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Comment by YokoZar | Hacker News Reader

No, you can't. Well, maybe you personally can. But all the actual science says that willpower, sleep hygiene, and sunlight exposure only move the margins a bit for those with inflexible night-time chronotypes.

Doing everything "right" is not going to make a 5am natural sleeper into a morning person, it's going to make them into a 3am natural sleeper.

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sorry, nothing about our bodies tells me they're this inflexible. i wonder if the "nighttime chronotypes" controlled for things that actually would influence it, like light exposure. regardless, one of the things that worked best for me was rigging a bright light to dawn gradually at a early hour, and cutting off my bright light exposure at a early hour. even if i have a "night chronotype" it's still possible to "trick" it into thinking i'm sleeping at a different time.

tbh i'm a bit suspicious that there are 5am natural sleepers. being basically nocturnal doesn't sound natural or healthy. and given the proven effects of lack of sunlight on mental health that should be fixed regardless of work timing.

i personally hate the phrase "the science" with a passion, but can you link me what you're referencing? cause nothing suggests that they're this "inflexible".

ngl everyone i've talked to who has a "nighttime chronotype" is actually just doomscrolling until 3AM then complaining "oh i can't sleep early". they typically keep bright light on late and use blackout curtains in the morning. no wonder their bodies don't work in a natural, normal circadian rhythm when they do this kinda stuff.

Agreed on caution regarding the phrase "the science." Both social psychology and medicine have been hijacked in recent years by PR firms spinning good sounding submarine articles out of typically underpowered studies. This is a problem. It contributes to the often-discussed replication crisis

> tbh i'm a bit suspicious that there are 5am natural sleepers. being basically nocturnal doesn't sound natural or healthy. and given the proven effects of lack of sunlight on mental health that should be fixed regardless of work timing.

Humans used to get up twice a night to do things like stoke a fire. A completely different rhythm of sleep to today's. Night vs day wasn't as much of a thing in the past. Assuming that everyone today should sleep just the once doesn't work as soon as you look at South America or Africa, either.

And plenty of people deal with variable work schedules often driven by coworkers in different time zones, shifts, on-call, getting up at 4am to catch a flight, some events that go late etc. I guess there are people with highly regimented hours but I can’t say I personally know a lot—but then most of the people I know have to be pretty flexible.

Being suspicious is your prerogative, it doesn't detract from factual data that this exists.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed_sleep_phase_disorder

For all my life I've been afflicted in such a way, judged as being lazy and stuff. I blamed myself a lot. I tried a lot of stuff to "hack" myself into a proper schedule, no-screen, circadian lighting, substance abuse, healthy lifestyle, all sorts of breakfast, intermittent fasting, doing a shit ton of sports to drive myself to exhaustion, nothing worked.

I just can't sleep before ~2AM.

If I ever do it's only when I am severely sleep deprived, and then only get very agitated sleep, wake up at most a couple of hours later and will be mostly sleepless for the remainder of the night.

With age I started to challenge the idea that everyone must operate in the same exact way and maybe there's nothing wrong with me.

Around that time I started to measure the shit out of my sleep using various devices, trying to find root causes, then the baseline of my core circadian rhythm. Over 5 years of accumulated data just point in a single very obvious direction: my body wants to sleep about 7h45 min avg, between 01:45 and 3:00, and get up around 10:00-10:30, and coercing myself out of that for any extended period of time results in sleep deprivation as I then only get at most half of restorative sleep. Of course I can wake up early for a flight or something, but that's just not supposed to happen everyday.

So what's the hack next? Bathing in 6000K artificial bright light at 4AM and closing blinds + pulling curtains at 4PM so that my schedule ends up aligning with what "normal" people do? Sorry but no I'm not going to do that.

Assuming your username means you're in college: I would wait for a few more years before appointing yourself the expert on other peoples sleep physiology. It's easy to think this way in college because people around you will be sleeping poorly or erratically, won't respect sleep or bother with sleep hygiene.

Once everyone is out of college the biological differences become a bit more noticeable. Most people will "fix" their sleeping relatively easily. Others will struggle at first but eventually make it work by adopting strict sleep hygiene and routine. Then a few will find that no amount of sleep hygiene gets them into a good cycle for the standard working day. For some of them the issue will be severe enough to qualify as a clinical disorder like DSPD. DSPD is known to be extremely difficult to treat.

i think that's the key point - i don't disagree that there are "the few" where genuinely nothing works. but then there are always the few with some special case where the standard solution doesn't work, but that doesn't mean anyone can say "the workplace is rigged" against them. i think you're right that there's obv a range of how easy it is, but most people can get into something workable with good hygiene.

Yes, most people can get into something workable and most people do. 9-5 probably wouldn't be the norm if this weren't the case. But if someone is years out of college and still can't sleep or function on the 9-5 schedule then chances are they are one of the few rather than the many.

>but that doesn't mean anyone can say "the workplace is rigged" against them.

You absolutely can. "X is rigged against them" is the social model of disability in a nutshell. Workplaces with rigid early schedules are rigged against people with sleep disorders and late chronotypes the same way buildings with no ramps or elevators are rigged against people in wheelchairs and on crutches.

most wouldn't fall under "inflexible night-time chronotypes" i don't think

Do you have links to the "actual science" btw, I'm curious to read about this

I wonder whether those studies tried alarms.

As a former “night owl” who has largely adjusted to a morningish schedule for approximately a decade… alarms are the devil to me. I only set them as an emergency last resort. Even if I do, I generally try to get to bed early enough I won’t need to rely on them. Alarms and abrupt wake from sleep are immediate and persistent negative rest for me. Even waking too early, checking the time to discover I could rest longer but not by much, is more resting. At least then I get an extra 20 minutes to just quietly ease my brain into the waking world instead of bludgeoning it with blasting sounds I either need to react to immediately or pretend I’m sleeping through.

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