Sleep tweaks boost night owls' wellbeing
bbc.com
bbc.com
The fix for me was morning blue light lamp, as soon as I wake up, for one hour. And 1.5 hours before bedtime, I take 500mcg melatonin. These 2 things worked like a miracle. I kept a log of doing these things, and the exact time I performed them, for a month. After a month, the habit was there, and I know have a normal sleep pattern, so long as I stick to the light and the supplement. It's had a huge impact on my life.
EDIT>> 500mcg, not mg
Also, any other advice that you may have would be appreciated, thanks!
As far as melatonin, I have to point out that I edited my post to say 500mcg (0.5mg) not 500mg. I've done some reading that the light doses work very well http://news.mit.edu/2005/melatonin. I haven't really tinkered with the dosage much, because the dosage I started with seems to work well.
The last thing I will say is that keeping a log is important. I've never been one to keep logs for things, but I knew if I was going to fix this problem and make it a habit, I needed to stick to it rigidly for a month. That's what it took for the habit to form, and I'm glad I did it. Best of luck!
I have those all over my house.
My kitchen has 14 40-watt T12 bulbs, probably 2600 lumens each, which would total 36400 lumens.
The way we treat night owls is akin to mental health in the 40's.
Not everybody works 9-5, not every job can be fitted into a 9-5. But many of the jobs allocated 9-5 could equally benefit from flexi-time and have those who wake up early come in earlier and those who wake up late, come in later. Covering more hours, and cater for those who are equally not 9-5 people.
It's time work hours got some research, not the people being forced into this arbitrary cookie-cutter mentality.
Some companies already do flexi-time and cater for such people, but time and time again, the media and research go to mentality is in viewing such peoples as an issue in a way that parallels many forms of negative science we have seen historically upon many differences between humans.
People's sleep patterns are not unified, not even binary, and people should be able to find the sleep pattern that works for them and not be forced into all wearing the same dictated sleep pattern.
With that, the way to boost wellbeing of night owls is: 1) Stop treating them as an issue but an opportunity and embrace that diversity. 2) See point one and stop repeating the same mistakes with different categorisation.
Or in some more entertaining format at Duke University's website [1].
[0] http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2017.0967.
[1] https://today.duke.edu/2017/07/live-grandparents-helped-huma...
Not saying that by solving the 9-5 mentality we will solve climate change, but it sure would be a measurable improvement on that front as well as mental health as a whole. Maybe somebody should research that.
Also nominal capitalists: let's dictate labor schedules so that everyone has no choice but to simultaneously compete for available transport.
Which was probably very true in the past, and while changing is probably still true.
I suppose I can imagine that perhaps at some point maybe there was a diversity of choices, and perhaps some critical plurality settled around 9-5 external facing availability, and once that happened, others that did the same had an inter-firm communication efficiency advantage, leading to wide adoption, but that's a just-so story rather than a studied opinion. Anyone know the actual history?
And that's a more macro scale. Internally, one presumes that either:
* It doesn't occur to most management to think about different ways of doing scheduling at all
* They've thought about it and it seems that the cost of aggregating an adaptive schedule is larger than the cost of dictating one (especially if most of the latter costs can truly be externalized!)
* Real day-to-day and career incentives for management reward 9-5 schedules
I've worked at two or three startups (and heard of others) where, when it was time to move to bigger offices, there was a long discussion about moving the company out to the suburbs. Everyone hired on because the job was downtown, except who? Management. Now that we're doing well they want to make their lives easier. It came to some very angry conversations and threats of quitting before they would relent.
If memory serves, none of these individuals were of the facilitator school of thought, where the manager's job is to make sure everything is running smoothly.
Whether additional congestion fees could help really depends on how much bigger that structure is. My own guess is that it's quite a bit bigger, to the point where the pain involved (not to mention rents sought) before you find the point where congestion fees actually flip behavior is too large to yield a stable or reasonable outcome.
Pricing at the marginal cost aligns the incentive structure. What you said was like saying "There's already a carbon tax! That is, there's already a very visceral cost imposed in terms of the climate change we're already seeing." Hot weather doesn't get people to stop spewing CO2 out their tailpipes; expensive gas does, which is what a carbon tax is supposed to be about.
If engaging in greenhouse-magnifying activities resulted in the same immediacy of frustration and discomfort that getting on a crowded freeway does, then sure, I'd not only contend that a carbon tax would be unnecessary, I'd go so far as to say as global warming wouldn't be a policy conversation at all until roughly the time the total waste heat output of human activity started raising the average temps.
Instead when I turn on a light or fill up a gas tank or type an argument on a computer, all I get is useful activity. There's no inherent negative feedback. Additional cost is one of the few signals that could be added.
When you get on the freeway, even in the absence of a fee or tax for your marginal contribution to everyone else's more arduous travel, you are immediately experiencing the aggregated marginal costs contributed by everyone else, in a way that you don't even have to calculate (though you could), you can feel.
And yet people do it anyway. Why? Certainly not because there aren't immediately apparent costs.
A solution that's incurious about why people are willing to bear existing costs isn't likely to be particularly effective at changing behavior. Or at predicting second-order effects even if it does find a price point at which it does.
Of course reality is more complex than a toy model. I brought up the simplest model because your objection seems to me even cruder. People are not generally Hofstadter's superrational agents directly overcoming game-theoretical equilibria in prisoner's dilemmas with a million strangers.
- Normals or larks that are currently functioning as night owls because of caffeine, late blue light exposure, lack of sunlight exposure, et cetera
- Night owls made much worse because of caffeine etc.
- Unaffected night owls who think they are normal. 11PM-7AM sleep is now considered normal.
The article refers to the second category. I was the first.
Anecdotal but I used to be a night owl and now I've risen at 5am every workday for the past two years. On off days I just set my alarm to go off 7 hours after my head hits the pillow which is only an hour or so later than usual anyway.
Just have a routine, any routine.
I definitely prefer the night time for things that involve creativity though. For me, the ideas just flow better at night for some reason.
That's a goal, not a suggestion. The suggestions include e.g. avoiding stressors and things that will keep you awake (such as caffeine and bright artificial light) late in the day, while making sure that you're exposed to sunlight early in the morning (even when asleep); also, accept the fact that you'll have trouble falling asleep the first few times you try going to bed earlier in the night, and stick to it anyway. This stuff works, and will shift your sleep-wake cycle backwards making you more of a "morning lark".
Of course it comes with tradeoffs too - morning larks will do their best work in the early parts of the day, whereas they might feel very tired and sleepy in the evening and early in the night. Perhaps that's not what you want to be. It's a choice you can make with some discipline though, not something that you're born with!
I've always been a "night owl" and I could come in at 10 or 11 and work until 6-7 if I wanted to - no one I work with cares as long as I'm communicative and get things done. But adjusting my sleep schedule and getting in around 8-8:30 (wake at 6:30-7) has improved my quality of life. I'm also most productive before noon.
Getting sun seems important. I have a Hacker News Health Theory (TM) about melanin content: why would human skin color vary so reliably based on distance from equator if sun wasn't really, really important? I think that, maybe, getting enough sun is much more important to our health than we realize.
Also, imagine being someone whose natural body clock is a 3-5am bedtime and 12-2pm wake time. You've adjusted your clock by a couple hours, but some folks are being told to make 6-8 hour adjustments. And for what? To accommodate a refusal to accept that not everyone is the same.
How is it "offensive"? No one is forcing you to live any specific way, but if you want to fit in with what "society" has deemed "normal", then you have to follow the norms and rules.
Thinking the rest of the world should cater to your personal circumstances is offensive. Why should they adapt to you, and not vice versa? Where did this entitlement come from, that not only should someone provide you with a job, but also that you should get to decide when and how you'll perform it? If the "real world" doesn't jibe with you it's your responsibility to find a place where you fit. There are lots of things I don't like about the modern rat race, and I adapt.
That's not much of a night owl. My preference would be to work until 1 or 2am, then sleep until 10 or 11.
The middle of the night is also peaceful and beautiful.
The thing is, we’re not a minority at all. There’s a large percentage of people who just aren’t morning people. If anything it’s a minority forcing their preferences on everyone else.
Whilst in many instances you may be right, it is not the case for all instances. Surly it would be far better for all to embrace night owls and with that make morning commutes less stressful, polluting and time saving by forcing some arbitrary time upon the entire populus and in effect forcing those who do not conform to self-medicate, so they can fit in and also join in this mad race to work at the same time as everybody else.
You can equally argue that workers in some hemispheres miss out on daylight as they are stuck in an office during 9-5 in the winter when that is the only time the sun is out. Those working later would at least get some sun exposure during their off-peak commute into work as opposed to getting no sun upon their commute into and out of work. Speaking from a UK TZ perspective and winter sunrise/sunset times.
I will also say, traveling off-peak is so much quicker, less stressful that the impact upon work is measurable.
I'm also a fan of polyphasic sleep and that helps in many situations in which an early meeting/appointment is unavoidable. But gets down to what works best for you, not everybody else and so much more could be solved by changing working hours mentality within companies more than changing the people. Again, thinking better quality of life commutes into work and all those positive side effects that can be gained from embracing differences in sleep patterns over what we have currently.
Can you expand on that? All I get from it is that protecting yourself from UV is really important, but producing extra melanin is somewhat costly, so evolution selects for just as much melanin as your environment requires, no more.
The tradeoff is vitamin d (+ nitric oxide) versus UV damage
So technically, yes, but only briefly and you would then have to repeat once your natural rhythm caught up with you. So about 2 weeks and then have to move again.
Tell that to my 1.5 hour morning commute.
As a night person, I've always felt a bit hopeless with fitting into the career world. Even having officially been diagnosed with DSPS I find that few people take it seriously. It's not something I would ever feel comfortable telling a prospective or current employer that I have, as I feel like I'd probably get laughed at and told that it's not real.
I've realized that whether or not I believe in DPSD or even call it by that name is irrelevant. What I do know is some things lead to better quality of sleep, better quality work, and better happiness. It's nice to know that the habits mentioned in the article are effective, even though they aren't as good as actual acceptance of the way of being.
How would the larks like it if we just stayed up until they were in phase 3 of non-REM sleep and just smothered them all in their beds? That's just as offensive as forcing us to wake up at the same time they do, just because they don't want to wait for us to finish sleeping.
I'm a night owl living in Brazil so when I take a job in CT I can sleep 2 hours more and still be seen as an early bird. I can sleep even more if the main office is in the west cost.
São Paulo is a huge, sleepless city (10 million citizens), you have excellent 24 x 7 options for almost everything.
Personally I'm mainly on a night owl schedule because I feel like I get less enjoyment and focus out of the day if I split my free time between morning and evening.
Does kinda make you review your own childhood and as you look back upon it with probably the same mentalities your own parents bestowed upon you as a child. All those things they said and as a child you dismissed now ring true.
If you think about it, it's exactly the opposite. Being a night owl means that you wake up late, go straight to work, use up all your energy there, come back home tired, and then you can't have a life other than "go to the pub" or other low-energy activities.
Waking up at a reasonable hour means that you can use your energy for useful things before work, which is bad for your company but good for you.
It doesn't matter when you want me to wake up; I cannot even think of trying to sleep until midnight at the absolute earliest. My natural sleep time is closer to 2am. I don't get the "afternoon slump" until 6pm, a solid four hours after the average (2pm, according to some light searching). I know this is the slump and not simply exhaustion because it's consistently timed even through the weekends. Once I'm through the slump, I'm good to go for another four or five hours, and I do effectively use this time for my own pursuits.
Now, I have been keeping this tracking for at least 4 years now. I did a 23andMe test recently and according to them my natural wake time is 8.04am.
Like everyone else night owls want to be successful and perception matters. So we end up waking up early and fitting in. However, I don’t think it’s good and I hope it changes.
Long story short: I adjust to the new timezone just fine, and (depending on the direction I traveled) the temporary jetlag is sometimes a huge boon. But I still ultimately end up offset relative to local time. I haven't tested with subtler variations due to the seasons, but it's a very interesting idea.
This is an odd thing to say, since the core point of this entire topic is that "a reasonable hour" differs based on a person's physiology.
This morning I got up a little early. Decided to catch up on some personal communications. Fast forward to now late, doing a mad scramble to be only 5 minutes late for my meeting.
Staying up late isn't a panacea either, of course. You have to have the judgment to stop when you are tired and judgement is one of the first faculties to be compromised.
Oh oh I’m a nightowl how will I ever wake up before 9am and go to bed before 3am!? Are you all insane for suggesting this? No way jose
Then I travelled to USA, or from usa to Europe. 9 hour time difference. After a week or two I adjusted. Going to bed at 3am and waking up at 9.
Hm that’s odd, if I claim I cannot shift my sleep schedule, how did I just do so by 9 whole freaking hours? And it only took 2 weeks. That’s odd
So i tried shifting without travel. Bed at midnight, up at 7am.
Worked great
Now I have time before work to do stuff I otherwise would’ve done after midnight. Except my mind is fresher so I’m more effective about it
Based on my reading, delayed sleep-phase disorder has two components: a natural sleep phase that is delayed from the societal norm, and an inability to adjust that sleep phase relative to solar activity. The sleep phase is not based on solar patterns directly, but is regulated by a couple of mechanisms, one of which is the circadian rhythm. The body regulates the circadian rhythm by the daily cycle of light -- but what I think most people don't realize is that this only makes the sleep cycle regular, periodic. It's the distinction between precision and accuracy: we are consistently off the bullseye.
Changing timezones only shifts where the bullseye is. We cope with that just as anybody does: the body regularizes to the new norm. We're still a fixed offset off of the bullseye.
There's a related disorder known as shift-work sleep disorder, where an individual normally exhibits a sleep phase compatible with societal norms, but when called on to adjust that sleep phase (e.g. for late-shift work) is consistently unable to do so. In other words, shift-work sleep disorder manifests only one of the two components of delayed sleep-phase disorder.
Your anecdote shows that you definitely don't have shift-work sleep disorder.
But here’s the thing: I used to struggle horribly with all this societal nonsense about when to and not to sleep. For 30 years I was always waking up too late and feeling more comfortable staying up late. It sucked but I couldn’t for the life of me adjust.
Until one day I realized it’s just like timezones. I can use the same tricks I use to switch timezones. Like going to bed at a set time instead of waiting for my body to tell me it’s time for bed. Waking up at a set time etc
And ... it worked.
So all I’m saying is try it. If you have and it didn’t work, fine. But you’ll never know if you don’t try. For 30 years I was too stubborn to try and would fight to the death anyone who suggested I may not have a sleep phase shift thingy and just aren’t going to bed early enough.
Also if you say you are so very tied to signals for the sun. What happens in the summer when it’s light out from 6am to 9pm? Do you also start waking up earlier? What about in winter when it’s light only from 9am to 4pm? How do you cope?
What do you do if you live in Finland and it’s light out for 6 months? Do you just not sleep?
This is good advice, especially when -- as others in this thread have mentioned -- blue light exposure may be making artificial night owls out of larks. I personally have tried this without success. I use f.lux to avoid making my situation any worse.
> Also if you say you are so very tied to signals for the sun.
That's not quite what I said, but I understand why that was your takeaway.
> What happens in the summer when it’s light out from 6am to 9pm? Do you also start waking up earlier? What about in winter when it’s light only from 9am to 4pm? How do you cope?
This is a good question. I would categorize this under "second-order effects", because I'm certainly delayed year-round, and I haven't noticed any obvious seasonal variation. It would be interesting to see whether earlier dusk correlates with going to sleep earlier more easily. Thanks for the idea!
> What do you do if you live in Finland and it’s light out for 6 months? Do you just not sleep?
Like I said, the circadian rhythm is just one mechanism the body uses to regular sleep. Another is the build-up of adenosine accrued while awake. Mentioned elsewhere in this thread, the book "Why We Sleep" by Matthew Walker is a wonderful exploration of the complexity of our sleep subsystem.
As for myself, although I've never lived in Finland, I have been a grad student living like a hermit in a room with almost solely artificial lighting. My sleep cycle starts to wander: every "night", I go to bed later and later, and wake later and later. It sometimes got to the point that I would wake at 4pm and sleep at 7am -- and eventually I would cycle back around to a lark's early morning schedule. This is pretty consistent with experiments in which people live underground and never see light, although it's certainly not so extreme as the results they saw.
(This, by the by, is also how I know what my natural sleep period is when unconstrained by scheduled obligations: nine hours. I've noticed that seven hours is the absolute minimum I need to be remotely productive the next day, and even then I'm likely to do low-effort things like discuss sleep on Hacker News.)
I think this is my one super power. When unconstrained by social obligations and only working on things I'm excited about, my natural sleep period falls down as low as 4 hours. Normally I sleep 6 hours and on the weekends it goes up to 8 because I'm tired from the week.
But put me in vacation mode and after 2 days of rest I basically don't sleep anymore. It's weird.
Maybe that's what helps me adjust. I'm essentially cheating by sleeping less.
For me what causes schedule drift like you mentioned in the hermit situation is a combination of procrastination and excitement about interesting work. When it's time to go to bed, I say "Just 5 more minutes" and keep going. Suddenly it's 3am and then of course I'm not going to get up at 7am.
The next day it's evening and well I got up late today so obviously I'm not tired yet ... aaand it's a self-reinforcing cycle.
I have seen good results from forcefully cutting that cycle and enforcing a bed time. It takes discipline to stop what I'm doing and go to bed, but ultimately it's the only thing that seems to work. Usually once I'm in bed there's no problem falling asleep within 10 minutes or so. The hard part is convincing myself to get to bed.
I did work out once that if I traveled East at a certain speed that I could maintain a 9-5 lifestyle with ease. Though costs and logistical reasons meant this was just a fun maths exercise at the time, but worked out I'd cycle the globe around every 9 weeks or so (was a while back so might be recall error).
We know for a fact plenty of people are able to make these transitions. Regular travelers can even do them very quickly.
Ergo it should be possible for most people to shift their sleep by a few hours. I think most people just aren’t inconvenienced enough to actually try
PS: some research suggests that nightowls are actually more creative in the mornings. Larks are more creative in the evenings. So if you have a creative job, you might in fact benefit from working in your off time
| Eat breakfast as soon as possible
| Exercise only in the morning
| Have lunch at the same time every day and eat nothing after 19:00
| Banish caffeine after 15:00
| Have no naps after 16:00
| Go to bed 2-3 hours earlier than usual and limit light in the evenings
| Maintain the same sleep and wake times every day
So basically, stop being a night owl. Great advice.
I myself used to be much more of a night owl- bed before 11:30 was just not going to happen. My wife is not. When we moved in together, I wanted to match her schedule. I started doing most of the things on this list and it worked for me. I went to bed last night at 10 and got up at 5:30 so I could go to the gym. Me of 10 years ago would have said that was impossible.
I feel that making people think it's somehow better to exercise only in the morning will discourage some people from exercising daily, which I feel is more important than the time of day.
There are still lots of people in this thread assuming that the "problem" that night owls face is that they're not sleeping in the evening, that's not it at all. They're sleeping in their natural cycle, it just doesn't fit with typical modern life.
So if exercising in the evening raises cortisol, and makes it hard to sleep for normal people, then that's not going to be a problem from someone sleeping at 4am.
I train anywhere from 9pm-1am and always sleep better at what seems to be my natural sleep time, which is around 3-5am.
No, those are not relatively simple things that anymore can do. Like getting that morning sunlight in the winter when sun rises close to 10? Not to mention my ADD causing every single new routine to be a continuous, unabating battle for years, at best!
I really wish people would stop assuming that what is simple for them, just might not be it for anyone.
> Research on ADHD has particularly emphasized impairments in inhibitory control (Barkley, 1997; Nigg, 2000) and working memory (Castellanos & Tannock, 2002; Martinussen, Hayden, Hogg-Johnson, & Tannock, 2005). Barkley’s (1997) model of ADHD emphasizes inhibitory control (i.e. inhibition of prepotent response, stopping an ongoing response, and interference control) as the primary neuropsychological impairment, which underlies secondary impairments in working memory and related functions https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4425416/
Trouble managing and structuring time, remembering things, paying attention to relevant cues, and avoiding impulsive behavior are some of the defining factors of ADD.
Have you considered that others with ADD have more extreme symptoms on a different axis from you, or perhaps their life experience and stress have amplified underlying proclivities? Or maybe they have mutations that make normal medication not effective.
Having ADD/ADHD means that you need to put in extra work in those areas, and not just throw your hands up and say I can't do that I have ADD. It's not fair, but everyone has their own set of challenges. CBT has been shown to have a positive impact on managing the symptoms of ADHD.
https://www.additudemag.com/cognitive-behavioral-therapy-for...
yes, and the original post you were replying to was lamenting how so many people seem to overlook that point.
> not just throw your hands up and say I can't do that I have ADD
Maybe we are interpreting things differently, but I don't see how they were making excuses for their behavior - just complaining about how so much of society seems to instantly scold them for struggling.
I interpreted your stance as a projection, and triggered off of the 'lazy' bit as being insensitive and manifesting the same unnecessary scolding.
For all I know that person is doing CBT and maybe even making a lot of effort - not just throwing their hands in the air as you seem to think. Being frustrated that large parts of society doesn't give you any slack isn't an admission that you are somehow not trying.
Blue LED's to the rescue! (ha ha only serious)
Did other animals develop a similar group sleeping pattern? Humans wouldn't be the only ones to potentially benefit
|Not drinking too much
|Regular exercise at the gym, 3 days a week
|Getting on better with your associate employee contemporaries
|At ease
|Eating well, no more microwaved diners and saturated fats
|A patient better driver, a safer car
An alternative solution is to go ahead and live your life on the 25 or 26 hour cycle that your "night owl" body demands. You'll need to be single (or partnered with a similar night owl), have light-proof curtains or blinds, and work independently (or remotely for an accommodating company). And probably you'll want to live in a major urban area so you have access to 24-hour restaurants, supermarkets, and other resources when your constantly shifting day/night cycle leaves you awake at night.
> The paper's authors ... said it was likely that people with late body clocks were being harmed by having to adjust their habits to a "morning lark world". Scientists say that about 40% to 70% of a person's circadian rhythm, or body clock, is genetic. Part of it you don't have any control over.
In other words, the "night owls" might have health problems because of the effort and stress of trying to keep their body clock in sync with the rest of the world. If they could live a 25 or 26 hour day, they might be just as fit as the 24-hour "morning larks".
If I take the second wind I am awake until early morning and then out like a light for a solid 8 hours, again waking at midday.
I have tried dozens of possible schedules and I eventually revert to this if given time. When working a 9-5 it inevitably turns into an 11-7 and I am tired all the time regardless.
sigh
> Individuals were screened for no diagnoses of sleep or neurological disorders via self-report and were not taking any medications that affected sleep, melatonin and cortisol rhythms.
I'm really curious if insomnia or DSPD counts as a sleep disorder here.
I guess the core point of the study is, if you force yourself to be on a morning schedule for a few weeks and follow basic sleep hygiene, then it will work and you will feel better.
I don't know what to take away from this. I already follow their protocol, but my sleep onset is still naturally around 1:30am. For me, when I go to bed earlier, I fall asleep even later than usual, since I just doze for an hour and am even more awake. When I wake up earlier, I tend to fall asleep during the day. (I test negative for sleep apnea).
The comments here are pretty split between "I just tried getting up earlier and it worked great!" and "I do all of this and it doesn't work at all," so my experience isn't unusual. It reminds me a lot of comments on anti-depressant efficacy.
So I'll probably do the same thing I do every time a study like this comes out: Follow the sleep protocol more carefully for a few weeks, then feel discouraged when it gives no results, then feel even worse from the comments claiming that I am just being lazy. And then finally I will remember that the science on this subject is weak and incomplete, that morning people's unyielding sense of righteousness and morality is based on nothing, and that maybe someday we will discover universal methods of adjusting sleep schedules.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S138994571... and if you cannot access the full text, sci-hub.tw may be helpful
I guess that makes me an extremely extreme night owl then.
-Do you struggle to sleep every day? Or is it only as the work/school/lark-world responsibilities progress through the week?
-Would you characterize your difficulty as struggling to sleep or struggling to wake up, or both?
-How does this impact your days off (i.e. weekends), and what is the first and last day off typically like in comparison?
-Is this the kind of struggle that you manage, but it frustrates you, or has other effects, or is it something that regularly threatens to derail your life? (i.e. late for work or class, or other real-life consequences)
-Do you feel like it is something you will always live with, or do you feel that there could be a lifestyle/solution, either involving your change, or accommodating to your current behavior and/or natural inclination?
I'm a night owl, and I won't go into detail about my situation with hope to not impact responses too much, but it would help me (and hopefully others!) to understand just how similar/different I may be. Thank you!
- Exercise only in the morning
- Have lunch at the same time every day and eat nothing after 19:00
- Banish caffeine after 15:00
everything else is "stop being a night owl".
I'm not saying I don't exercise. I just do it in the evening after work, when I feel it provides a couple of benefits. (1) I do it consistently every day, because I feel more "up to it" at that time. (2) I feel that it helps relieve the stress of my work day, since focusing on my form and nothing else is almost meditative to me.
I just feel that making people think it's somehow better to exercise only in the morning will discourage some people from exercising daily, which I feel is more important than the time of day.
I once considered myself one, until I started actually rolling the blinds up in the mornings (Spanish blinds block all light) and staying away from blue light in the evenings. Being brought up in a cloudy, rainy town and having a very obstructed view of the outside from my bedroom window didn't help, I must admit.
Also I wonder if certain habits and behaviors, like dopamine-induced compulsive social browsing or gaming, food addictions, etc. play a role here.
Is this supposed to happen if you try to shift the sleep cycle?
After 2230 I don't wake up until about 9
The early bird gets the worm, so no matter how much we'd like to adjust society to be accepting of different sleep schedules, early risers will always have a natural advantage.
Furthermore, the article is common sense. Obviously, shifting my daily routine 3 hours would shift my daily routine 3 hours, and I'd eventually get used to it, but why would I want to?
I've lost the ability to sleep in one sitting and it irks me.