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Comment by elynde | Hacker News Reader

Bedtime procrastination is my kryptonite. Every other habit like working hard, exercising, eating right I do well at but can't fix this.

I've battled with it my whole life. Even as a toddler I would stay up late reading in secret. There is just something about the stillness when everyone else is asleep where I feel like my brain can finally wind down/process the day/kick back and relax.

Anyone else struggled so badly and fixed it? How?

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I consider it a feature, not a bug.

Also read in the dark with a flashlight when I was a kid. I'm writing this near midnight with my wife and our dog soundly asleep. I'll be around for an hour or two until I switch off to sleep myself. All I hear is the faint hum of my laptop fan and the car lights that pass by on the road in distance. Just perfect.

Maybe fix it by accepting it and yourself.

I love getting up early for the same reason. Everyone is asleep everything is quiet and I can just relax in a way I can’t when people are around.

If you can, try to arrange your morning routine to give you some extra time to sleep and enjoy the quality time at night.

To second this- I have been an extreme night owl my entire life. Trying to sync my sleep/wake to an early morning schedule was to live a miserable life of permanent jetlag. It wasn't thriving; it was barely surviving, with no mental juice left for love or hobbies.

I finally had a health event that was a real come-to-Jesus moment about 10 years ago. As part of dealing with it, I learned to accept my nature as being what it is.

And now, 10 years on, my life has never been better. That doesn't mean easy or without issue, but I'm finally living as myself. And that makes all the difference.

what do you mean by "accepting"? To me accepting means being a night owl and not being bothered by it or its social repercussions. sorry, mixed with the note about the health event, it sounds like you sleep nights now, but that clashes in my mind with "living as myself" and "accepting". not trying to say it is contradicting, just that I did not fully understand it.

By accepting, I mean stop trying to force myself to be a morning person. This wasn't a trivial thing- the job I had paid well, and people depended on me. But I now do different work, that fits my natural rhythms.

I bedtime procrastinated pretty badly.

CBT-I helped a lot. It forces you to skip to a schedule. The schedule is completely set around the time that you want to get up. Or at least it forced me to; I was paying $300/mo for the privilege!

Quitting Reddit helped a lot too. I wouldn't have done this had their leadership team decided to go hostile with their API access, but they did, so i did. It's been a great time-regainer. I didn't realize until after I left (and using this site more) that Reddit was designed to be a textual version of the same hooks that keep people glued to social media, which I quit almost entirely years back for the same reason.

(New Reddit does infinite scroll by default, with no way of turning it off, along with boosting chats, de-emphasizing multireddits in favor of subscribed reddits, tweaks their front page to maximize engagement, rewards short, quippy posts regardless of substance, and more. I still browse Reddit through Google for finding local restaurants and things to do, but I'm enjoying that while I can until I have to trudge through TripAdvisor or city-data.)

These days, I fall asleep within 15 mins of hitting the bed and wake up between 0530-0700 without an alarm feeling refreshed on most days.

Didn’t realize CBT-I was also for bedtime procrastination (vs just insomnia). Would love to hear more about this.

I can't say I've struggled with it--I've leaned into it and accepted it as how I get my own time. The quality of that time however is low since it comes at the end of the day. Sometimes I'll have a large meal, short but deep nap, then have quality late night time. The 'fix' seems to have come from being able to get by on fewer hours of sleep as I get older. Other times like around DST change, I'm able to get time at the beginning of the day, which if I plan or think of something doesn't merely go sleeping in while half-awake.

If it can fit into your schedule try the flavor of biphasic sleep where you go to bed with everyone (or even a little early) then wake up 4 hours later for 2 hours or so max, then sleep another 4. It will give you your alone time, with a motivator to get to bed earlier as that is now a prerequisite. It has been proposed that this is closer to the "natural" human sleep cycle that people used before ubiquitous artificial light.

For me it’s all about removing the tempting things I would normally waste time with. Go camping and don’t take a phone or book or kindle. Buy night two I’m asleep before my head hits the pillow!

So at home I try to do the same. Before reaching for the laptop or phone I ask myself what I’m going to do with it, and if the answer Is waste time, I try very hard not to pick it up (doing something else makes that easier - load the dishwasher, get lunch ready for tomorrow, etc)

On this topic, camping is "cheating", IMO. I naturally want to wake up somewhere around 10AM. (I'm sure I've got something like "delayed phase sleep syndrome", but don't see the point of medicalizing/externalizing it rather than just knowing myself and mitigating the harm from society). But stick me in a tent outdoors and it's a few short days until I'm waking up with the sun, or even the birds.

Go to bed with the sun at home, that will help you wake up with the sun.

I'm sure light has much to do with it, but that's a poor proposition at this time of year in the northern hemisphere. And frankly often times when it starts to get dark is when I actually start to feel fully awake.

Of course the caffeine dependence I've built up lately doesn't help that. It's one hell of a high interest loan, and there's never a good time to pay it off.

I live in the Yukon, I’ve never felt better than when I go to bed with the sun, even in winter.

When your body sleeps for 14+ hours, it’s telling you something

I’ve played with eliminating nighttime lighting (aside from candles) and after-dark screens period, and can confirm, it puts one’s “clock” closer to where it should be. Which shouldn’t be surprising.

It is hard to keep up. If I were dictator of the world I’d experiment with hibernating the whole economy a bit in the Winter. Three months or so of 5-6 hour workdays.

Well I wouldn't have guessed you are in one place!

That's completely different from my experience with myself. I can go to bed hours early, still fall asleep pretty quickly, and essentially just sleep through to the waking time of my latent schedule. Contrast with staying up an extra few hours will cause my waking time to move forward about 20-30 minutes. The main way I can move my schedule earlier is to make myself get up earlier, and then stop myself from taking a nap in the middle of the day.

That's of course modulo artificial light and being indoors. I haven't really tried to reproduce the effect of camping indoors, but I think the exposure, temperature change, and nature's activities contribute more than the light level. Indoors, I can generally continue sleeping just fine with direct sun on my eyelids.

When I lived in Montana, I definitely slept more hours in the winter. Kind of enjoyed it, too. Those long evenings of nothing much but staring in to the fire (house was heated with a Franklin stove) were good for the soul.

Some life lessons from a fellow night owl. Don't worry about it! Don't schedule important meetings at 8 am! If you need to become a regular at some place at 8 am, then they only solution for a night owl, is to get up before 6; 5:30 for example - then you are foolling your body into thinking you're still getting up at night.

I've struggled since that age as well. I have good periods and bad periods, but I still can't really get to sleep unless I've had an hour of "quiet house" time.

I did the same thing, BTW. I'd stay up and read, complete school workbooks ahead of time, etc.

Everyone telling me to accept it, I wish I could. Unfortunately the kids gotta get up and go to school!

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