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Comment by Murky3515 | Hacker News Reader

Working at a company and keeping an early morning routine is absolutely brutal to my productivity. I'm a zombie for about 4/5ths of the day, and I start winding up around end of day. Then all night evening and into the night I'm high performing, only to force myself to sleep so I can wake up early again the next day and repeat.

Yes I've tried melatonin, morning full-spectrum light therapy (incl sunlight), nighttime blue light filters, exercise, restricted night diet, alcohol + caffeine + sugar abstinence, and more that I'm sure I forgot about. Morning productivity just doesn't work for me. The world isn't made for night owl workers.

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I'm not a morning person either, although by afternoon I'm fully functional.

I recall when I was younger trying to adopt a "early bird gets the worm" routine. Went to sleep at 9 PM, woke up at 5 AM, drank a coffee, went out in the chill of the morning for a vigorous jog, came back into the apartment, drank another coffee ... then went back to bed and slept like a baby until around 9. Going back on the memory lane, school was a nightmare. With it's start at 8 AM and wake up at 6:30, I mostly spent it in a tormented fuzzy stupor.

Now I kinda accepted there's literally nothing I can do to wake up my brain "on the double". Thanks God for WFH, sleep till 9, start work at 10, I'm almost functional. By noon it's all engines running.

I have had similar internal clock issues as you

Please try adding two (or potentially three) more supplements:

- 10g of glycine before bedtime

- 5g of creatine per day with a meal

These two along with sufficient magnesium have eliminated my sleep related problems I struggled with for an extended time (most of my life, in fact)

What issues did these solve for you? My issue is waking up repeatedly in the night. I remember magnesium being helpful for this though.

Why the Creatine? What does the Glycine do?

It didn’t completely solve it for me, but 10,000 IU of Viyamin D3 early in the morning and making sure I get >100gr of protein per day made a huge difference for me after nothing else did (have tried most on your list).

Being a vegetarian, the 100gr of protein doesn’t happen on its own, the way it does for many carnivores. I have to pay attention to it, or I end up with 30-50 which isn’t sufficient.

> the way it does for many carnivores

If you mean actual carnivores (mostly eat meat, with some other animal products - eggs, dairy...), that may be right. For most people who are omnivorous, >100g protein per day is not as easy to get, especially since most people's meals are carb-heavy.

It doesn't help that general guidance seems float around 45-55g per day.

> On average, men should eat 55g and women 45g of protein daily. https://www.bbc.co.uk/food/articles/should_you_worry_about_h...

> Most adults need around 0.75g of protein per kilo of body weight per day (for the average woman, this is 45g, or 55g for men). https://www.bhf.org.uk/informationsupport/heart-matters-maga...

Remote work during Covid was so nice because you could sleep at natural times and not get judged for it.

Smoke some weed in the evening and go to bed early.

Take with a grain of salt, but I've read that weed can really affect sleep quality. Like Benadryl, you fall asleep but don't really rest.

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