How to rise early and why successful people do it | Hacker News Reader

How to rise early and why successful people do it

ericosiu.com

23 pointsmaclover27 comments

This is just silly. You get the same amount of hours in a day regardless of whether you wake up early or stay up late. Other than missing out on the sunrise, none of his arguments hold much water.

There's no reason you can't exercise in the evening. In fact, gyms are typically busiest between 4-7 pm so clearly a lot of people find time to exercise after work. And there's no reason you can't be just as productive at night as you can in the morning. To follow the same name dropping technique he uses, famous night owls include President Obama, Charles Darwin, Adolf Hitler, Winston Churchill, James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Keith Richards and Elvis Presley. And finally, you definitely don't need to get up at 5 in the morning to make a healthy breakfast smoothie that only takes 5-10 minutes to make. Just wake up 5-10 minutes earlier if you're really that pressed for time.

From my personal experience, being a night owl is easier on the body. Waking up early is great until you decide you want a social life that extends past your normal bedtime of 9 pm. Then your whole schedule gets out of whack and you struggle to make up for the sleep debt.

"Tis night: now only do all songs of the loving ones awake. And my soul also is the song of a loving one." - Nietzsche

As Yakko Warner of the animaniacs put it "Early to rise and early to bed…Makes a man healthy, but socially dead"

I must be getting old. I had to look up Animaniacs.

This was an 80s cartoon.

My impression is the big virtue of getting up early is nobody is around. It's time for solo thought. There's no waiting for equipment at the gym, if it's open early. And it's possibly to plan the day.

It's not for everyone. This could also be done after everyone else goes to bed, for those so inclined.

I like the idea and I've done it successfully for a couple of months, but my conclusion is that you can't fight your tendencies. I simply got a lot more done by staying up late than by getting up early.

Also, I think its a little facetious to namedrop early risers without doing research into similarly successful/creative people who stay up late.

A common trait among type A early risers is that they assume that's the only way to be a productive member of polite society.

I have this experience too. In my experience Early Risers tend to be suspicious of night owls, but I think it might be a deeper issue of personalities. I found this link that says early risers tend to be conscientious where night owls are more of the creative types and it makes sense that two of those kinds of personalities might not necessarily get along well ... at least initially

Here's the link http://www.forbes.com/pictures/lmj45hjhj/more-optimistic/ (forgive me for not providing something more substantial)

I've lived both ways (regular rising times that have varied from 4:30 am to 12 pm), but I'm a natural night owl. I find the somnic cultural fascism of early birds obnoxious.

I don't like that I'm basically a down the line stereotype of night owls excepting some business related stuff.

The Morning Fascists rule the world, however. While we're sleeping, they are out there making noise and rules for everybody else. I was told that as I got older, I would prefer rising early. Now that I've reached that age, I can say that, no, I don't prefer rising early. I get much more done at night.

Indeed. "They have revealed that night owls are generally brighter and wealthier than those able to get up early in the morning." Source:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2298354/Early...

While I don't disagree The correlation between a higher income and having a more flexible schedule to allow you to keep to the night-owl schedule is easily explained on the job traits front rather than the personal traits front.

A number of years ago I had a business-related email exchange with Steve Jobs at 3:00AM. I was coding, which I tend to prefer doing during quiet late night periods. I sure doubt he was waking up at that time. I'd love to read a study on this but I'd be surprised if there isn't a significant percentage of entrepreneurs who function better on a schedule that might be alien to "normal" people.

See, I know I get more done late at night than morning. I've tried waking early consistently and find that I'm getting less done. I assume that is partially because the quality of my sleep declines.

Then again, I was always a night person - my parents used to wake me for Santa and my poor mother fought with me through school to get me up - and try to make me go to bed.

It is much easier to simply accept I'm a night person.

Step 2: never have those 'fire drills' at work so you can leave at 5 every day, all the time, so you can get to bed at a decent hour and still get your 6-9 hours of sleep.

It feels like every time I come in early to work, and yeah, my morning is more productive, something happens and the world goes crazy that afternoon, forcing me to stay until 7 or 8 or 9pm, because things went bad and it has to be fixed right now.

I may be a bit jaded.

I love seeing the sky go from dark to light. Nice way to end a night of productivity.

It's quite likely that Ben Franklin had a mutated gene that caused familial advanced sleep-phase syndrome, and it's silly to try to shoehorn yourself into a sleeping pattern that isn't right for you. Early risers seem to have a genetic predisposition, just as do those few people who need less sleep than most[1]. Chances are if you try to force yourself to be an early riser you're likely to end up more tired, less productive, and more prone to mistakes for absolutely no benefit other than a sunrise. (On a side note you don't need to be an early riser to see the sunrise. I see the sun rise every day and it's my cue to go to sleep.)

The rest of this article isn't worth refuting because the arguments are so obviously flawed or subjective.

Also, just because Franklin said something doesn't make it correct.

[1] http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2009/08/13-02.html

If you're getting up at 5 and getting 8-9 hours of sleep a night it means being asleep by 8-9 pm (i.e. going to bed a bit earlier than that). That's just not very realistic in a lot of households, unless you can convince everyone to do it.

I've always been a "morning person."

From my childhood days of waking up before the sun in order to check the surf conditions from our living room window, to military service, to my present tendencies towards waking up at 4 am in order to be more in sync with my online counterparts, I've always enjoyed waking up early.

I don't have any secrets as to how I maintain my early-bird ways, other than "you just have to want it."

I was in the military and I couldn't stand getting up early. At one point, I was consuming close to a dozen cups of coffee (including the NoDoze) per day to stay awake and try to be productive, in my 20's. It didn't work well and I have stomach problems as a result.

My peak is 2:30 PM to midnight. On days when my company lets me work from home, that works out great. So a couple days a week I get stuff done, the other three days I'm drinking 4 cups of coffee to deal with getting in at a reasonable hour (fortunately they aren't too bad about this) and to deal with morning and afternoon traffic.

I have never been a coffee drinker, nor a tobacco smoker. I do, however, drink caffeine laden soft drinks, but I tend to not drink caffeinated beverages after sundown.

I often work on projects for 36, or more, hours at a time, but I do see a reduction in productivity when pushing myself to the limits, and often wonder at the things I've done while sleep deprived, in pride as well as shame.

There's a saying about habits which goes something like the following:

    If you want to make something a habit make sure to repeat that act every day for two weeks, after which the act will become habitual.

I don't draw the curtains so the morning light wakes me up. Unfortunately I live in a place that does not have daylight savings (Queensland, Australia), so the times differ. But I can work around that.

How is it better than sleeping late at night? The atmosphere is serene, you don't get disturbed, and the sky doesn't turn lighter... which to me is an indication that chaos is going to begin now.

My own experience agrees. Making the switch to waking up really early increased my productivity and mood significantly. I found that melatonin pills (in the short term) and the Sleep Cycle app (despite the iffy science behind it) worked very well in adjusting and maintaining my sleep schedule. Additionally, I programmed the AC to kick in about 30 minutes before I wake up so it gets cold and hard for me to stay sleeping.

It also helps to have alarm clocks strategically placed in places hard to reach while your eyes are closed.

That all sounds extremely unnatural, and uncomfortable. What's I'd be far more interested in is how to naturally change the sleep cycle to be "early to bed, early to rise", and waking naturally rested, rather than the more typical "stay up 'till dawn, sleep 'till lunchtime" routine, with enforced scattered alarms to get up earlier, with resulting sleep deprivation.

I should have been more clear - those more extreme measures were only to deal with the initial change in sleep cycle from going to bed at 4 am to going to bed at 9-10 pm. It took me about a week to adjust and wasn't all that bad. Otherwise you can try shifting an 45 minutes a day (which seems to be the ideal time) until you're at where you want to be.

Now I just use Sleep Cycle.

>Rising Early: Why Successful People Do It & How You Can Too

Define "successful". Made lots of money? Happy? With a quality creative output?

And why should I care that some -- surely not all -- successful people do it? Correlation does not imply causation, and I've known many succesful people in all of the above categories to know that there's hardly correlation either.

Perhaps some business and self-improvement junkies wake up at 5 or even 4, but I'd hardly call those successful.

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