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Comment by Raphmedia | Hacker News Reader

If you were able to "no longer be a night owl" after changing diet, through exercise or by other changes in your behavior, you were in fact never an actual night owl but simply someone with bad sleeping habits.

You read the same thing whenever there's a discussion on clinical depression. People push their anecdotes about mindset changes but fail to acknowledge they were never clinically depressed in the first place.

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> If you were able to "no longer be a night owl" after changing diet, through exercise or by other changes in your behavior, you were in fact never an actual night owl but simply someone with bad sleeping habits.

Is there an established strict definition of "night owl" that supports this conclusion? I always thought a night owl meant anyone who for whatever reason prefers to stay up late and sleep in, which doesn't really presuppose a genetic cause.

This is part of the issue and one of the causes of the stigma. People who have biological and/or genetic particularities and are unable to follow regular sleep cycles should not be put in the same category as people who have regular circadian rhythm. This article is about biological factors so its safe to assume we are discussing about people with actual circadian disorders and not people who have bad habits.

"Circadian rhythm sleep disorders are characterized by a persistent or recurrent pattern of sleep disturbance (difficulty falling asleep or staying asleep and excessive sleepiness) due to alterations of the circadian timekeeping system and/or misalignment of the endogenous circadian rhythm and the external environment." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3523094/

Key part of this being "persistent or recurrent". In other words, people who have been struggling with this for a long time and have it reoccur after trying out different strategies.

Adding a distinction could help. Perhaps "voluntary night owl" vs "involuntary night owl".

> Key part of this being "persistent or recurrent".

The key part is that it's related to the circadian rhythm and time keeping. That it's persistent and recurrent doesn't in itself distinguish it from other sleep disorders that may cause delayed sleep schedule, such as sleep-onset insomnia, or "bad habits" as you call it.

> Adding a distinction could help. Perhaps "voluntary night owl" vs "involuntary night owl".

If you want to address people affected by e.g. DSPD, and not "night owls" in general, it is perhaps just better to simply address them as such.

I think for it to be a clinical problem, there needs to be a struggle. Like, in my particular case, I enjoy staying up late. The neighbors are quiet, my housemates are generally falling asleep, and I've got an hour or two to myself to knock something out or research something I find interesting. There's no struggle though; I found a job that lets me work an evening shift and I couldn't be happier with the state of things. I feel like if I needed to get up regularly very early in the morning, there would be an adjustment period and then I would equalize on a new normal.

That certainly fits the description of "night owl," but I don't think there's anything clinical about it. My particular manifestation is more of a lifestyle choice, and based on what I observe in the tech field I'm hardly alone in making this choice. Folks who do have a sleeping disorder causing night owl tendencies to manifest (especially when they'd prefer, socially, to rise early) are in a different boat altogether, and I'm... honestly not qualified to classify them. It's an interesting space.

"Anyone who is cured, was never really ill" seems a position full of problems; is that really what you're saying?

Less charitably, it sounds like gatekeeping.

My position is this: if you have a headache, do a Google search for a few minutes, "diagnose" yourself with brain cancer and then you lose the headache after drinking water, you haven't cured the cancer but you've simply fixed your dehydration.

I think the position is different. Symptoms can have many causes. You can undo symptoms due to some causes by doing some things. That means you can cure the condition that's expressed via a symptom by doing the thing. However, that doesn't mean you can cure the symptom by doing the thing.

A personal example is shortness of breath. My friend and I both had that when we were kids. However, I had it because I got bronchitis for a bit. He had it because he was asthmatic. Imagine if I said "Oh, I don't understand what the problem is. All I did was rest and it went away". Well, that won't help my asthmatic friend, will it?

I have a very hard time believing that this stuff has to do with anything other than having the discipline to have a proper sleep schedule. It's possible to adjust your sleep schedule. People do it all the time when they change timezones. I didn't read the article, I'll go read it and update if I change my mind..

Just to present another perspective: https://abc3340.com/news/local/adhd-and-your-circadian-rhyth...

Yes, people can adapt to different timezone. However what's interesting is that night owls will adapt based on their own circadian rhythm. If you are someone with delayed circadian rhythm, you would end up synchronizing to the local timezone but still fall asleep after midnight.

So the solution is to own 24 homes and move one timezone over each month?

An easier solution would be to colonize different planets and send the folks with non-24-hour sleep–wake disorder to planets with orbits that corresponds with their circadian cycle.

That's what I need actually, a 30-hours-a-day planet. So I can live perfectly in a routine like 10-12 hours of sleep and 18-20 hours of being awake.

Sure, you can change timezone, but you usually feel like shit in the process. The idea seem to be that it takes about a day per hour to adjust.

Now the idea (somewhat supported by the article) is that night owls have a natural cycle longer than 24h. It means they are in a constant state of jet lag. The (unrealistic) solution to get in sync with the rest of the population would be to always go west.

Early birds are in the opposite situation. They have a natural cycle shorter than 24h. It is just that for some reason, waking up and going to bed early is not seen as a problem in our society, while the other way is.

You're confusing delayed sleep phase disorder with non 24hr sleep wake disorder.

"You could have a proper sleep schedule if you could hold yourself to a proper sleep schedule" doesn't seem to usefully explain or add anything. Surely the people with poor discipline lack exactly that which they need to build discipline?

Seems like an unpopular opinion, but this is my experience as well. Went from sleeping from 4-10AM to 11PM-5AM over the course of 3 years, without changing time zones. I swore I was a night-owl my whole life, but I definitely fall into the category of early-risers now. Overall happy with the switch; I love having those quiet morning hours to prepare for the rest of my day.

For me, it was about establishing new habits, setting up an environment conducive to sleeping by midnight, and having some external pressures like a work schedule, etc. I've heard this validated by external testimony as well.

Can't say there are no biological factors at play that impact individual inclinations, but it's a bit hard to believe that we're hard-wired for one over the other.

> but it's a bit hard to believe that we're hard-wired for one over the other.

How is this harder to believe than the huge amount of other human characteristics that are directly affected or even effected by the genes?

It really doesn't take long to adapt, but that first week is glorious, awake and energised!

Counterpoint: when I fly back home westwards from the US, that first week is the best. I get up at a normal-person time. I have energy during daylight hours. I sleep at a decent time.

It doesn't last.

i was a night owl almost 90% of my life. then i started working out, eating a bit better... and now i wake up at 6:30~7am every day.

guess what? drinking 6 cans of redbull per day fucks up your sleeping schedule.

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