Can a Night Owl Become a Morning Person? | Hacker News Reader

Can a Night Owl Become a Morning Person?

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48 pointscubix45 comments

I love the night. I also love the winter and cloudy days. Has anyone ever thought about running their company at night? Has anyone thought about making the normal hours for your programmers start sometime after 8 pm? It might produce interesting results. The only thing you would need is your public facing group awake during the "normal" hours, or as I like to call them: the "sleeping" hours.

Music production usually works on roughly this schedule. Producers and musicians show up in the studio sometime in the afternoon, and work goes on until well past midnight. Most musicians are night owls because that's when they play live, and studio work follows this rhythm.

You should try working from China. I'm currently based out of Beijing working US hours (8pm-5am). All you need is broadband and a bed.

Are you working for a corporation, or are you working for yourself? Also, for the position you are in, do you need to speak Mandarin or Cantonese?

Check your email

I've read a lot of articles and even a book on healthy sleep. I generally understand how sleep works and I have desperately tried to make myself a morning person. I have to wake up in 6:30 am for school and i usually feel good for an hour or two and then i get sleepy. I take a monster coffee dose and try to go through school without sleeping trough it(im not the only one, at least 6 people from my class are night people) I handle it somehow until 1:30 pm and go home and im sleepy. But i just start wasting time until 5:00 pm and go jogging and an between 6:00pm and 8:00 pm i usually fall asleep and wake up between 9:00 pm and 11:00 pm. Weird. i fall asleep between 1:00 am and 3:30 am. Sometimes when i go to sleep i stay awake for a really long time, i don't know how long. Anyway i managed that by forcing myself to NOT think in bed. The bed is my favorite thinking place and i don't think here any more. And i manage pretty well i guess, im a pretty energetic person. The only problem is that i know someday i will burn out and this schedule will fall on top of me and crush me. So the summer is going to be hard, because i won't have to wake up for school. I usually wake up at noon and no alarm works on me, i just go back to bed because i don't care. But at least i don't drink coffee so it balances it's self. Anyway don't try to drink yourself to bed like i tried with alcohol. It comes back to haunt you in the morning. Pill's i don't like taking any at all. So im just cursed.

How did you force yourself not to think in bed? My brother who can fall asleep in a few minutes says he can do this but I've never been able to do it once. My mind just wanders the second I lie down.

A few months ago i started meditating. Im not that much in to it, but i learned how to concentrate for a while on something(eg. my breathing) And in bed i just concentrate on something like that, don't brutforce yourself not to think, just take your mind away from it. It doesn't always work, but im getting better and better.

For me the trick to overcoming the constantly running thoughts was to take Rozerem, which is a drug designed to compensate for melatonin deficiencies. It works pretty well for me. I can usually fall asleep in under a half hour when I take it properly.

I am the exact same way you are. My brain tends to kick into high gear around the exact same time that society dictates that I go to bed. The only thing I have found to help me is some form of sleeping pills. I'm not sure what they are doing to my body, but it's really the only way I can fall asleep after 8 pm.

I've always wondered if there was a job out there for me that didn't involve working the third shift in some factory, but I have not found a tech or finance job offering the third shift. Until I do find this type of job, it looks like I will need to continue taking sleeping pills.

What I am learning about sleep

I wanted to be a morning person, because I wasnt, because I am a hacker and our pledge requires constant self-improvement, because others could do it and finally because i wanted to feel good about myself. Alas, all this failed, till I chanced onto something interesting. Here is how I manage getting up early-ish.

After numerous unsuccessful attempts my body just gave up...but I wasn't quite done yet. So, the alarm was set for 7 AM and every morning I would get up to switch it off and promptly go back to sleep. My body and I had reached a compromise. I was allowed to set any big hairy audacious goal and my body was free to disregard it just as long as it went through the motions to humour me. Soon enough the body started getting up a few minutes early just to switch off the alarm and then took its own time going back to sleep. Now, it gets up at 6.30AM to switch off the 7 AM alarm (lol) then it sleeps till 8 AM and is fresh as a daisy for the rest of the day. I sneakily fooled my body! You can too...

Next goal 6.00 AM!

I also read that our bright monitors are fooling us for daylight but the key thing is eating. Usually I would eat late in the day and just get going on coffee. But I read and tried it (it works somewhat) that if you dont' eat at night, then wake up early just one day and eat a nice meal. Your body instantly adjusts. You repeat this for a while and soon enough you are an 7-8am'er.

Making any lasting change requires three things: Motivation, Mechanism, and Monitoring.

I've implemented these three things to fix my sleep schedule: Motivation comes from my own desire and encouragement from those around me. The Mechanism is to shift my eating schedule earlier by eating a snack in my bed right when the alarm goes off and eating dinner earlier. Monitoring is the log book of times that I eat, wake up, and go to sleep.

Applying this technique for 2 weeks has yielded a 2-hour forward shift in my sleep schedule! :)

The article mentions another mechanism: going outside right after waking up. I'm going to think about adding this mechanism to my sleep-schedule-shift personal development project.

I have two things to add:

1: The consequences of lifestyle won't hit until you cross thirty. Unhealthy diet, lack of exercise, poor posture, poor sleep habits, extreme stress - none of these matter when you're young, so you think you're invincible. We even celebrate this kind of lifestyle as some kind of macho thing. But bad lifestyle karma WILL eventually get you and weird shit will start happening with your health.

2: Want to wake up early? Just drink a huge glass of water before bed. I'm serious.

I love how she makes 1:30 in the morning out to be "sleeping late."

Definitely not a hacker.

Sure, but that's kinda bad. During 4th year of university, my bedtime crept up to a regular schedule of 5am - 3pm with some nights even later. It made it hard to do a lot of things, including going to pretty much all classes.

I agree with what you're saying.. but most hackers I know can force themselves to get up sevenish if they're going to sleep that early. IMHO, late is 3am+

I was thinking the exact same thing when I read:

> "One day, after crawling out of bed at 10:30, I decided enough was enough."

I'm currently going to sleep around 9am and waking up at 4:30pm, so I may be a bit biased, but her 'problem' doesn't sound that bad. Even when I had a job, anything before noon felt like it shouldn't exist.

Being a morning person has its drawbacks. Morning people get sleepy just when all the fun begins. What I really wanted when I started this experiment, I now realize, was to be one of those crazies who functions well on just five hours of sleep. That's never going to happen.

Remarkable. I've thought a lot about this issue, and this is exactly the conclusion I've reached as well.

  O, to rise when bright,
  And bed past dark.
  To be both an owl
  And a lark!

Have children; worked for me.

Still hasn't worked for me (typing this at 2:00AM..)

Or get a day job/contract.

I did just so I would be forced to sleep and get up at 'normal' times.

...so far so good. A hidden benefit that never occured to me is all the prety girls I now meet with no extra effort. (day<girls<night). :)

I did get a day job, and I force myself to sleep on a normal schedule. I still hate it. It's completely unnatural to me.

About the half-hour morning walk, you can skip it if you can put an 100 watt light bulb (or equivalent) somewhere in your field of vision. It should be visible without turning the head, but not directly in your retina. Mine is (accidentally) half a meter above and behind the monitor and works just fine. Used it to get over a bad case of winter blues (more like winter depression, if you ask me) and worked wonders.

I'm still waiting for someone to try and confirm the latest Harvard study, the one about not eating 16 hours before the desired wake-up time. Looks very good on paper.

Throughout university you could not of convinced me that I would be a morning person. But once I got into the real world (aka corp gig) I realized that I was most productive in the early hours of the morning, my job required me to get up early. Now I have totally embraced the morning as my "getting stuff done" time. I have more energy and time, I won't be going back to the night owl lifestyle anytime soon.

Last September, I flew to Australia to visit my family. My normal routine (roughly) is sleeping from 2am to 9am.

Somehow the jetlag worked its wonders on me. For a couple of months after the trip, I was dog-tired by 9pm and asleep by 10, up at 6. Somewhat sadly, it wore off, but at least I started getting stuff done in the evening again. I found I just wasn't productive in the mornings.

That's the final argument for us, night owls. Even if we could "fix" our schedule, it's not worth it because it's the best for us. Plus nothing compares with work done after 7 pm - no phones, no emergencies and even less noise.

Exact same for me, high five!

Daylight can be replaced with "full spectrum" lights, esp if you live in places where sun is infrequent (e.g. Seattle).

Also recommended is physical activity. A small, foldable exercise bike is ideal for apartment and can be used at the same time as lights.

> A small, foldable excersize [sic] bike is ideal for apparment [sic] and can be used at the same time as lights.

Real bike riding is more fun, though. Riding at night is especially nice because nobody else is awake, there's no traffic, and the wind is lighter.

And how would riding at night help in becoming a morning person?

Because you are up before the sun (at least in the winter).

To suppress melatonin production you need to be exposed to the sunlight, not the darkness before the sunlight.

Popular post on sleep from a former programmer;

http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/05/how-to-become-an-ea...

Read his polyphasic sleep posts too.

Thanks for the link. I've struggled since childhood with both falling asleep and waking up, especially the latter. (Some of my earliest memories involve been ripped out of bed and thrown into a cold car to be taken to school.) I've read quite a few articles like this over the years, but this is the first time I've encountered the notion of practicing a routine during waking hours to program yourself to get up. Interesting idea -- I may even give it a shot.

Where is the bug?

In your beliefs about the universe? > Your purpose in life? > Your career choice?> Your motivation? > Your diet > Your genes...

Seriously, at what level of abstraction is the problem? Is it a problem at all?

There's most likely a large genetic component. I doubt I had formed many beliefs about the universe when I was only 5 or 6, but my tendency to stay up late and sleep in appeared as early as then, if not sooner. If I'm free to set my schedule, which has been possible at times, it's not a problem. But inevitably outside factors -- job, school, relationships, etc. -- interfere.

That said, I find that the night does have a certain aesthetic appeal -- a sense of freedom, of wonder even -- that I find absent in the cold, hard light of day, which likely contributes to my return to a "night owl" pattern when possible.

Almost word-for-word, I'm in the same situation and have a very similar outlook, for whatever that's worth.

Yeh I totally was warped for ages going to bed at 4am and waking at 12pm. I got so much done but my health, availability and communication hours were difficult. I am still fighting it but when you can work it in the day sometimes you spend less time messing around, for better or worse. Some of my best stuff came from just messing around.

There is something to be said of the late night session, It almost feels like you can draw more inspiration without constant interruption and nothing going on, extreme focus.

In fact with the green onslaught, globalization and population growth maybe night living will be acceptable at some point.

Does anyone know of any other websites for Night Owls besides www.nightowlnet.com and www.nightowlcafe.com? I want to believe that there is a whole group of people who are dedicated towards making my condition more known so that I one day will not have to CONFORM to a way of life that I view as backwards. I use to envy Dave Attell.

Of course there is some sarcasm in the above comment, but really does anyone know of a place or company more centered around the "night owls" life?

I like my life much better when I go up at 07-08:00 and not 12-14:00 but I have this really bad tendency to push later and later everyday until I stay up 24hours , go to bed at 18:00 sleep to 04:00 then start it all over again.

But it has to do with being free, I will soon have more habits, training etc which will force me to keep a more normal schedule.

I used to have trouble getting up by 9am back when I lived in my parent's basement. When I moved out on my own, I started waking up at 7am. It was the sunlight which did it. It was bright shining through the shades and when I lived in the basement, I had no windows.

How about trying the recently-discovered "fasting" method?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=199394

I think melatonin works really well for some people. If I take one mg melatonin, I sleep great, natural, and wake up 8 hours later, refreshed, ready to go, feeling like it's morning no matter what time it is.

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