply not an option for most people. Family members, roommates, gyms, all might have TV screens or people browsing their phones and talking loudly and doing various activities. You can't simple "escape" the digital world entirely at 8pm. This is realistic on vacation, and I can confirm it results in better sleep, but in day2day, you're bound to slip eventually.

4. Workout - working out can prevent you from falling asleep from all the adrenaline generated during the workout. Just like coffee, it's better to not do it within 3 hours of sleep but many people don't have the luxury of choosing when they go to the gym (if they go at all).

But what's the end result? You wake up earlier, and you get tired and sleepy in the afternoon, around 1-2pm. Most workplaces don't allow you to nap for an hour, so you keep feeling tired and unproductive for the rest of the day. Not to mention waking up early makes you feel really hungry if you don't eat a big breakfast.

> Until you begin subconsciously turning the alarms off or hitting the snooze.

Your counter-argument here appears to be "it's hard." Sure, it is, but your goal is to make it easier by ensuring a routine, a better nights sleep, etc. Some mornings still suck, but they still suck when it's 9am and the bed is warm and you're already late and don't want to go to work.

> That's simply not true. Coffee takes about 5-7 hours to wear off.

I didn't make any factual assertions regarding caffeine, so it's not something that can be true or false. I suggest avoiding caffeine after noon because it's a crutch. It also ensures there's no chance your body is affected by stimulants when the sun goes down and it's time to wind down. I know from experience that it's far easier to retrain your body to sleep easily and wake early if you minimize chemicals like caffeine and alcohol that interfere with your brain's natural behaviors.

> That is simply not an option for most people. Family members, roommates, gyms, all might have TV screens or people browsing their phones and talking loudly and doing various activities.

People did it for millions of years. In general you shouldn't be working out once you cross that time threshold, either, since you want your body to be preparing to sleep. Spend some time in the kitchen preparing your breakfast and lunch. Do some laundry or house cleaning. Get your things ready for the next day so you wake up without stress. Then grab a physical, paper book and read until you start to feel drowsy.

> many people don't have the luxury of choosing when they go to the gym (if they go at all).

Possibly the number one greatest thing about waking up early is that you all of a sudden have an extra two or three hours all to yourself. You can work out early in the morning, work on side projects, actually sit and eat breakfast, etc. I basically eliminated my afternoon crash since I no longer skip breakfast and overeat at lunch, and I don't hit a major caffeine low.

> Your counter-argument here appears to be "it's hard."

The counter-argument here is that it gets progressively harder. If something is getting progressively harder for the same benefit, what's the purpose of continuing to do so?

Likewise, if something is a consistent difficulty, but with diminishing returns, what's the purpose of continuing?

> I suggest avoiding caffeine after noon because it's a crutch.

I take it you don't suffer from ADHD or any other learning disabilities. Some people need crutches to walk and not everyone is wired for the same focus and concentration ability. Calling an enjoyable harmless habit a "crutch" is nothing but a snooty high horse remark. We're not talking about popping adderall here (which has its own legitimate use cases), we're talking about 1 cup of coffee/day.

> In general you shouldn't be working out once you cross that time threshold, either, since you want your body to be preparing to sleep. Spend some time in the kitchen preparing your breakfast and lunch. Do some laundry or house cleaning. Get your things ready for the next day so you wake up without stress. Then grab a physical, paper book and read until you start to feel drowsy.

Again, thanks for the snooty and terrible advice. People fit household chores into the time-frames they have, and frankly house cleaning is a sometimes vigorous physical activity that's very likely to leave you in a state of elevated heart rate, just as a workout would have.

> Possibly the number one greatest thing about waking up early is that you all of a sudden have an extra two or three hours all to yourself. You can work out early in the morning, work on side projects, actually sit and eat breakfast, etc. I basically eliminated my afternoon crash since I no longer skip breakfast and overeat at lunch, and I don't hit a major caffeine low.

The time doesn't come from nowhere. There are only 24 hours in a day and early birds just shift the productive day to 3-4 hours earlier. If you're in bed at 9PM, You lose out on the productive 9-12 hours.

> Spend some time in the kitchen preparing your breakfast and lunch. Do some laundry or house cleaning. Get your things ready for the next day so you wake up without stress.

This makes a big difference: set it up so that all you have to do in the morning is jump out of bed and put on shoes then head out the door. Have everything you possibly can packed and in the car/bicycle trunk. Shower before bed, or after your workout in the morning. Virtual inertia can make it harder to get going in the mornings; eliminate it.

> Possibly the number one greatest thing about waking up early is that you all of a sudden have an extra two or three hours all to yourself. You can work out early in the morning,

It's funny too, because I had the exact same response to the "luxury of choosing when they get to work out." Getting up earlier is the perfect life hack to jobs that you can't take a workout break from, because you now are getting your workout in before you even get to the office, when the gym is least crowded. Bonus: sleep in your workout clothes, then you only have to change clothes once instead of getting dressed for work in the morning, then changing to workout clothes at the gym, then changing back to office clothing.

>But the truth is, it's perfectly possible for anyone to adjust their sleep schedule and become a morning person.

You seem to be conflating waking up early and being a morning person. With a rigid schedule night people can adjust to an earlier schedule (i did for several years) but that wont make someone with later rhythms be as productive as they would be on a more natural (for them) schedule

I also find my sleep schedule to be flexible (although I'd be wary of your assumption that this is true for everyone.)

I find that the key ingredient is others' expectations. If I'm going to be arriving at a workplace with the person I report to sitting right opposite me, and sleeping in means arriving an hour or more after them, then I can get in gear, avoid pressing snooze, and catch the 07:33. At my previous job, the norm was to arrive between 10 and 11: I was rarely up more than 15 minutes before my carpool arrived, and the idea of getting up earlier regularly gave me headaches.

Edit: some stuff I've done for a while: no caffeine after 18:00, no blue light after 21:00. Falling asleep is much harder if I don't do these things.

What you're describing is called "Delayed sleep phase disorder" and in some cases, like yours, it can be managed. However this depends on the severity so just remember not to judge someone who has tried and failed to align themselves with society's clock.[0]

You were able to align yourself using a couple of techniques, but missed out on some of the most potent which include

1. Melatonin

2. Blue light therapy

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

[0]Here's a relevant quote from Wikipedia "Depending on the severity, the symptoms can be managed to a greater or lesser degree, but no cure is known."

> 3. Put down screens like phone, laptop, and TV after about 8pm. The artificial, bright light throws off off your body's natural instinct to get sleepy when it gets dark. Spend some time preparing for the next day so you aren't stressed in the morning, and then read a book or something until you feel tired.

I can confirm that this works, but this part's really killer if you have young kids since it means (very nearly) zero kid-free screen time, ever. Also hard if you have, say, friends over and want to watch a movie or play some Mario Kart or something, since most of that's going to be later in the day if you've got kids. Seriously restricts your solo or couple entertainment and unwinding options. Winters especially are incredibly tough since going out in the yard isn't even an option (dark too early). Basically books and tabletop games are all you've got, and yeah, people got by with that (or less) since forever and were basically fine, but you won't be keeping up with the various TV series or games your friends and coworkers are into, for example.

There are real costs to making your sleep schedule sane, and they mostly come out of free time for entertainment/side-projects/online-classes/100-other-things-that-require-a-screen.

I don't have kids but I can see where shutting off screens early would be a pain. Personally I will bend the rule to watch the occasional movie or TV show. For me the bigger benefit of having a stop-time is just avoiding the endless scroll of social media or getting lost in some rabbit hole like Reddit or HN. Additionally, I find it easier to fall asleep if I've spent a some time consciously preparing food, clothes, brain for the next morning and I can feel organized and calm than if I try to zone out watching Netflix or something.

> 3. Put down screens like phone, laptop, and TV after about 8pm. The artificial, bright light throws off off your body's natural instinct to get sleepy when it gets dark.

What I am supposed to do during four hours with basically no media? That sound a bit extreme. 90 minutes of that ought to do. Oh, if you DO watch something (eg. movie), try an app like redshift, to reduce make the light blueish, which is what actually deprives you of sleep.

Books, exercise, instruments, writing, drawing...

Three of your five examples are screen-related, though?

wat

Which three? If they're the ones I think you mean - then you've forgotten about the old tech called "dead tree" and "graphite" (or whatever your preferred medium)...

It was a bit tongue in cheek, but it's not so much that I've forgotten about them, but that I think people giving this advice tend to forget that many folks just don't buy paper books, notepads to sketch or write on, pens and pencils, etc.

Yes, but those folks then can't complain about their sleep problems.

Trust me: For a big chunk of the population (and not just "older" people), spending four hours a day without screen time is not something special. Insisting you need a screen for not just one, but multiple activities listed makes you an inflexible person. And that is the type of person many employers do not want to hire.

For health reasons not related to sleep, I found I had to reduce my screen time. I'm the type of person who likes everything electronic. All my notes are in a text file, etc. But I did step back and looked at the bigger picture: The cost to my health was clear. The gains on insisting everything be electronic was much muddier. I was spending a lot of time on activities with a dubious ROI. Once you start getting older, the urgency with which you want to make your "free" time meaningful really kicks in. If I didn't change, I could easily see myself in my 50's still sticking to habits that do not benefit me too much.

To be fair, I also use screens for at least part of four of those things (not counting buying books on Amazon, then it'd be all 5) and plenty of people also use a screen for books (even if you don't count e-ink, which isn't light-emitting so probably shouldn't count as a screen in this context). You can do without them entirely all parts of those activities, obviously, but it's less convenient and/or more expensive, and depending on your goals or workflow may be entirely inappropriate (some drawing/art, for instance).

Not one of them has to be.

This is in the context of shifting your schedule towards being an early-riser, so I imagine you'd be going to bed at no later then 10pm, not much more than the 90 minutes you are thinking of.

"Early-riser" is sleeping from midnight to 0900hs for me. Not sure HOW early you're aiming at.

Personally I went from being a night owl (0100 or 0200 -> 0800 or 0900) to being an early riser (2130 -> 0500).

0900 is historically the beginning of the business day. "Bankers hours" start at 0800. Traditional businesses expect people to be at the office by then so I would think you would need to rise by 7 or 8 at the latest to be "normal". An early riser would be getting up a few hours before that.

Also in pretty much all parts of the world you've missed the sunrise by 9AM. Not really an early riser if the sun is fully risen before you wake.

I'm an unapologetic night owl. I don't wake up before 10AM if I can help it, and I get a lot of productivity out of late night hours, both for work as well as personal endeavors. I enjoy my groove and would not change it. Were an employer to require me to be in the office early, I would refuse the offer or seek new employment. Given the nature of software work, I don't think this is at all unreasonable. As long as the team is able to rendezvous mid-day for several hours, it seems petty to hold individual actors to a universal schedule.

>But the truth is, it's perfectly possible for anyone to adjust their sleep schedule and become a morning person.

Quite false. Yes, the standard sleep hygiene rules[0] can be helpful to those not already following them but they're not effective for everyone, particularly if they have a complicating condition.

[0] For those interested, a more complete list is at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_hygiene