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Wild guess: you started waking up a more consistent time each day (less sleeping in on weekends). This might have been a result of getting more sleep on weekdays and therefore not feeling like you need to sleep in, or of less late night socializing.

As someone who has run the full gamut of sleep schedules over different years of my life, I've found by FAR (orders of magnitude) the most influential factor in how I feel in the morning is the consistency of my wake-up time. The only factor that can sometimes eclipse it is extended periods of sleep deprivation (eg, 1-2 weeks of averaging 4 hours per night).

If you want to try this, I highly recommend an alarm app for Android called Talalarmo - https://f-droid.org/app/trikita.talalarmo

Yes, i think it is true and it makes a whole lot of sense too

I had the sleep schedule you describe until my first child. Now, I'm opportunistic. Generally I get up at 7 or so, because a certain someone makes sure no-one sleeps past that. It's fine, now. But at rare times the little one is away with grandparents, and then the sleep rhythm rapidly returns to night-owl mode.

But my point is, I think maybe parents are a bit unsympathetic to the optimal sleep patterns of their children because those same children have spent years teaching the parents that sleep is a luxury you have limited access to.

I had a split schedule in 7th and 8th grade, from 11:30am to 5 pm. Best time of my childhood education in terms of awakeness and alertness. High school was the opposite, horrible, had to be on the bus by 6:45am. It was dark and raining/snowing sometimes, we hid under parapets at nearby houses sometimes for shelter. I remember cursing the Board of Education during those times, they didnt have to suffer through the stupidity of their decisions.

Yes, I vividly remember the awful feeling when it was dark, cold, wet and on the way to school half asleep. We too had 2 shifts for school, the first 4 grades were in the morning and then it would alternate every other grade in the morning or evening. I liked when I had school in the second part of the day but in the winter I had a nearly similar experience returning home, at about 6 or 7 it was already dark, cold and snowy. And this schedule would eat out the whole day.

When I went to Waterloo, most of the math classes were scheduled around 8:30 - 10 while most of the computer science classes were scheduled in the afternoon.

I'm pretty sure my major would be different if I was a morning person.

We know that math professors see the blank looks and droopy eyelids in their 8 AM and 9 AM classes. Why do they schedule those classes?

Because most professors are scheduling classes for THEIR convenience, not the students. You don't typically keep your professorship and grow in an academic career by teaching students. They're scheduling classes in a way that maximises productive time for them (pitching sponsors, supervising research etc)

While many profs would probably do this if they could, the registrar usually makes the schedule.

You got older. It is pretty well established that a) people are different but b) teenagers on average don't wake up early as well as adults. e.g https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/06/170621140458.h...

Firefox just suggested the following article to me a minute ago, actually...

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/brain-scans-reveal-why-ni...

> a one sized solution does both good and bad

Not necessarily. Who says morning people have a problem with later school start times?

They can still get up earlier if they like and use those hours for something productive (e.g. doing homework in the morning vs. in the evening / at night)

I was the same as you until about 26-27. I could operate on nearly no sleep. As a teenager and throughout my twenties i didn't really like sleeping. I'd stay up past 12 most nights and wake up around 7 as a teenager and closer to 5 or 6 from about 21 until 27-28 or so. Then I just started appreciating sleep. I started going to bed around 9:30 or 10, feeling like shit if I get less than 8 hours consistently for some time in a row and just generally preferring consistency and routine for my sleep schedule, where as before I didn't really care or think much about it.

Yes, thats sign of maturing and doing whats obviously best for our bodies and implicitly ourselves. I know people who never learned this and somehow you can even tell by looking at them, their bodies always look more aged

One year I had to take a class before school and by winter it started before sunup and it was horrible.

On a handful of occasions I had a moment while washing my hair where I could not recall the alarm going off. I'm not sure anything aggravates a night owl more than discovering that they have accidentally gotten up early... except discovering you'd gotten up four hours early.

And then barely getting to sleep in because fixing wet bedhead takes almost as long as taking a shower.

I did not sign up for the follow-on class.

How has your diet changed over the years? I'd be curious to know if different foods and eating schedules might affect circadian rhythm.

They do and there is quite a bit of research on it. Food is a major zeitgeber.

My partner is a vegetarian and a good cook so we don't serve meat at home. Consequentially I eat less meat now; I eat less meat also because the meat quality isn't very good unless you go to a very good restaurant and that is not 100% guaranteed either. I've got a friend who ran a restaurant business and was shocked to learn the price of the chicken was suspiciously low. After doing some digging I realized what most meat we eat, how it is produced, what animals are fed and all the antibiotics they're fed are quite bad for us. I frankly lost my appetite for meat. I started eating more fish instead, not a very good decision either but nonetheless better imho. I still eat meat but not too often, not sure if I'll ever become a fulltime vegetarian.

Second, I stopped drinking alcohol excessively and completely stopped eating sugary drinks or sugary things in general. Rarely whenever I eat something sugary, because I'm no longer used to it, it makes me very nauseous.

> and all the antibiotics they're fed

To nitpick on this one, the societal problem isn't the antibiotics, per se... it's that antibiotics get used to paper over an incredibly unhealthy and unclean environment, and that in doing they so encourage the rise of 'superbug' antibiotic-resistant diseases.

But also the mass over consumption of meat isn't very normal either, plenty of countries are vegetarian, take for example parts of India for generations; to me at least, the current practices in our modern meat factories kill my appetite. I do still consume some animal products but always try to get those from farmers, and for one it's noticeably tasting better.

As someone who I think excuses his own laziness with 'being a night owl', I appreciate your mentioning of recently changing. I'm an aspiring morning person.

Given the downvotes, perhaps it wasn't clear I was referring to myself.