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Comment by hedonistbot | Hacker News Reader

My biggest problem with sleep is the fixed working schedule I have to follow. The 9-to-5 is killing me. It's not that there isn't enough time to sleep, it's that I cannot convince my body to go to sleep if it doesn't feel like it. Just last night I stood awake till 5 a.m. unable to fall asleep despite all efforts. The problem is that my natural clock seems to be working on a 26-7 hours per day cycle and I cannot fit this properly into the regular working hours. This leads to general accumulation of tiredness during the week and on Friday I need a total reset by going to bed early. At least now I know what to look for in future job opportunities.

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I had this problem all my life. Now I take 500 micrograms of melatonin every night an hour before bed. I'm out like a light.

It might not be for everyone, but it's changed the way I feel about sleeping. And it's non-habituating

It's really easy to develop a tolerance and a reliance on it though. That's the downside to a supplement like melatonin.

My understanding from speaking with sleep specialists is that you'd need to take a large amount every day for weeks or months to develop a tolerance. They thus recommend cycling off melatonin bi-weekly or monthly for a little while.

(Sorry, no source other than time spent visiting the Cornell Sleep Institute.)

Yeah. Melatonin works unreasonably well for me too, and it's as "natural" and side-effect-free as a drug can be. Definitely worth trying.

How has it affected your quality of sleep? Do the same hours as before make you feel equally rested?

Personally when I take melatonin, I fall asleep quickly but I get weird dreams and I feel my sleep quality isn't the same. I took it for a little while (a couple of months) and now only take it when I'm really struggling to fall asleep.

I've tried it a couple times. I have to allow extra time to sleep and have someone there to wake me up since I sleep even heavier than normal - more chance to miss the alarm, unfortunately. I wake up groggy, but once that passes I'm very, very well-rested. Also, I get weird dreams as well.

I decided long ago I wouldn't try it again without a doctor's advice, which is probably a good thing since now I live in Norway and it is only available with prescription. Some folks do wind up needing it if they take it every night, though. I worked in a pharmacy in the states and heard the pharmacists' advice on this very thing many times.

Wake up at the same time every day. Pick that time and stick to it. Whether you get too little sleep or not.

I've personally tried this, and it only sometimes works. It depends on the wakeup time. I can go as early as 9am and feel rested. This is a few hours before my natural waking time - and wake up. 8am? That's a bit of a struggle, but overall doable. Any earlier than that and I get a sleep debt. The quality of sleep simply isn't good enough to keep me going and it winds up bad for my mental health.

To be fair, I've been like this since I was a child. Everyone thought I'd grow out of it, but I'm 39. I work evenings and nights with some ease, though, and luckily have generally had jobs that start later in the day or allow days I can sleep later (even if I had a few early days during the week).

Agreed, 5 years ago I would have made the same post. I just did the "wake up" time for 4-6 months, which had a lot of bad days, but eventually it clicked in that I wake up then, so I get tired at 12.

Also, get some exercise. I have a hard time falling asleep if I haven't done enough physical activity during the day.

I've tried doing that. Even if it is possible, I really don't like it. When married to a fixed schedule, life just isn't as much fun for me.

Have you considered a polyphasic sleep schedule? If you truly do have a non-standard circadian rhythm, you should be able to adapt one of the dual core schedules towards it.

https://www.polyphasicsociety.com

Maybe? I was thinking more that stuff comes up that affects my schedule, and I don't be forced into living with the constraints of a 10 p.m. bedtime (or whatever time I set). More to the point, I am more disciplined about getting to bed before 12 a.m. I do not want to go bed at a fixed time.

I think it can make one feel trapped. Trapped to a schedule.

But you have to think of it as something that you choose, i.e. your own limitation, not some external limitation.

Having a normal circadian rhythm makes the rest of life a lot more enjoyable (fun) than not. Especially after 30.

I've tried most of the advices mentioned except (serious) meditation and melatonin. Exercise has the opposite effect for me - it pumps me up and makes falling asleep even more difficult, and since I exercise 3-4 days per week after work, this is the main driver that keeps me awake. I also wake up every day at the same time. The problem is not the waking up part but the general feeling of exhaustion that accumulates during the day and the week because when I feel like falling asleep (between 1 and 4 pm) I am at my busiest at work, so I just push through and by the time I am at home and ready to relax, my body has given up on the idea of sleep.

Have you tried exercising before work? I've been doing 1hr to 1.5 hr runs before work once a week and I'm always relatively sleepy by the time the sun goes down those days, as long as I haven't had caffeine after 2ish pm.

I highly recommend you try meditation, not just because it reduces the total amount of sleep you need ( https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2919439/ ), but also because it sounds likes it'll teach you how to drift asleep more easily.

Yoga is also another great option, but just know that both of these will require a small amount of dedication.

That's really interesting! Now all we need to do is find a MED where we save more time sleeping than we need to invest meditating. Although that might be offset by the amount of focus we gain by meditating as it would allow us to be more efficient.

I had the same problem. In fact, for a couple of semesters in college I followed the 28 hour day schedule:

https://xkcd.com/320/

These days my biggest problem is waking up too early, not too late.

What worked for me:

1. eliminating caffeine from my diet, saving it for medicinal purposes. Ibuprofen + caffeine is an order of magnitude more effective for me than ibuprofen by itself; but that's because I'm no longer caffeine tolerant. (See #4)

2. No screens after 8PM.

3. Better reasons for going to bed and waking up early. AKA a wife to share the bed and kids to get to school.

4. Getting older. Biologically, 7 year olds & 50 year olds share a propensity for waking up early, with teenagers the highest propensity for sleeping in. You don't have to wait until you're 50, it gets better in your thirties, in my experience.

I have this exact same problem. There aren't enough hours in the day...

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