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Comment by sph | Hacker News Reader

I went 30+ years telling myself I am a night owl, with delayed sleep phase, unable to wake up before 11, finding my groove only in the late night.

Then one day based off someone's comment I bought blackout blinds for my bedroom, the kind you can't even see your hands in front of your face. Overnight I became a morning person. I haven't been able to sleep past 7:30am in almost a decade. My mornings are sacred now.

Unfortunately, small time slots just don't work for me. It's all about making the time weird ideas pop into my head coincide with the time I can sit down and engage with them fully. This is why I believe it's crucial not to waste that precious time with distractions.

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You say your mornings are sacred now; before you made the change did you treat your nights as sacred? Do you think you were always a "morning person", but didn't/couldn't realize it?

Not specific to your comment here, but speaking more generally: I always found it sort of interesting how "morning people" are typically thought of as more productive, less lazy, etc. than "night people". If you say you wake up every morning at 5am people are impressed and assume you are highly motivated, but if you tell people you go to bed at 3am every day people assume you're lazy and maybe depressed. Yet everyone has roughly the same amount of waking hours -- the only thing that should matter is what you're doing with them, not when you have them.

> You say your mornings are sacred now; before you made the change did you treat your nights as sacred? Do you think you were always a "morning person", but didn't/couldn't realize it?

Yes. I've always loved morning time, despite waking up around 11 until my early 30s. I've been told I was lazy, lost a potential job offer because I was always late for work, until one day magically I became one of the "normal" ones :-)

I don't believe night owls to be lazy, variety is the spice of life, but I believe a percentage of them simply have a messed up sleep schedule and no idea how to fix it.

How do you wake up when it's dark at that 7:30? Do you have something that pulls them with sunrise?

For me waking up when it's very dark feels much worse than getting to sleep with a bit of light.

Good question, waking up in the dark is awful, so I bought myself a silent light alarm. Now I can wake up more or less at the same time no matter how late I go to bed, alarm or not.

i'm confused to how this is different to waking up to the sunrise that is also (almost) at the same time every day?

I don't know where you live but even at my latitude it most definitely is not "at almost the same time every day."

If I woke up with the sunrise in winter I'd be waking up 2 hours later than in the summer (3, really, because of daylight saving time).

The time doesn't change by a lot every day, sure, but that's not relevant to things like transportation or work schedules.

yeah i just meant like it's mostly the same time between days, but shifts heavily seasonally. I suppose one season might be worse for you than another based on your internal circadian clock

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