You don’t have to feel guilty for oversleeping

I used to have such difficulty waking up, but this vibrating alarm clock annoyed me so much, I'd actually end up waking 5mins before to turn it off before it could vibrate...

I did that all through high-school, and now I've gone from a night-owl to a morning person, by training myself to hate that alarm clock.

The one in question: http://assistivetech.net/search/productDisplay.php?product_i...

I've had it for about 10 years I think. Changed the batteries twice. Love this thing to death. (this is not a plug by the way, the link above was whatever came up in Google)

Right now, my normal work day starts with my waking up 5am and I feel like shit most of the day regardless of how long I've been doing it and how disciplined I am about getting to bed.

My natural cycle has me waking up at around 10am and falling asleep at around 2am.

Guess how many days it takes for me to readjust back to my natural cycle when I have some time off and turn off the alarm clock?

The next day. I'll crash early like normal the night before and sleep through an extra 5 hours to wake up almost on the nose at 10am then fall asleep the next night at around 2am.

This happens when traveling overseas too. Within one or two days I'm back on the 2-10 sleep schedule.

And I feel awesome when I'm on that schedule. Even better, I avoid most traffic on those days.

I am not productive whatsoever before 10am. I would rather work 10am-11am until late into the night (2am-3am).

One sleep schedule for everyone? Never going to happen.

I am pretty sure you didn't "sleep off your debt". Sleep debt is something you easily recover right away, just by sleeping until you wake naturally.

What you did was to shift your circadian phase. The circadian phase is usually measured by the nadir point of the core body temperature rhythm [1] (apparently the better measurement is of the "endogenous melatonin rhythm", but it's easier to talk about core body temperature).

Apparently you can force the nadir point forward, but it's relatively hard to move it backwards. You move it forward by delaying sleep, thus accumulating sleep debt that causes you to get up increasignly later. To move it backwards you have to curtail your sleep, thus accumulating sleep debt which needs to be paid at some point.

About your solution: As a fellow night owl, if I just set my sleep cycle free, at it were, then my wakeup time quickly shifts to around 16-17:00, and I sleep 9-10 hours per night. So while your recipe works for you, it's not for everyone.

[1] http://www.cmse.ch/pdf/colloque_14_octobre/6_approche%20trou...

The real value is that the light rises slowly and your body eventually wakes up when it's ready.

So... I have zero clue how or why, but I recently stopped drinking coffee and I'm back to 7 being late for me. It is a good feeling. More than a bit of a shame, though, as I do like the taste of coffee.

There is some truth to what you say. I do feel people who "can't" get up in the morning are slackers. But, those same people are full of energy and ready to party (or whatever) when I'm slinking off to bed, so they regard me as boring, lame and no fun.

These are two solitudes, I'm afraid.

I guarantee you a "night" person came up with that.

If the people who surround you subscribe to either the view you present or the one I did above, it's not a matter of morning or night people, it's a matter of stupid people, and there is no cure.

Once as an experiment I began waking up an hour later every day. I went around the clock, felt great, couldn't stop my body from doing it again, had to work hard to avoid it happening a third time.

If days had 25 hours, I'd be all set.

What you say about light and stimulation sounds convincing, but for me it was about habit. I was in the habit of ignoring my alarm. I was in the habit of getting up when I needed to, and no earlier.

To start off with, I used an alarm app that wouldn't deactivate until my phone touched my credit card, left in the shower. 'Sleep as a Droid', Strong recommend.

I'm usually go to sleep at 1 at the earliest, and I generally sleep like a rock. After coming back from a trip to India last year, I decided to not fight my jetlag and try this "waking up early" thing everyone's always on about.

The waking up early was actually kind of nice (I got to meditate in the mornings; have some time to myself, etc), but I have literally never slept worse in my life. I would wake up almost every night, toss and turn for hours. It was miserable. I wasn't sure what to attribute it to for a long time, but as soon as I drifted back to my 1-2am bedtime, lo and behold, I started sleeping like a rock again.

Correlation does not necessarily imply causation, but seeing how I don't have a job that requires me to be up early, I'm fine with my circadian cycle. Even if it does mean I'm up till 5 occasionally.

Search for recent threads on sleep referencing "first sleep". Seems the electric light has made us forget most sane humans through most of history would sleep at sunset, then wake a few hours later in a relaxed blissful state, then sleep again. Methinks what you experience (not uncommon) is natural behavior, subverted by not realizing you're supposed to go back to sleep after about an hour of some nocturnal activity.

In fact, when I'm on break I tend to gravitate to a very weird sleep schedule where I stay up until about 7am and sleep until 3-5pm.

It seems to stem from the fact that when I go to bed at night around 11pm/midnight, I'm never tired. I just seem to be pulled toward staying up late and sleeping throughout the day. This used to keep me from getting much sleep at all, and it was drastically affecting my day to day mood and life. Melatonin has become a life-saver in this respect, but I worry about if it has any side effects or if I depend on it too much. It does allow me to be tired and fall asleep when I want to, which is WAY nicer than the alternative. I used to just lie in bed for hours before falling asleep. I wasn't on my phone or reading or doing anything productive with this time. I was just agonizingly waiting to get some sleep.

More importantly, you might not give a rats ass what your boss thinks of you. Just because he's "in charge" doesn't mean he doesn't have a large amount of accountability.

I just read him as arguing that you should recognize it as a natural condition rather than a failure of willpower or laziness, and approach it accordingly. That could still mean looking for methods to modify it, e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed_sleep_phase_disorder#Ma...

8-9am start time? That'll be an extra $10K-20K/year. Same for dress code, etc.

And, as far as I can tell, that's how most valley jobs work. heck, I know guys who work for lockheed martin who keep odd schedules. (The guy I know complains that he gets dinged on performance reviews for showing up late, but meh, apparently he's otherwise good enough that they deal with it. We all have priorities.)

I'll wake 4-5 hours after first falling asleep with a period of 2-3 hours of wakefulness before I feel sleepy again. Unfortunately I'll begin to feel sleepy again within an hour or about the time I need to wake up for work. Sometimes I can catch an hour or two of sleep, but it's the hardest sleep to wake from and I feel like I'm dragging the rest of the day.

I personally just tough the day out, though sometimes I take a sleep aid (usually one 25mg dose of Benadryl) before going to bed as a preventative.

New York Times about First and Second Sleep: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/23/opinion/sunday/rethinking-...

Wikpedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segmented_sleep

While the parent article itself is really great and somewhat similar, (a) you have a better explanation of melatonin, and (b) the morning wake-up light you recommend appears (from quickly scanning comments) to be much higher quality than the one the parent article links to.

Seems to me like your situation isn't applicable to everyone. I, for one, fit the OP's description to a tee, and I'm pretty sure there are a handful of people I work with who assume I'm lazy etc. In practice it doesn't end up mattering because I still ship and honor my commitments, and I haven't been fired.

I only feel guilty for "oversleeping" if I promised to be somewhere in the morning and I break that promise. Otherwise it's not oversleeping, it's just sleeping.

- He's had a chronic problem with sleep. - He was able to overcome his problem with sleep by realizing it was not so much a personal or moral fault, but a problem that was being approached the wrong way. - He related the story to a friend who felt that her inability to sleep was a character weakness, and upon realizing that maybe it was just that she had a difference and needed to approach that problem differently was a comfort to her. - He thought maybe that sharing the story with others would help them recognize that maybe their sleep problems weren't a bad character trait like laziness, but instead just an unsolved problem on how to properly let themselves fall asleep.

I disagree with some of his diagnoses, and even question whether the processes he was using actually helped in the way he thought they did. However, I appreciate the premise that "laziness" is not the cause of oversleeping, and approaching it as a solvable problem rather than trying to bruteforce your way to wakefulness and feeling like a failure when it doesn't work is a better solution.

What exactly is "willpower" and why would a lack of it need to be rationalized? "Morning people" don't need to exert a lot of mental effort to be wakeful in the morning. To insinuate that someone needs to "rationalize a lack of willpower" implies that willpower is some sort of moral resource that morally superior people have a higher quantity of. But all that's in there is hormones and neurons and flesh and blood. If they're not interacting properly, and you can organize yourself so they interact better, then it would be foolish not to.

Yep. Unless you've been professionally diagnosed, just pointing to a Wikipedia page and saying "I have that!" as an excuse for your behaviour is not the right thing to do. The same thing happened with Asperger Syndrome; it became the excuse du jour for dickish behaviour. "Oh, I'm not anti-social, I have Aspergers." No, actually, you're just a dick.

Using "I have this-or-that disorder" as an excuse (unless you have been professionally diagnosed) is just that: an excuse. It also belittles those who actually do have the disorder, which could be an even worse side effect.

AKA growth hacking.