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Comment by Swizec | Hacker News Reader

As a lifelong nightowl, I switched to mornings almost 2 years ago and it’s been great.

Rather than bed at 2am, sleep till 10, I wake up at 5:30am and fall asleep at 10 simply by being tired enough.

The result is that I get better sleep, need less caffeine, have more effective creative time for personal projects, and put my stuff first before the brain is full of work stuff. Oh and the girlfriend says I’m less cranky, more pleasant to be around, and she loves that we go to bed together.

The insight that made it happen: If I can switch to a 9 hour different timezone, why not to waking up early? Body just cares which timezone your circadian rhytm is in, not where you are physically.

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Doesn't work for me, sure, I can drive myself to exhaustion but my day simply doesn't feel right. Morning is usually fine for 2 hours, followed by waves of exhaustion.

There is something about the night that boosts me and fascinates me, it feels like it is my world. And it has been the case since early childhood, even before I can remember according to my parents.

And it is not just about the sun. I love the feeling of being the last one standing, the calm after everyone went to sleep.

I also asked myself the same question about timezones and also DST, why can't I be a morning person when I can naturally adjust to clock change? And I came to the conclusion that there is a lot more than the clock.

> I love the feeling of being the last one standing, the calm after everyone went to sleep.

I love being the first one standing. Get to the office early for that 30-60mins of quiet and peace. Most productive time of my day.

we must have always needed night owl and early riser humans to serve as watchers of our sleeping civilizations for hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years, and our genome is adapted to the need. Do you think so?

Rest of the tribe is asleep, we’re the ones keeping watch while the stars are out, left to our own thoughts.

But then the tribe is on the move and a few need to sleep. I think a mostly synchronised schedule is more likely.

There’s a potential study for someone out there - see if descendants of nomadic tribes have less of a variance in circadian rhythms as opposed to people descending from static tribes.

I think screens just keep us awake as I.T. workers. Unnatural as ever, much more probable in my opinion.

Last theory I heard it's why we have depressed people and asperger/autism: all qualities fitted to perform some edge functionalities (being alone at night, extreme dedication to problem solving,etc.).

Anyway, seriously: just because our genomes stir us to it doesn't mean it's good for the individual.

> There is something about the night that boosts me and fascinates me, it feels like it is my world

This is exactly why I used to stay up all night and why I now wake up early. Same feeling of aloneness and serenity, except the brain is nice and fresh full of your own thoughts instead of everybody else’s crap. Hardest part is staying away from thought pollutants for the first 3 hours of the day.

That is a great way of framing it. My own sleep habits are definitely sustained by my thoughts around night time, relaxation, solitude, etc. I’m not sure why, thanks to your comment, I’m just now realizing that the early morning hours are a good approximation of being awake at 3am.

I’ve found that early mornings are the best when I need to write while late nights are better for programming. It may be that running on deadline-induced adrenaline and caffeine pushes me to turn off my internal editor and write, while I need the low-energy calm of a late night to stay focused on my code and only my code.

Same happens to, and I realized that I am wasting my life procrastinating during working hours and being able to work only during deadline-induced adrenaline, as you formulated it.

Now I am thinking to get some profet help, since others on HN mentioned that this is possible.

This is why I simply sleep during the day: if you wake up and appear after everyone else starts "closing up shop" (around 3-4pm usually) then there is no way for them to fill your head with their "crap"; the secret is that it is absolutely imperative that you go to sleep before they start waking up (which has been a bit hard recently as I am working with someone now who lives on the other coast and wakes up early enough that they can sometimes catch me before I commit to going to sleep at 6 or 7).

Works for me during summer and if I go into the office early. Doesn't work during winter (thought of getting up in the cold is a strong deterrence) and doesn't work if I don't go into the office (the kids hear me and decide to get up early).

At night, I have no distractions and if it's cold I'm already rugged up.

Do you also feel much more creative and confident at this time? Personally I feel like there is a sort of weak hypomania that kicks in right after bedtime if I let it. It can be fairly irresistible, especially when under stress and having trouble sleeping anyway.

I used to think I was the same, but I realised (embarrassingly slowly), that every time I went camping/hiking away from artificial light I would just go to a natural sleep cycle. It was artificial stimulation all along, I wasn't really a night owl.

This - the startup industry is full of late night owls and spike-oriented because they are kept awake by screen light and by the contraption they are mentally building.

And this sounds ridiculously lazy to physical workers, and even to my former self, when I woke up at 4.30 in Australia to cut the first trees at 6:00 ;) That was the only moment of my life where I wasn’t depressed. Maybe this blue light has a very palpable effect on sleep cycles and depression, after all.

Same here, but I can not go camping for a living and I enjoy building things with code after midnight.

I think it has to do with what I would call "social pressure".

During daytime you have to be ready for a phone / doorbell to ring, a package to be delivered, a package by a neighbor who isn't there being brought to you, an e-mail reaching you, which demands attention, et cetera. It's louder outside. In front of your house kids might play, a dog might bark, traffic is heavier, gardening work is going on,... it feels like a world for extroverts and there is the risk of something demanding your immediate attention while you don't feel like it. There is a "societal" pressure on you to be functioning.

And at night, it's the opposite.

You can finally relax, focus, you know nothing of that will happen. You feel safe knowing that people around you are sleeping. No one expects anything from you during these hours, because it's the designated time for sleep. What you do now is outside of anyone's expectations, it's your time, your time alone. No commitments, freedom, and focus.

So I wonder if night owls are predominantly introverts with some form of social anxiety (whether they realize it or not) and I certainly think there's a large overlap there. I'm speculating, and I am sure it's not true for plenty of people, but it certainly describes me.

I feel like that if I get up early enough. (I'm a night owl but my sleep is all over the place.)

Getting at 2-4am, feels great, like there's plenty of time and the hordes are fast asleep, or going to sleep. Finally I have a stretch of time to get some real work done

Getting up at 7am doesn't have any of that benefit. There are too many people around by then.

My experience as well.

Waking up at 0600 instead of 0700 is one wasted sleep.

Waking up 0400 means two peaceful hours before the hordes wake up, and I am awake when they do wake up.

I relate so much to this.

No matter how early (or late) I get up, my day is not done until 3-4am when I had time for myself without the bothering of others/society's expectations.

During the week, I'll sleep 5-6h and start to work, on the weekend I'll pay my sleep debt and sleep 10-11h.

Damn that hit hard, and gave me lots of info to bring up with my therapist. Thanks

I had the same feeling but like much else in life it turned out to be adaptable. I find similar feelings from mornings while the world is asleep.

As someone else mentioned, if I camped without artificial light I would get tired at eight. So I switched my evening routine to only use lamps, created a wind down routine, and now I get sleepy around ten and don’t feel good if I stay up.

Feel free to stick with your schedule. But if it is causing you trouble you are probably more adaptable than you think.

I’m right there with you. I can go to bed early and wake up early, but I straight up feel gross/sick/off until my normal wake up time, don’t feel great the rest of the day, and my peak hours are after 10pm so I’d miss out on them.

It has dominated my life choices and I wish there was a way around it.

It's great that it's working out for you.

I have a pretty annoying sleep disorder called delayed sleep phase disorder (DSPD), diagnosed by multiple clinicians. I have impeccable sleep hygiene, quit caffeine entirely, tried lots of OTC and prescription sleep drugs, light therapy, every kind of sleep supplement you've heard of and probably a few you haven't, and I still revert to going to bed around 5am and waking between noon and 1:30pm.

In the times I maintained a "normal" early-bird schedule, I actually consistently fall into a deep depression.

Our circadian rhythms are pretty powerful regulators -- not just of sleep, but of our hormones and regularity (in the poop sense) too. So misalignment wreaks havoc on our bodies in various ways, even if we're able to get enough sleep.

Anyway for some people they're more flexible and trainable than others. I'm genuinely happy for your case, but I mainly wanted to point out that not everyone will have the same results.

> Anyway for some people they're more flexible and trainable than others. I'm genuinely happy for your case, but I mainly wanted to point out that not everyone will have the same results.

I wonder if this is something I unlocked during my digital nomad days. There was a period of 2 years in my mid 20’s when I moved from Europe to SFBA and back every 2 or 3 months. 9 hours difference each way, just enough to really screw up your rhythms.

What visa did you use in that time?

It is also something that changes as you age

Out of curiosity, did you have any luck at all with the glasses-style light therapy devices like the Luminette? I was having limited success with other forms of light therapy (and the rest of the laundry list of interventions), and some recommendations from an experimental non24 protocol (https://circadiaware.github.io/VLiDACMel-entrainment-therapy...) lead me to finally try the glasses type and it's oddly effective, so far. I'm waking up around 10:30 AM without alarms and without sliding, which has... literally never happened before. I'm just hoping it won't regress to the mean after another month.

I've got n24, the glasses work temporarily for me but i cant see them as a long term solution as the entrainment doesnt last. Dedicating 3-4 hours first thing every morning to staring at a painful light while getting nothing else done (no driving, no computer, no active work or exercise, no going out in public) simply defeats the purpose.

ed: I should caveat that some people will no doubt be able to do some kind of productive activity while wearing them, I've not yet been able to.

This hasn't even the case for me. I have young children, so I can't sleep in anymore... I now wake up between 6am and 7am most days.

I still have trouble going to sleep early. I end up staying up too late, and then am tired most of the day the next day. But I still end up staying up too late the next night, too.

I would think I would adjust my schedule, but I struggle with it.

My biggest bedtime struggle is when I’m too tired to make the decision to stop what I’m doint and go to bed. It takes some discipline but setting a sleep alarm has worked well for me.

10pm, watch goes bzzz -> lie down in bed with lights off. Even if you don’t feel like it, even if you don’t wanna sleep yet, even if it seems dumb. Invariably within 20min at most I’m asleep.

The hard part is accepting the boredom of it all. It’s sleep, you’re supposed to be bored.

I just want to note that reading your last sentence, “It’s sleep, you’re supposed to be bored.“, just felt like a revelation to me.

Idk, sleep has never been boring for me. It's something I consciously look forward to/anticipate(?).

Yeah, that is certainly part of it. Another part is that right after I get the kids to bed, I don’t want to do the dishes and clean up things to get ready for bed, so I take a break. But then I get more tired and want to clean up even less, so I stay up longer. Until I am so tired I sleep clean and go to bed.

Yeah this is me. I think I averaged 5 hours per night this last week.

Exactly. I feel for you. I am in the same boat. With young kids around I was forced to wake up 2 hours earlier than my circadian rhytm would dictate and it's been a nightmare so far.

I need to compensate each day with even more coffee than normally and my head's just spinning by the end of the day because I am too exhausted.

Since my rhytm cannot be forced to the early waking, on average I only sleep 5 hours each night.

It's a constant torture.

When stuck in a similar rut I had to quit caffeine cold turkey for over a month to get my body to settle down and start to acclimate.

Definitely cutting out caffeine at noon helps.

May I suggest: avoid first-thing caffeine; wait until your body has naturally woken up to drink caffiene (or other stimulants). The natural process for waking up (cortisol!) stops when you feel awake. Using caffeine can hasten that moment, but then it doesn't get you any more awake than you would have gotten naturally, and can disrupt your sleep cycle in various ways (for me personally, early caffeine actually makes it harder for me to fall asleep at night; I always thought I was really sensitive to caffeine, but it turns out "...even if I have it first thing in the morning" was more accurately "...only if...").

Idk if this will work for a regular coffee drinker. Part of the coffee first thing in the morning is dealing with the withdrawal from over night.

Caffeine also takes 30-60 minutes to really kick in anyway, meaning your body has to do the waking up on its own either way. The immediate pick-me-up a regular drinker gets from it is a psychological response to the initial low concentration that can start to be felt after 10 or 15 minutes.

Right. For a regular coffee drinker, coffee has stopped being a boost and is merely a requirement to get back to normal energy.

If I had to guess, I would say you are not allocating enough personal time during your day so you are claiming it back in the night. And the lack of sleep is tomorrow’s problem.

I keep telling the kids I need more personal time, but they don’t seem to be listening.

Yes, same here, but longer ago.

One thing that made a huge difference for me was managing light levels. My sleep schedule is much more tied to ambient light than I expected. Now I automatically dim the lights in the evening and bring them up in the morning. That leaves me with a solid 10-6-ish sleep schedule. No alarm clocks, no caffeine, and generally solid energy levels.

These days if I accidentally leave on some manual lights while I'm engaged in something I'll end up staying up way too late. Turns out I'm just not a responsible lightswitch user, so now I try to leave all up to Hue.

Humans have natural sleep preferences.[1] Artificial light can keep almost anyone up later though. Your story sounds like a life long early bird who stopped fighting their biology.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronotype

I think it’s more likely I just don’t need a lot of sleep and it doesn’t matter when that happens.

These days I average 7h/night and I’m ridiculously well rested. In high school and college I could go weeks on 4h/night.

7 hours is the low end of the normal range.

How do you reconcile "it doesn’t matter when" and "The result is that I get better sleep"?

It’s better in that there’s more of it because I spend less time trying to work on personal projects when I’m already tired from dayjob and am more effective.

The actual sleep quality depends more on how much regular exercise I get and eating well than it does on timing. Unless I’m literally jetlagged.

Yeah, these posts drive me nuts because they seem to imply that I should just "push myself and get over it".

No, sorry. I've been "fun-employed" for 3 years and I've experimented with my sleep schedule extensively. If someone wants to tell me they know my biology better than me, fine, but I'll do what keeps me productive and happy.

I actually wondered if I was a night owl... or an even earlier riser. I never really tried it, but at around 5-7pm I'm always drowsy and that's the time of day I feel I could just easily fall asleep (no matter when I wake up).

So I always thought, maybe I need to wake up at 3am and fall asleep at 7pm.

i've gone to bed on maybe 5-10 occasions before my kids actually fall asleep. I read them nighttime books and get sleepy as fuck while reading. Then pop right over to bed around 8pm or 8:10pm and lay there falling asleep by 8:30pm. Usually wake up around 4-5am.

If this was true, then night shift workers would not see lower life expectancy, even controlling for other factors.

I'm not sure it would. There are other factors besides circadian rhythm at play for night workers.

Eg, they probably need money not, or they would be less likely to accept a night shift. Another one is how there is more noise during the day that could affect their sleep, etc...

Same. Night owl forever. Switched when I got a real job.

Realize nearly everyone has bad sleep hygiene and self diagnoses themselves as having a disorder of some sort.

>>fall asleep at 10 simply by being tired enough

You are truly a blessed person and are enjoying one of life's greatest treasures.

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