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Comment by ArchOversight | Hacker News Reader

> This shift reverses at adulthood. The biological nature of this daily rhythm means that sending a teenager to bed earlier won’t necessarily mean they fall asleep earlier.

No, this shift does not reverse in adulthood for some people... I am in my 30's and I still fall asleep midnight to 1 AM, and wake up "late" by most adult standards at around 8/9 AM.

I can not shift my sleep schedule to earlier, I've tried many times, it's just not how I am wired.

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Same. I tried having a bed time routine, eating/drinking at certain times, reading before bed, no phone, etc. Nothing makes a difference. I get sleepy around midnight and wake up around 8 - 9 am.

All I wanted to do growing up was sleep. We were the first ones on the bus at 6:30am every weekday, and then my parents dragged us to some kind of sport extracurricular on Saturday mornings and church on Sunday. I would have been so much easier to deal with if I'd just had a chance to sleep.

If you are anything like me, what you are able to do is driven by what you have to do :)

I used to be a developer/dev manager and in that life, if you booked a 9 or even 9:30 am meeting with me, the odds of me being in by then were low. I loved sleeping in.

Then I moved to the business side and my life was that quite often, I had to be at the airport say 7am. So now there was a REASON to move my life to an earlier schedule and it was doable.

Now we have little kids, who get up super early so there's yet another pull towards an earlier start to the day, and I am able to do it fine.

If there was no pull, I'd probably sleep till 10 but I don't think I'd be happier or more productive.

I used to have to be in the office by 8 AM. That was the absolute worst thing for me ever. I would be groggy and tired till around 11/12 and only then would my brain engage. Even though I was tired all day, I could not fall asleep before midnight or 1 AM.

Trying to shift my sleep schedule for a "REASON" does not work. In fact I used to be late so often that my boss let me have an exception and work slightly shifted hours, this gave him more of my productivity.

I just love how half of the responses to you refuse to accept that chronotype is a physical attribute just as real as height or metabolism. I see a "just push through it" and a "stop drinking caffeine" so far, and those are emblematic of how people without extremely shifted chronotypes absolutely will not try to understand the health and social costs to people living outside of their enforced norm.

do you consume any caffeine after 12:00 noon? Caffeine's half life is 6 hours. So if you consume at 3pm, you still have 1/2 that caffeine in your body at 9 pm. 1/4 of it at 3am.

I have similar sleeping habits, and I generally have caffeine only at breakfast.

I stop drinking caffeine at 5pm and I can fall asleep at 10pm or 11pm. Sometimes it feels like if I don’t drink enough caffeine during the day I can’t fall asleep.

Do you have ADHD? For me caffeine helps calm my mind, and I can fall asleep having had caffeine without any issues.

I'm in the exact same boat as the commenter you're responding to: I'm in my 40s, been a night owl my whole life. I very, very rarely fall asleep before 1am, despite decades of trying. I usually (but not even always) have a cup of coffee when I get up in the morning, but that's it.

Why is it so difficult to imagine that people have different sleep schedules? Like, we do not blink at the thought that, say, height exists on a bell curve. Why wouldn't a circadian rhythm?

God save me from the early-riser moralists.

No morals implied here. I had the same pattern as you until I learned about sleep health from Matt Walker. There are very specific things you can do to change sleep habits, but only if you want to.

Of tremendous importance to me was learning that not all sleep is of the same “quality”, and that quality affects you the next day. You can learn how to improve sleep quality. Matt Walker is a good start in case your interested. Andrew Huberman has some episodes on it, too, as does Rhonda Patrick.

If you’re happy with 1AM then by all means, don’t change. I wasn’t happy with how I felt during waking hours. I was getting enough sleep, but it was low quality.

No. One cup of coffee at around 9:30 AM after I wake up, except on very rare occasions.

That being said, when I used to be on aderall for my ADHD I would often take my second dose of the day right before going to bed, as it would help me calm my brain down and fall asleep.

Caffeine does not affect me or my sleep cycles, it does help me focus though by quieting my mind down, and on the weekends I enjoy drinking a cup of coffee and going back to sleep for 30 - 90 minutes of deep relaxing sleep.

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