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Comment by hexo | Hacker News Reader

I'm unemployable just because of this. I cannot "work" in the morning or when my employer thinks I have to.

Okay so hear me out here. You can change. It’s not hard.

I am the owliest of owls. All my life, I’ve been up till 2am and struggled to get out of bed, snooze the alarm, last minute, dash through the shower, hurry to work, no time to think, sit down guiltily at 9:01am. I hated that morning rush but whatever, “that’s just who I am”.

Now, I’m 42, so maybe age makes this easier. But my girlfriend is an early riser, and she sometimes gets up at 5am. FIVE A.M. What? Mental.

Except when you do it a bunch of days in a row, and you see the benefits. You know who else is up at 5am? Nobody, because they’re not idiots. So it’s an amazing time of day. It’s calm, it’s peaceful. Nobody bothers you.

The best part by far is right about now. It’s 9:30am here in Australia and I’ve been up for 3.5 hours already (only did 6am this morning). It feels like midday, yet I have the whole day left. It’s amazing.

The trade-off? You have to go to bed early, of course. But when you do this regularly, your body just sorts that out for you. You will be tired at 9pm. Just you try not to be, buddy. No amount of telling yourself that you’re an owl will change that. And, help yourself. Put the screen away, read a book, you know all of this.

Also, help yourself in the morning. My advice: don’t be a hero. Don’t try and get up and run a marathon. Just get up and put the kettle on. Slouch downstairs. Rub your eyes. It’s okay to be sleepy, it’s 5am and probably dark [0]. Have a cup of tea and a slice of toast. Read HN or Twitter or the paper or a book or whatever. DON’T BE A HERO.

Now, it’s 5:45am, maybe 6am. Seriously, don’t rush. But now it’s 6am and you are thoroughly awake and you are ready to go.

Enjoy the day. Just try not to be too smug about it, us morning people can be a bit like that. :-)

[0]: Added bonus. You get to see sunrise!

I really like the "don't be a hero" advice. I think people often try to do two really hard things at the same time. Wake up earlier and start running. Log all of my eating and eat less. You need to pick the easier one and go with that first, even if it doesn't get results right away.

Like a lot of well-meaning advice, this did not work for me. Getting up at 5am or 6am for a few weeks just means I feel tired all the time for a few weeks, and it just takes me a couple days to (gratefully) revert back to the night-owl schedule my body wants to keep.

The scientific evidence keeps showing that there are many people who are more alert at night, but of course morning people and morning converts seem to think that since waking up early works fine for them it must work fine for everyone.

No, I get it. It took me 40 years and like I say, maybe getting older itself has something to do with it. Also I 100% would not have done it without my partner, I needed someone to drag me along.

I do agree that the prevailing "earlier === better" mindset is harmful and should go away.

The body needs 2 Werks to adjust to a New schedule

I don’t think everyone can do this. I’m generally an early riser (~ 7). I tried shifting to 5 am but was unsuccessful. I went to bed earlier. But the mornings were miserable. I did it for a month without change.

Had to check this wasn't an alt account I didn't remember creating. This is me. Everyone complains I turn up to standup at 10am eating. For me I've been awake for 5.5 hours and had breakfast 5 hours ago, I'm hungry alright.

It took me a long time to get in the rhythm for this, the first few weeks I slept in more than I like to admit, and mostly it was because I couldn't admit I needed to go to bed closer to 9pm than midnight. Once I got into that habit the rest falls into place.

Now it's not unusual for me to roll into bed after a night out at 3am and at 4.30 or 5am I'm awake and having an argument with my body about what time I'm getting out of bed.

Yeah we have two breakfasts. One when we wake up, then “second breakfast” somewhere around 10am.

There are lots of interesting jobs that don't have 9-5 hour requirements, or any time based requirements for that matter.

Have you considered telecommuting? There's got to be a time-zone that may provide optimal alignment with your sleep patterns.

I've considered it, didn't try it yet. I'm really curious if it would work

Do you get enough sleep to even judge whether you're able to wake up in the AM?

Even if I wake up before sunrise - I do that sometimes for extended periods of time (few weeks/months) - I just cannot work in the morning

I'm confident you could work in the morning if you readjusted your sleeping habits. And there are a ton of jobs out there that start later in the day or have flexible work hours.

> I'm confident you could work in the morning if you readjusted your sleeping habits.

This subthread is about the possible/probable genetic reasons why some people have more trouble adjusting their sleeping habits to that of everyone else. Saying that he just needs to adjust his sleeping habits is not really helpful.

I was a night owl from the time I was 16 until 33(sleep 2-3-4AM until 10AM-11AM-12PM), and then I adjusted my sleep cycle to be an early riser(sleep 11-6). It took about 4 days before I felt physically right. The hardest part was lifestyle adjustments around the differing hours. I don't believe I have any kind of special power.

OP sounds depressed with a self-defeatist mindset. He considers himself unemployable because he is a night owl. I don't know if telling him 'It's okay, it's not your fault' will help his situation. And I don't think what I'm doing is similar to telling a paraplegic to just try really hard to walk - is there any science that these 'hardwired night owls' can't actually change?

Without clocks I will naturally go to bed between 5a and 7a and wake between 1 and 3p. I've had a "normal" schedule for most of my life, and have gone long stretches (months) where I was in bed every night by 10p. It doesn't stick. Without alarms and diligence, I will always revert to my natural schedule within days.

Sure, that's fine. It doesn't need to stick, because clocks will continue to be available. I'd rather be employable and have to use a clock to wake up, than unemployable but in a 'natural' state(to use the false dichotomy presented by OP)

Also, I'm curious what your natural bedtime would be if you not only removed clocks, but also removed TVs, screens and other artificial lighting. It seems unfair to say you would do something 'naturally' without clocks, but not without all the other technology that is actually causing you to stay awake at non-natural hours in the first place.

I was fired from last job just because I couldnt stick with morning schedule and basically "had my own". I was supposed to be at work by 10am (LOL, we had standups at 10:45), and I just couldnt do it. Sometimes I came to work at 9, sometimes at 11:30, until they were fed up with this. I felt physical discomfort from this - vomited twice in the morning (I suppose it was from stress) and developed tick in the left eye after just 3 weeks into office.

I'm unemployed now (last 14 months), and I've given up so that I don't even look for job anymore since I don't think we'd be compatible. Saves my time and employers money.

Yes I'm slow-starter - it takes me from 1.5hr to 2.5hrs in the morning to start my day. Now I usually wake up at 7:30-8:30 because I'm happy owner of six parrots and they need maintenance and to make a lot of noise :)

All this combines with my inability to stick to just one single thing to do. I have to change stuff I do very often, which leaves many of my projects unfinished. From this reason I usually find myself very unhappy working on some project for longer periods, especially if those projects are too complex to even start contributing - because of this I then usually used to start working on something different in my "free time" (in member of local hackerspace) and my productivity (if there was any) goes away. This allowed me to acquire quite a lot of different skills and knowledge but left me uneployable.

Or maybe I just haven't come across a job that really suits me and be appreciable, yet

Why can't you wake up at 7:30AM, be with your birds and start your day for the next 1.5 hours, and then get into the office before 10AM?

It sounds like you have other problems that are preventing your employment that are not related to you being a night owl(I don't even think you're a night owl...you self-admittedly wake up at 730-830am).

I would doubt genetic reasons until he tries without all the modern light/darkness. It’s insane how quickly my sleep schedule changes when I sleep in a tent and the sun is unavoidable at literally sunrise... I match the sun schedule pretty quickly, and then get out of it really quickly (1-3 days).

I think walking around outside all day and not having to concentrate really hard sitting in front of a screen also helps a lot.

I absolutely don't believe in the genetic reasons because for me it tends to shift every few years. Let's take out childhood and puberty and only see my adult life. I can go years on 6h of sleep and everything's perfect (usually sleep 9h on the weekends) and then there's years where I absolutely need my 8h to function. Sometimes it's easy to get up at 6 sometimes I could sleep in to 9 every day. It has nothing to do with summer or winter, that much I can tell. I am not a morning person, but compared to other people it's fine.

So yeah, maybe there is some reason I've never discovered why it shifts so much (eating habits, weight, general mood) - but I can only say it shifts every few months or years and hasn't significantly changed since I am an "adult".

My hours of efficiency are not like in grandparent, and after I'd tried a lot of things with switching the sleeping time, the only conclusion that these hours are tied to internal clock of what is day/night (1 to 10 a.m. for me, varies a bit in winter/summer). I know two ways around: constant jet lag or submarine mode, and can't go for any of them.

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