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Comment by grumpy8 | Hacker News Reader

You say "You've followed every advice", but what were you trying to achieve exactly? Is it that you can't fall asleep or that you're not productive in the morning, or something else?

Personally what worked best for me is just to wake up at 6am for 2 weeks without nap during the day.

Most people try to adjust their sleeping time to match their waking time, but they've got it backward. Set your wake up time and listen to your body for when it's sleepy, then go to sleep and wake up at the same time the following day.

The "have a kid" is just a way to force this behavior because they will wake up early every day over a long period of time.

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> You say "You've followed every advice", but what were you trying to achieve exactly? Is it that you can't fall asleep or that you're not productive in the morning, or something else?

Well, that's a good question since I assumed that the answer was obvious but putting it down is important:

I wanted to:

A) Not spend hours trying to fall asleep at night.

and

B) Have energy in the Morning, not feel groggy all day after forcing myself awake.

When I was in my early 20s and had long vacations my body fell into a natural sleep cycle of 4am to 12pm, when I woke up I had enough energy that I actually _wanted_ to do things and the energy lasted until I fell asleep in the night. Now I'm just groggy and tired and procrastinating all the time.

Of course, I'm _really_ conflating things because; Vacations are inherently less energy consuming, waking up naturally is going to make you feel more energised too and, obviously, I'm falling asleep naturally also.

I have to be very careful when I have more than a few days off work in a row. When left to fall back into my own schedule, I always drift toward more of a 2am-10am sleep schedule.

Normally I need to be up at 7am in order to get to work so I have to make certain I'm in bed, in the dark, and reading in dim light by 11pm (midnight at the absolute latest) if I hope to fall asleep at a reasonable time for a 7am rise.

It's not ideal, and as you mention, I typically spend much of the morning groggy and slow, but it's preferable to my late teens/early 20s when I followed my natural rhythm and missed way too many classes or came in late to early, low-level jobs.

I even made sure it wasn't some sort of sleep apnea causing problems but I'm clear on that front and I feel fine when I am able to keep my natural schedule. When I have a couple of weeks off I let myself drift later and get a lot more stuff done.

Counterexample: I had to wake up at 6-6:30 am Monday-Friday for over half a year. I never adjusted and was chronically sleep deprived.

Chronotypes can only be bended so much.

Ditto. When I was in a warm climate with no access to air conditioning, I forced myself to follow the early bird schedule for 3 months so that I could hit the daily temperature minimum for my run. Contrary to popular mythology, not only did this fail to turn me into a paragon of virtue in all aspects of life, it robbed me of my highest productivity / highest energy free-time, which typically happens late at night.

Pretty much. I'll wake up because I need to go to work. But I'm always tired :/

Sometimes I wish I could work nights, but I did work from home like that and sleeping during the day is also pretty bad. Especially during winter, not seeing much daylight can mess you up.

Going to sleep at 2-3am and waking up at 10-11am seems like it would be great.

And just as a curiosity, were you taking nap? What about the weekend?

I'm curious as I have a few friends with a similar problem (I.e. struggling to wake up early for work). But they often party hard the week-end and wake up between 11am-3pm, so it's hard to tell if that's the reason it's so hard for them.

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