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Comment by grishka | Hacker News Reader

Oh so it's genetic. Don't know if it's that or something else, but I have this weird problem that it's as if my biological clock day is a bit longer than 24 hours. So if I don't discipline myself, if I go to bed whenever I want and wake up without an alarm, my sleep schedule goes to crap fairly quickly. Even if I do, it still drifts somewhat. At some point it becomes so bad that my waking hours are at night and vice versa. I then have to fix it by forcing myself to stay up all day because I live in a society that sleeps at night after all. Waking up for school and then university was a torture for me, too, but at least that kept my sleep schedule in check somewhat at the price of only ever getting enough sleep on the weekends.

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You just described myself.

> At some point it becomes so bad that my waking hours are at night and vice versa

This. One week I'm sleeping at night, some weeks later I've shifted to sleeping during the day. Then back to nights in a few weeks. Granted, this only happens when on my own -e.g.: working home and alone- otherwise I have to "adapt" by staying up all day, just like you. Not funny.

I was night owl until I had a son. Now I'm falling asleep at 10 PM and enjoy sunrise. Maybe it is not always genetic.

Kind of same here. I start functioning at 7 because the world doesn't care i need these these two hours. I still rarely fall asleep earlier than 12PM, and it takes perhaps a week for the lack of sleep to accumulate so i crash with a migraine at 9 or 8 PM. I love my kid but sleep is a fuck.

There are genetic programs that take off when you get a child, even as a father (not sure what your gender is). It was shown in voles:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6305489/

Fish too:

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-12212-7

I think the normal cycle is actually more like 25 hours (what you get if you live in a cave and don't know what time it is outside), but certain impulses throughout the day push it into the 24 hour frame. Things like light, eating, exercise, habit for example.

It's really common among our types. There's an xkcd about it, naturally: https://xkcd.com/448/

I do wonder, though. Is it that we're different, or is it just that we have a hobby that can easily keep us awake slightly longer than we should be night on night? Maybe more people have the same innate tendency to slip, but they have structures that keep them more on track, like watching scheduled TV etc. It would be interesting to see if there are more cases of bad sleeping patterns now that on-demand TV is more popular.

Most jobs require physical presence, synchronous communication, or both. IT requires neither despite what some managers say, so this is what sets us apart IMO. We're able to work detached from the rest of the society most of the time. There of course are owls among non-IT people, but they never have the freedom to break their sleep schedule like we do.

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