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Comment by xkcd-sucks | Hacker News Reader

When backpacking in the wilderness for weeks, I like to sleep around 12-2am and wake up at least eight hours later. When I need to wake up early for a long period of time, I do it and it never stops feeling suboptimal. I appreciate the your point re: lifestyle, technology and sleep hygiene.

But I'm close to forty and it FUCKING PISSES ME OFF how seemingly everyone minimizes and deflects my concerns and observations about my own body. I function best when I sleep eight hours beginning at 2-4am. A consistent early schedule, plus daily exhausting exercise, minus artificial light changes nothing about my sleep preferences. Two plus two does not equal five.

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Talking about "sleep hygiene" is still perpetuating this backwards paradigm based around expecting that people must wake up early to be productive. The early bird may get the worm, but the early worm gets eaten.

I've personally found that dark hours are more productive for mental tasks like programming. AFAICT not because of secondary factors like quietness or people being around, but simply that bright light undermines my ability to concentrate. After loading a problem into one's head, and getting "in the zone", one is supposed to interrupt what they're doing to go to bed at a "reasonable hour" to live up to someone else's expectations of what a productive person should look like? Give me a break.

The times I've driven across the country car camping, I've naturally fallen into waking up much earlier. And I'd much rather do physical tasks when it's light. But consciousness is not a scalar, and so it's inappropriate to extrapolate these patterns as indicative of some "true natural cycle" that's being distorted.

It seems to make evolutionary sense that groups benefit from night owls, etc., and so would develop them.

Unfortunately, my non-normal sleep not only doesn't qualify me for any subsidized treatments, recognized disorders, non-discrimination statutes, or not even sympathy from most people.

> I've personally found that dark hours are more productive for mental tasks like programming. AFAICT not because of secondary factors like quietness or people being around, but simply that bright light undermines my ability to concentrate.

It's more like the Balmer's peak effect: the brain is so numb that it can't lose the concentration.

Why are you using negative terms to describe something you seemingly have no experience with?

I wasn't talking about running on fumes at 2am to pounding pounding pounding techno music. I'll have days where I do not feel fully awake until it starts to gets dark. Given many mammals are nocturnal, I would presume there's some bona fide physiological reason for this rather than a deficiency of something else.

At any rate, there's a huge difference in stating advice in a personal-constructive way (for instance, I'm fully aware I presently need to detox caffeine cold turkey, and am waiting for the opportunity to do so), and pushing paternalistic "one size fits all" social mores whereby people on later schedules are assumed to just not be taking responsibility for themselves.

> The early bird may get the worm, but the early worm gets eaten.

This makes no sense. All worms get eaten randomly because all worms have to surface at the same time. Earliness and lateness don't change the chance you will be eaten by the early birds. But the original phrase is true that the early bird gets the worm because it shows up in the window the worms are all surfacing and the late bird misses the window and goes hungry. Leave the original phrase intact and maybe ditch the added second part.

The point is a quip to push back against the culture of early risers lording their being up early over everyone else.

It doesn't really push back though because it doesn't make sense. Phrases are powerful because they are compressed versions of larger truths. This new version doesn't work as a phrase like the one it is built from.

It doesn't actually have to fully make sense per se, to invalidate the earlier saying.

The truth of the whole matter is that we're not birds, but distinct creatures who live technological lives because of our lazy ancestors who looked for better ways rather than just competing to do the straightforward thing first. If you can find some way to stuff that into a tight phrase, please do!

That's interesting, I find backpacking to be one of those activities where you have to get up early no matter what type you are. You want to hike during the daylight (and for alpine starts, even earlier- before the snow begins to soften by afternoon), and you want to reach your destination with plenty of daylight to make camp, cook and eat.

Car camping is a little different, with electricity it's much easier to eat in the dark and stay up late partying.

I completely agree: even my can't-sleep-before-3am backpacking partner falls asleep before 11pm reliably when we were out. In a lot of places it's hard to sleep much past sunrise in a tent.

I am normally a early to bed early to rise type, and I find myself crashing early and hard when camping the moment the sun goes down.

I don’t know that people are minimizing you. It’s just that your observations aren’t consistent with how it works.

Sleep cycles exist and aren’t innate. Your engrained behavior or schedule is something that sets your cycle, but is changeable. Based on what you’re saying, it sounds like from time to time you need to wake up early, and you do so by rolling back bedtime or compressing by losing sleep. (By accident or design) Yup — doing that will make you feel like crap.

You need to roll forward, not back. You can take a long weekend and roll your sleep schedule forward 6-10 hours at a time and sleep from 9P-5A without much “suboptimality”. There is lots of research about this in industrial and military contexts... “rolling back” your schedule is unhealthy and increases accident rates in workplace situations substantially.

As someone who had similar habits, I’d respectfully suggest that you consider changing it. Living your life out of cycle with the world is bad for you... you experience more stress as a result. It made a measurable positive medical impact on me.

Curiously the book Why We Sleep says the exact opposite: we all have natural sleep cycles that differ and it's genetic, impossible to change. What I've noticed is that it's possible to keep a consistent schedule and overcome all of that inertia, but if you slip up you'll find yourself back in your natural cycle. Interestingly, the cited reason for this is that evolutionary, it's an advantage to not have everyone asleep at the same time.

> Sleep cycles exist and aren’t innate. Your engrained behavior or schedule is something that sets your cycle, but is changeable.

How do you know this? Not trying to be snarky, I'm just wondering if you have any evidence for this claim.

This article (which I was reminded of by this thread) gives an overview of sleep for teenagers, and it isn't radically different for anyone else either:

https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/sleep-and-tiredness/why-are-tee...

I expect that there is variation within the general population with regards to body clocks.

This would still be consistent with there being genetic (or otherwise hard to change in adulthood) factors that make a person function better with a shifted sleep cycle. It's not at all clear that it's all environmental (like the post I replied seemed to imply) and I find it irritating when people make such sweeping claims without evidence.

That's an entirely reasonable thing to be irritated at.

A lot of scientific and medical literature disagrees with you. You also assume a lot about their habits and what they've tried.

Studies of chronotype consistently show a near-normal distribution skewed toward later hours.[1] This is partly heritable.[2] Genetic studies have found markers for chronotype near genes known to affect circadian rhythm.[3]

Delayed sleep phase disorder may be a distinct condition or just the tail of the chronotype distribution. Either way, it exists. It usually responds to treatment, but relapse rates are over 90%.[4] The world isn't asleep by 9:00 every night. Even a day in bed sick can cause a relapse.

"Rolling forward" may increase the risk of non-24-hour sleep disorder in people who have DSPD.[5]

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5479630/

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4363835/

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18760498

[4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9562922

[5] https://www.circadiansleepdisorders.org/info/N24chrono.php

Delayed sleep phase syndrome is an ada protected disability, your employer must make reasonable accommodation. I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice, but might be worth looking into.

Never heard of this, details?

https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/14295-delayed...

Just goes to show that anti-discrimination laws are a ridiculous imposition of arbitrary social demands onto private contracts. We now have an enormous rule book on how people are allowed to exercise their contracting rights with other consenting adults, when the only rule that should apply is whether the terms are mutually agreed upon.

Please don’t be so reductive. Many of us out here are pretty happy that our employers can no longer fire us on the basis of things like sexuality, religious views, or because we got pregnant.

But that's not the premise. The premise is whether we respect the right of employers to offer people jobs that let them discriminate based on sexuality, religious views, pregnancy, etc, or we do not respect that right, and use the force of law to restrict the right of consenting adults to reach any agreement they want.

In a free society without these anti-discrimination laws, you could still find an employer that offers terms of employment that bars them from doing these things. The question is whether you're willing to tolerate other people choosing differently, and yea I guess some people like limiting other people's choices when they find them ideologically repulsive. I contend that people are only harming their society by rejecting freedom.

You're absolutely right. Any impingement on an employer's right to discriminate is ridiculous.

That's why we were much more free when we had company towns with company stores and company scrip and when attempts to unionize were countered by well-trained private police.

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

>>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_worker_deaths_in_Unite...

Thousands of people die in the US every day. The most important factor for reducing the death rate is economic development.

Productivity, wages and life expectancy were rising much faster in the late 19th century, when the right to freely contract was not violated, than today, when we have hundreds of thousands of regulations instituted by nanny-states telling us what and we cannot do with other consenting adults.

Occupational licensing alone costs the economy over $184 billion a year by some estimates:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/instituteforjustice/2018/12/03/...

And what is all this centralization and Big Brother control getting us? We have a highly regulated medical system, largely subsidized at the expense of the taxpayer, and captured by highly regulated opioid-manufacturing pharmaceutical giants pushing opioids to the vulnerable, through licensed doctors, and creating the worst opioid epidemic in history:

https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/5/15/17355722/op...

>>That's why we were much more free when we had company towns with company stores and company scrip

In defense of the company town:

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/01/in...

>>when attempts to unionize were countered by well-trained private police.

No, attempts to blockade company premises were countered by well-trained private police. Do you know what strikers did to "scabs" who crossed to picket lines? Replacement workers needed hired protection, so that their contract freedom wouldn't be violated.

>>The most important factor for reducing the death rate is economic development.

Don't forget not murdering people, please. I think it's very important not to murder people.

I wrote all that and this is the only response you have to me? I guess you have everything figured out, and there's no need to consider any viewpoints opposed to yours.

The way you feel about your own body isn’t science.

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