Maybe Your Sleep Problem Isn’t a Problem
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Since college I've made a point of taking jobs that offer flexible hours, which thankfully seems to be increasingly common. I have no interest in going back to having that conflicted feeling around midnight, knowing that if I stay up much later the morning will be torture, but feeling wide awake, productive and creative.
In recent years I've found myself tending to wake up earlier in the morning, but regardless of when I wake up my brain is still fuzzy until 10 or 11am. It turns out that this makes the mornings an ideal time for me to get some exercise, which I've discovered to be a great way to start the day.
Those are the only days of my life I can remember not feeling jet lagged. I should follow your lead and get jobs with flexible hours.
2) Had a kid, and sleeping in late is simply no longer an option. Which makes me think that despite how I covet late nights and sleeping in, it really was never the natural order of things, at least for adults.
* My eyesight was a bit poor, got glasses for the first time * Snored a lot, got a mouth guard as a sleeping aide
On top of that going through a period with vitamine suppliment really boosted me. My take from is if you don't wake up when the sunrise (if you went to bed in ok fashion) and feel somewhat rested, start to look at your sleeping behaviour/daily stress.
Incorrect. We survived a million years of nocturnal predators while possessing neither claws nor fangs nor, for most of it, fur.
How did we do that? The night owls guarded the early risers in their sleep, and we took turns, one person staying up extra late and one getting up extra early.
I spent high school thinking I was exceptionally prone to getting songs stuck in my head. It turns out that I just get them stuck in my head when I'm extremely tired, and that state was so continuous that I never noticed there were times it wasn't true.
That's a relatively harmless example, but I do seriously wonder how I spent ~8 months/year for 4 years getting 2-6 hours of sleep per night. Getting that amount of sleep distorts everything from my personality to my ability to drive safely, and it's more than a bit alarming to me how little attention we pay to what it means to have teens spend most of their developing years shockingly sleep-deprived.
I also am stuck with keeping an 8a to 6p schedule in a city with bad traffic. Because of the detriment to my motor functions, I sold my motorcycle as it didn't felt safe to ride anymore.
No matter how little sleep I've had, by five or six in the evening, I usually feel fine, and full of energy and things I'd like to do, read, think about.
I once read that DSPS only affects 1-2% of the population, which makes me discouraged that it will ever be something that people recognize as a reality for some. Everyone seems to get too little sleep, so it's not really a point of sympathy that I don't either. Doesn't matter than <4 hours is a lot different than <7
And my best work is from about 1:15 to 3:30 (4:30 on a great day). So if you really want a bad employee, make me show up early and then schedule meetings all afternoon.
I know a lot of people who think waking up in the middle of the night means they have a disease, insomnia. When the truth is that before electric light, normal sleep was going to bed when it got dark, being awake for a while in the middle of the night, and then sleeping more until first light. A nice look at it is in this history podcast: https://www.backstoryradio.org/shows/on-the-clock-4/
(Especially the segments "Friday Night Lights" and "'Til Morning is Nigh".)
For those who prefer text, here's a writeup of the historian's book: https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-16964783
When I mention people to this they're generally both shocked and relieved. The problem often wasn't with their bodies or their minds, but their expectations.
In my personal experience, if you don't have a post-lunch carbs crash and you do have air conditioning, the dip doesn't exist.
He doesn't really seem to back up the existence of a biological dip at all that is innate to human rhythms.
This brief descent from high-degree wakefulness to low-level alertness reflects an innate drive to be asleep and napping in the afternoon, and not working. It appears to be a normal part of the daily rhythm of life.
It's very easy to avoid bluelight while you work. However, as you mention, that's only half the battle.
I'd hazard you are sleep deprived.
I don't mind split nights but I'm still into the usual belief.
I was always wondering, though how this worked in summer when the nights are short and one can hardly afford a meaningful break in the middle (if not napping in the afternoon)
I know there's been research done as well on the number of hours of sleep required rather than 'when' it occurs, but those haven't seem to have reached a consensus yet.
I will say some of these articles sometimes read satirically. Notably, they have a diagnosis for people who can't sleep at 'normal' hours: Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome. Then the kicker at the end, "The term “chronotype diversity” is starting to find traction, as business managers explore concepts like team energetic asynchrony". At this point, I stopped and looked up at the URL to make sure I wasn't on a parody site.
But all joking aside, it would be interesting to explore what societal as well as productivity improvements could be had if people's sleep patterns were viewed as varied rather than forcing everyone on the same schedule.
Personally, I shifted from being a night owl to an early riser years ago. I think it had a lot to do with a complex series of changes I made in my life. Trying to force it by just changing my wake time wouldn't have done anything good, but improving other things eventually resulted in a mode of life I like more that happens to be early rising.
And possibly related, of course, was that I got older during this period.
Honestly, the only difference in my day to day has been when I do stuff. I'm still sleeping the exact same amount. I'm not more/less rested or alert during the day. I just do the same stuff in the morning that I'd have done in the evening previously.
The only benefit is that I no longer use an alarm. Work has flex hours and I don't have to be in until 10am, so I just wake up whenever I wake up and don't worry about it because there's plenty of time.
I will say some of these articles sometimes read satirically. Notably, they have a diagnosis for people who can't sleep at 'normal' hours: Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome.
I have been struggling with being unable to sleep during normal hours my entire life. My parents would yank the covers off of me in the morning, or maybe my mother would start vacuuming my room at 8 AM frustrated that I wasn't already up. All through my school years, from elementary to HS I was barely functional. I was often late or missed the bus because I was a walking zombie, struggling to get dressed and out of the house without falling asleep.
Keep in mind that I'm 45, none of this was due to too much TV time or smart phone use. (One TV in the house, no such thing as notebooks, ipads, or smart phones back then).
No matter how much I struggled through the day to just stay awake, and how much I was looking forward to going to bed that night, at 9 PM I would be fully awake. I laid in bed night after night watching the click tick by as I tried to unsuccessfully "just go to sleep". Then, when my alarm went off I'd be exhausted again and struggle to get up and out the door. I was a terrible student to say the least.
You're told for years that you're lazy, unmotivated, a slacker, etc.
During my High School summers, I would get into a pattern of going to sleep at between 3 and 6 AM, waking at noon. I was a fully functioning human being. I had the most creative and productive days (evenings) of my life as an artist. I was naturally alert and creative Ispent the wee hours of the morning drawing, painting, reading.
Then I'd be plunged back into misery when the school year began. I once again drove my teachers crazy. I got in trouble for falling asleep in class. I was told again that I was a lazy slacker. I don't know how many times I was spoken to by faculty about not living up to my potential.
When you're told your whole life that you're only problem is that you're lazy, and you can't figure out why you can't find the motivation to do the things you want to do, you start to believe it.
After HS, I had a few menial jobs, stumbling into one where I worked from 8 PM to 4 AM. It was great, except for the fact that my mother still harassed my by trying to wake me up at 9 AM because... I don't know. I guess she just didn't want some lazy slacker sleeping the day away?
Later I worked my way into tech and had jobs requiring normal office hours. I was self medicating by drinking most nights, trying to get to sleep to maintain a normal-ish schedule. It didn't work all that well.
I was working at a company as a technical lead that I'd help get up and running with a couple of friends from school, and even though we were supposed to be "flex" hours, not surprisingly the morning people kept setting up 8 AM meetings that I was almost always late for and sometimes missed.
Out of frustration I spoke to my Dr about it, and he sent me to a a medical sleep center. I had a couple of sleep studies done, electrodes glued to my head and all that. The Dr told me I had DSPS, something I'd never heard of, nor sought a diagnosis of. This was roughly 20 years ago. I looked it up, and found that it was a real thing.
So, I told my friends that I'd started that company with what was up... I had thing thing called "DSPS" and what it was, how it worked and all that.
And I'll never forget how my best friend looked me square in the eye and told me he basically had lost all respect for me, for coming to them with some kind of bullshit made up medical diagnosis, trying to excuse my inability to keep the same schedule as everybody else. The relationship between the two of us quickly went down hill.
I spent some time after that out of tech, working jobs that were more amenable to later hours. For the last 6 I've been back in it, and it's still a frustrating struggle to stay on "normal" hours. In an effort to go to sleep when I should, I take benadryl and melatonin almost every night. Sometimes it works, sometimes it seems to have no effect.
I know that I'm not as effective at my job as I could be, my mind is often in a fog during the day. And again... I spend the whole day looking forward to climbing into bed at 9 PM to get a good night's rest, only to have my brain begin firing on all cylinders that night. I get tremendously motivated to do all of the things I was too tired to accomplish all day, and I have to try to shut it down by taking that benadryl and melatonin cocktail so I don't stay up all night. Then I get into bed and toss and turn, unable to sleep usually until 1 or 2 AM.
My paternal grandmother had it. I have it. One of my four children has it.
The article linked to here says that genetic mutations have been found that are linked to it.
And still, you make a comment illustrating society's skeptical attitude toward DSPS. You obviously don't believe that it's real.
That's what we deal with, and I don't expect that it will change any time soon.
After several years of melatonin use, I developed an irregular heart rhythm I could hear/feel, and you could see on an echocardiogram. It dissipated within a week of stopping.
Long term benadryl use is pretty bad for your brain/body. Long term use of anticholinergics in general has been strongly linked to the development of various severe health issues, including alzheimers and dementia. Beneadryl specifically has been linked to the development of prostate issues as well.
I appreciate the marijuana suggestion too, but I find that I'm unable to sleep after partaking. I get intermittent erratic heartbeats that make it impossible :(
THC itself is certainly prone to triggering incredible amounts of anxiety, especially in the high-concentrations found in modern weed. In the quest for increased potency, many strains have been heavily modified to have the highest THC content possible, sometimes up to even 50x normal levels.
THC is only part of the equation, though. The "other" (there are many, but these two are primarily what people care about) cannabinoid, CBD, is linked to the 'calming' and 'pain relieving' effects associated with marijuana.
I would suggest trying to find a strain with a very high CBD:THC ratio before giving up completely. From personal experience, high CBD strains alleviate the anxiety I used to experience whenever all I could find was high-THC sativas.
Strains are usually split into three categories, sativa, hybrid, and indica. You can research these more yourself if interested, but usually indica strains are more associated with 'sleep' and 'relaxation', whereas sativas typically cause a more energetic head high.
tl;dr You might want to try a high CBD indica/hybrid strain before giving up on marijuana alltogether. The effect profiles are dramatically different between different strains, and a high CBD indica strain could be life changing when it comes to pursuing consistent sleep.
This may be more than you wanted to know, but as somebody who has also struggled with often debilitating sleep issues and has tried __every__ sleep aid, marijuana allows me to sleep better than anything non-dependency forming.
The only sleep-aids I've found to be more effective than marijuana are GABAergic drugs such as benzodiazepines (klonopin) or z-drugs (ambien). The main problem with these is that they are HEAVILY dependency forming, and once dependency is developed, can actually straight up kill you from withdrawals. They are incredibly powerful tools which will certainly allow to you sleep, but considering their addictive potential should be relied upon as a last resort. For short-term treatment of insomnia however, they can be literally life saving.
I've been considering giving CBD oil a shot, I've heard that it's helpful from a friend. I guess it's time to pull the trigger.
The reality is that the first person to wake up sets the schedule, because they can prematurely awaken anyone that is still sleeping. If you go around clattering around in the kitchen making coffee and bacon smells at 6 am, you can wake me up and I have no recourse. If I wake a lark up at 2 am, before going to bed myself, they can take revenge by staying awake and preventing me from sleeping at all. They have us by the clocks, and they know it.
The quotes around the word normal to me is the clearest indicator of dtien sympathetic view toward people with 'DSPS'. In a better world, people with late night preferences are just people, not labeled people with DSPS.
>some of those preferences are going to have a genetic reason for them
It's hard coded for you, that's understood. The argument is that it's silly to have a distinguisher for everything that doesn't fit into society's majority notions, or for everything that falls outside a "normal" range (or, what we perceive to be normal, even if it's not a true reflection of the average population). Everybody has preferences that help them function-- some preferences have a genetic basis, others don't, but in either case preferences help people function and it would be productive to shift the notions held by society that being flexible towards such preferences is going to lead to a happier populace.
In my experience it is likely to give some sort of decrease.
I have worked in places with very flexible working hours and my team leader was always in later than me (officially we were supposed to be in by 10 am, but 11 am was more normal for him. I on the other hand got woken up by my girlfriend for her job, so i started at 9 like most other people).
Basically if I had something to ask him in those two hours I had to wait, which ended up being a bit of a pain in the arse overall.
"But I was the only person here at 7:00pm when the server fell over."
Everything is 24/7 these days. It’s fucking ridiculous that we’re trying to have all of our employees in the office during exactly the same hours the same five days a week, and then outsource to a place 12 time zones away which can cover most of the rest of the day, except that you can’t even have a meeting without inconveniencing literally everybody. It’s stupid, wearing a clown suit backward.
We should have heterogenous shifts. Say 9 days a fortnight with the 9th being a weekend. 25% of the staff is available on any weekend day, and everyone has one weekday off per week, and some fraction of the staff is available for extended hours the rest of the week.
That might mean that Scrum and scrumbut don’t work but I’m perfectly fine with that.
I tried to convince him to either work out or do a side project in the morning, or take at least an hour lunch every day. I wish I could remember what he ended up doing but it might have been “work somewhere else”.
Being sanctimonious is annoying, but that sounds like she's getting the right amount of sleep
It's the same with people who go to bed really late as if it's some kind of achievement. Or people who sleep less. Or people who sleep more.
All of these things are simply facts about your life. They don't make you any more virtuous, interesting, blah blah blah, than the next person.
It feels like a much bigger issue to late-risers than early-risers.
That said, as long as it's working for you great! Just don't assume it's impossible to change if it's causing you problems.
If you stay up until the sun is nearly up then the eastern edge means the sun is up longer before you have to be at work. But if it’s N hours after you get home, then you’ll see more daylight on the western edge which might be more healthy for you.
For me I don’t want to move if the sun isn’t up yet. I need to move farther south so my winters aren’t as rough.
A main problem is - even when i've had to be awake at 9am every day (yes awake at 9am, not working at 9am) it causes me to fall really ill. Mentally and physically your body feels wrecked and it doesn't matter how tired you are, you wake up at night.
I now, after a decade, manage a sleep cycle that doesn't change every day by a few hours and I can just about function enough for meetings.
I can just about get to 1pm meetings and it's taken so much effort just to be able to get here!
I've written nearly 4 articles covering the different strategies i've used to be able to wake up early in the morning. I've slept through some of the most important things - which led me in my final exams to just stay up all night to get to 9am exams incase I wouldn't wake up.
What has worked is accepting that it is a genuine disability and problem. And as you say, adjusting my environment to suit my sleeping issues. Unfortunately, changing time zones doesn't work. But it's a nice theory (I've already tried this).
I'll be posting my articles soon which documents every strategy i've tried over the last decade, in hope it might help someone find a solution for them.
I personally know someone that lived on a 28 hour day for a while (6 * 28 / 7 = 24). He was able to keep a fairly normal workday during the week but over the weekend he was crashing in the day. It only worked because he was religious about managing light levels at home with blackout blinds and sunlamps on timers.
If your willing to try just about anything it might be worth a shot, but you end up making a lot of sacrifices and must keep a very tight schedule.
I've had shutters for my windows so no light could get in the evening, light simulation alarm clocks, only used the computer for a maximum of 8 hours a day and got rid of my smart-phone so I had an old fashioned phone, to reduce phone use. I don't drink coffee or tea. Melatonin, sleeping tablets, waking up every day at the same time and going for a run.
Fyi, waking up every time at the same day makes me ill because I still can't sleep early even if i've had a lack of sleep for several nights before.
You can't crash at weekends either. Because if you crash at weekends it messes up your sleep cycle completely and you'll start Monday having slept at 6am on Sunday night.
A tight schedule means you have to do it every day. Then there's the other problem that happens when you crash out - you're really groggy for days.
When I was in school, I'd crash out at 4pm on a Friday night and wake up at 7am the next day. I'd have headaches and feel so drained. And I'd still go to my weekend job.
It's not a lack of motivation.
If you know anything about this guy and the strategies he uses, please do share. Always looking for suggestions.
In my opinion the 2am is just a conceptual thing and there is nothing concrete about it - we change it twice a year and most people adjust fairly quickly.
Early risers speaking on the issue don't have anything interesting to say.
One is what you're talking about: the way people regard waking up early as virtuous.
The other is that, how early or late you arrive to an event sends signals about your attitude toward the event. Or at least it is interpreted that way.
For example, if you are very excited about seeing a particular movie or a concert and it has general admission, you will arrive early to get a good seat. Someone who is ambivalent about the movie will not make such an effort. Therefore, arrival time correlates with enthusiasm, and people know this, and they reason backwards.
There's also probably some stuff behind why people don't want to be the first to arrive at a party. Arriving fashionably late can show you only want to experience the best part of the party, which in a sense is a power move indicating you think you are more important than some of the other guests.
I think people sometimes have these perceptions in the business world too. If you have a later schedule, they're not sure if it's because you are aligning your work schedule with your productive hours or because you'd rather not be there. Ideally, people wouldn't make assumptions, but it happens.
Showing up early on the other hand often put's people who are not ready on the spot. If you regularly host parties who will get annoyed at people that show up 30+ minutes early unless they are willing to help.
However there was a reddit thread (or was it HN?) a few weeks back discussing this very issue and if i remember correctly being on time was considered almost rude in brazil as well as a number of other countries,
My friend basically sent out an invite to her party with staggered start times based on nationality. Spanish Greeks were asked to come two or three hours before the real start time, French one hour and Brits and Germans were given the actual time.
I like to sleep from 3-12 and I like to take naps at 18.
This has nothing to do with me being unable to do a job or being not intersted in it.
I worked for a bunch of people who gave me a hard time for not being awake at 9.
I was trying to make a distinction between perceptions of character and perceptions of attitude.
Though not everyone agrees, many people see waking up early as a valuable part of being self-disciplined and hardworking. That's a perception about character.
But that can't account for perceptions people have around events that happen in the afternoon or evening, and yet people still read things into arrival time for those events too. So there is a second factor in perception.
> This has nothing to do with me being unable to do a job or being not intersted in it.
I agree that it's absolutely possible for this to be the case. But perception doesn't always reflect reality.
Often people really do understand and just like to tease others who don't fit the mold. But sometimes people make assumptions, so basically I'm trying to be aware of what assumptions they might make and why just in case it happens.
Yeah, I wish it was different tho' :/
You are also going to be constantly having people trying to talk you into committing code after 2:00 (a perfectly reasonable time) but then getting pissed because you broke the build and went home.
Have people started talking about Core Hours yet? They will.
The virtue of getting up early dates from the days when everybody was a farmer. Farmers who got a head start on the work that needed to be done even befode the sun came up outfarmed late risers.
These days it is considered a mark of professionalism and respect for the job to show up for work on time or early, at 8 AM or before.
I think it goes both ways because people want to justify why they are not at 100% energy. Partly to not offend others when you're being abnormally unenthusiastic. A type of social defense mechanism.
nocturnal - Done, occurring, or active at night. [0]
diurnal - 1. Of or during the day. 2. Daily; of each day. [1]
crepuscular - Resembling or relating to twilight. [2]
[0] https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/nocturnal [1] https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/diurnal [2] https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/crepuscular
I'm trying to get companies to realize this.
Just my 2 cent.
Dan Gartenberg, PhD, CEO of Sonic Sleep Coach
I'm not a sleep expert or a neuroscientist, but I take issue with being branded into a sleep-band that is "hard-written" into my DNA. I perform at my worst when I wake at times other than my current habit allows for - whether that is early or late.
I don't believe this leaves me in the 30% of in-between people. It just means that my habits are most telling of my performance. Don't assume my chronotype.
So, you can take it with them.
Or you could an outlier, but it's not like this flexibility you mention is statistically true for most people. What has been studied is statistically true.
However, what is actually known about the human body is often a lot more fuzzy and uncertain than how the popular press, or sometimes scientists, would have use believe. If the second paragraph of the Wikipedia article on the chronotype is to be believed there is plenty of room for believing that environment and habits play a role in your Chronotype as is the case for most behaviours.
> The causes and regulation of chronotypes, including developmental change, individual propensity for a specific chronotype, and flexible versus fixed chronotypes have yet to be determined. However, research is beginning to shed light on these questions, such as the relationship between age and chronotype.
With that being said, I am legitimately unable to find any conclusive research that says there are effectively three "cronotype" bands, and 100% of the population falls into one of these three bands, and that these bands are completely DNA-driven and non-dynamic. Every source of this information seems to be behind a "buy my book" paywall from some inspirational speaker like Daniel Pink.
The article says: "For further proof, researchers at Rockefeller University last year announced the discovery of a gene mutation that apparently accounts for D.S.P.S."
In that study, the author says, " According to the new research, the mutation may be present in as many as one in 75 people in some populations." While there might be more genes which lend themselves to DSPS, the numbers from the study don't exactly lend extra credibility to the argument.
Can you help me to understand where it has been statistically proven that 100% of humans fall into roughly three equal bands of morning/evening/between, and that this has been solidly linked to genetics rather than environmental/habits or a combination of both? Most studies on humans don't make such bold claims because genetics are so diverse across populations that the study population itself would need to be enormous.
I was travelling in Chile and went up to Peru. There was a two hour time difference despite being at more or less the same longitude (I think Chile shifted its clocks in summer while Peru didn't, and there was a one hour difference on top of that).
Guess what? I got used to it in a few days.
Likewise Spain is an hour ahead of the UK, despite being both being similar longitude. We shift our sleeping patterns by and hour a couple of times each year with daylight saving. It usually only takes a couple of days to get used to it.
I enjoy my sleep and the answer seems to be going to bed earlier, and not convincing yourself that you can't sleep because its too early. The time of day is a social construct.
The other major factor is getting regular exercise.
My friends and I call this "poo brain." We all had the same rhythm back in highschool which did not give with the 7:15am first bell. By about 2pm we'd be zombies, capable of no kind of creative thought.
To this day if we're visiting each other and suffering jet lag, inevitable accusations of poo brain get thrown around. It feels like every part of the brain works except the part that thinks - that's a swamp.
Being a hard night owl myself, I'm happy to work at a place with flexible hours, but then again most of my company is <40-50 years of age. People in BigCos often aren't as lucky and to make it worse "office politics" with the competitiveness associated there (and mentioned in the article) effectively kill off any motivation to chsnge.
Big companies with competent leaders are perfectly capable of rapid change when survival is at stake. The classic example is the pivot from desktop software toward the Internet that Bill Gates led at Microsoft.
Look into politics, no matter the country, or any big corporation - it is usually an old-white-men club (exceptions confirm the rule). And they are hell-bent on keeping the situation so that they benefit, and the younger generations suffer for it.
The social contract was that at reaching ~65 (here in Germany) years, you retire, and someone younger rises to your position. The current situation with people working way past their 80s, either due to stubbornness (rich old white men) or due to economic need (poor old people, PoC), breaks that contract, and young people are locked into lower-paying positions because they cannot rise up.
To provide my claims with data: average age of DAX company boardmembers is 61, with some companies at 70 (!!) [1], only 7% of CxO posts are held by women [2]. In addition, the government commission "Deutscher Corporate Governance Kodex" actually has literally asked for "fresh blood" in boards [1].
1: https://www.welt.de/wirtschaft/article137859180/Zu-viele-Sen...
2: http://www.faz.net/aktuell/beruf-chance/beruf/dax-unternehme...
Once I experienced the pain of needing to wake up for a small child, I was forced out of my historical sleep pattern. Fortunately I, like my parents, need less and less sleep as I get older, so 24 hours with an early rising child is more tolerable now than when I initially experienced it.
In the end, my wife is a lark, so I'd rather be awake with her :)
I have it too. Have since childhood.
There seem to be various incarnations of it: it's pretty common among blind people, though not all have it.
Some people just seem to have a really long day, 26+ hours, so that they need extreme light exposure to entrain to the sun's rhythm.
I tried that, and apparently it was something else - I suspect a defect in the suprachiasmatic nucleus (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suprachiasmatic_nucleus), which is a part of the brain responsible from interpreting the signals from the eye that keeps the daily clock in sync.
I've mostly fixed it using the Ketogenic Diet (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketogenic_diet), which tells me it has something to do with the sugar metabolism in the brain. Because that's what the ketogenic diet addresses eg. in epileptics.
Ever since finding out I had this "incurable" condition and fixing it within 3-4 days of keto, I've been just a regular night owl. I like to go to bed at 2am and wake up around 10am, though I have to make due with 12-8 for work :-/ It's not the same though. In my experience, sleeping at the correct time makes an enormous difference.
I've been "symptom free" from Non24 for almost 3 years now using keto, and I know of 2 other people that have had success.
Should your SCN not be the problem, but you simply have an extremely long circadian rhythm, you can try extreme morning light exposure. This giant article explains tons about DSPS and what he calls the "farmer's lifestyle": https://www.supermemo.com/en/articles/sleep#farmers_lifestyl.... (He's wrong about Non24 always being an extreme form of DSPS - it does exist).
It is worth experimenting months at a time and solving this. You'll spend 1/3 of the rest of your life sleeping, finding out how your body wants to sleep is a huge investment. I found out in my 30s that I had an "incurable condition" and had it accidentally fixed a year later.
It's becoming unbearable. Unfortunately there are a couple of commercial activities nearby, and my understanding is that there's no way to force these trucks to come at a more decent time.
Any of you have any idea on how to fix this? Sorry if this is a bit off-topic, but not sleeping well for months is something that deeply affects your well being...
Move out of an urban environment. Or consider investing in soundproofing?
http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/07/10/melatonin-much-more-tha...
> I have it fairly bad. My body naturally wants to go to bed around 2 a.m. and rise around 10 a.m.
That was my cycle as well and I wouldn't describe it as "fairly bad" it's definitely later but not egregious.
The SSC article recommends .3mg melatonin 7 hours before desired sleep and it worked like a charm for me (along with rituals for earlier sleep and better sleep hygiene).
Within a few weeks I was going to bed at 10pm and naturally waking up at around 7am. Now I regularly operate on this schedule and I was kind of surprised at how quickly I was able to adjust.
"These don’t “cure” the condition permanently; you have to keep doing them every day, or your circadian rhythm will snap back to its natural pattern."
So it looks like you have to take the melatonin on a continuous basis.
I like to go to bed late, but I also like to wake up early. Sometimes I can't wake up until noon. Sometimes waking up at noon feels like shit. Sometimes I'll spontaneously awaken at 7am and feel amazing until about noon. Sometimes I'll be dead-tired at 9pm. Sometimes I'll set my alarm for 9am and wake up at 8am-- sometimes its the opposite.
It makes no sense because I go to bed at pretty much the same time every night (between 1 and 3 am, usually 2am).
I feel inspired to monitor my natural sleep now and figure out what's going on, rather than constantly trying (and failing) to conform to 10pm-6am.
I am really left with doubts on whether it's better to support a baby's time schedule or to "force" the standard's.