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Comment by bartread | Hacker News Reader

I'm in my 40s. Same.

This morning I had to get up at 0615 for the second morning in succession due to a couple of appointments. This is absolutely not normal for me and it's completely painful. Obviously sometimes it has to happen, and that's OK, but it comes at a cost.

People will say, "just go to bed earlier", but actually that doesn't really work because unless I go to bed hours after I've eaten I don't sleep and tend to get heartburn. Case in point, last night: got home at about 1915, ate dinner just after 2000, went to bed at 2200 (because I had to get up early this morning), slept like absolute crap.

Sorry (not sorry), but I can't live like this. I need a good 8 hours a night every night, and that means going to bed at 2300 - 0000 and getting up at 0700 or, ideally, 0800. I work much better that way, and am much happier with it. More than that, I'm not falling asleep by lunchtime.

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It's funny that you say you are not an early bird yet for me going to bed at 2300 - 0000 and getting up at 0700 or 0800 is still early.

I consider myself a night owl and if I ever get to bed before midnight I consider this early. I still have to wake up between 0730 and 0800 (because life/obligations) and that is why I am like a zombie half the day.

But no matter how tired I might be through the day, at night something happens and I feel full of energy.

Same here. It seems that I don't have just one tank for "energy", but two, and the second one unlocks somewhen between 20:00 and 23:00. More than that, no matter what time I go to sleep, I can't possibly get up on my own before ~10:00. This does not happen, period.

Between moving out of my parents' house and moving in with my wife, I had some years to do experiments on this, and there's one consistent result: whenever I'm not forced to wake up at specific time (say, by threat of getting fired, or just because I asked someone to keep calling me to make sure I got up), my sleeping pattern always settles around going to bed ~04:00 and waking up ~11:00. Whenever the external pressure stops, I automatically revert to that mode in two or three days.

It would all be fine, except this sleep mode is thoroughly incompatible with normal people and the society at large :/.

I'm very similar to you. Left to my own schedule, I will go to bed around 2-3am and wake up about 10am. Unfortunately, I have to be out of bed around 6:30am for work, but no matter how hard I try or how tired I was during the day, when it's the evening my brain wakes up and I just cant get to sleep before 12-1am. The only thing that really helps is cannabis, but as I got older cannabis started giving me anxiety really bad.

It would be cool to research those ideal times. It is obvious that if one sticks to the hard coded ideal rest/wake times one is much more energetic, productive and more focused but I'm curious how big the difference is. Around 11 am I can wake up and cycle 200 km or run a marathon starting immediately. If you ask me kindly to run 100 meters around 6 am your life is probably in danger.

That second tank is caused by light at night.

In my opinion, most people who say they are night owls are just light sensitive.

If we didn't have so much light in our environment at night we would be bored to sleep. On top of this, there is also a physiological effect from light. It suppresses melatonin and makes you feel newly awake to be in anything above the intensity of candlelight.

Of course there are social elements to staying up late and partying. But unless you are a party animal (and it's great if you are, the world needs more happy socialization) it's hard to believe that this causes you to stay up late every night.

> That second tank is caused by light at night.

I don't know. If anything, maybe not total light, but some kind of inside/outside delta?

I am light sensitive. I tolerate only two states: very dark and very bright. The average underlit indoors people keep during the day, when there's not that much sunlight coming in, but enough for them to keep the lights off - those shut me down very quickly.

I normally thought of it in terms of not enough light, but I just realized it's not exactly it. There are cases when, during the day, the total of sunlight + artificial light in the room is squarely in the underlit, sleep-inducing zone, but only few hours later, once it's dark outside, the same amount of artificial light is enough for my mind to consider the room bright enough.

Still, the "second tank" effect doesn't feel light-related. It's fast-acting - one moment I'm tired out of my mind, the next one I realize someone just plugged me up to a fresh battery - and the change occurs without any obvious prompt like changing locations or light levels.

As for social element, I'm not a party animal. But I am someone who suffers from something like 報復性熬夜 - "revenge bedtime procrastination". The late-night ours, after everyone around me is asleep and couldn't possibly bother me anymore, are the only time I feel I can finally unwind, relax, and recover. I've had this for a long time, but I'm fairly certain it's a downstream effect - that is, my difficulty getting up and extra energy kicking it after dark were something I've had for much, much longer.

I liked this phrase "revenge bedtime procrastination". In my case there is often this parameter that I do not want the day to end, I feel I did not accomplish enough during the day or that I did not have enough "me" time and I spend the nights in front of my PC or watching a movie/series.

I've been able to make this sleeping pattern work by being in Asia while working with American companies. I reserve 11pm to 3am for meetings/sync with other employees, I work from home and do any work that requires deep concentration in the late afternoon and I reserve lunch plus early afternoon to play with my son.

Luckily my partner is also a night owl and if she weren't forced to wake up early for work would go to sleep around 2-3am. So, when we're on holiday, we're in sync.

Oh, it's early for me too, but I can at least function well, and without becoming incredibly short tempered and frustrated, on a 0000 - 0800 sleep pattern. Left to my own devices, and with no alarm clock, I tend to actually wake up at around 0900 - 1000, but (not being independently wealthy) that's pretty incompatible with the rest of life.

If I had FU money I'd fully embrace that.

What's the point of getting up early, rushing around, only to leave the house and get immediately stuck in traffic? What a giant waste of time.

I was watching a video about getting good sleep hygiene the other day and the main tip was "control what time you wake up, because waking up tired is easier than going to bed when you're not tired."

That person is clearly not a night owl lol. Waking up at 7 doesn't make you feel any more tired at 11 when you're a night owl, because that's just when you're the most awake. All you end up doing is creating an ever growing sleep debt until you're on vacation and just sleep for its whole duration.

You can eat earlier than 20.00?...

I think it's detrimental to someone's quality of life to be unable to shift their sleping schedule.

The only physiological thing you cannot shift is the sunlight. If I have to wake up early before sunrise and feel like crap, I will take a walk out a couple hours later and the rest of my day will be productive.

Not when I've got in after 1900 I can't.

why not? eat before 7pm?

This is a big deal. You will be awake when you eat, 24 hours later, even if that's the middle of the night. You can shift your internal clock faster this way than any other.

It can be done but it's hard with todays jobs. The advice I was given was to wake up and then do not rest in bed until I go to bed. Sitting on a chair all day is about the same.

I did manage to switch from a night owl to a morning person but what I realized is that sitting on a chair, starring at blue light and the stress to "make things work" are actually toxic and they will mess up my sleep.

I look at the screen, make a mental list (sometimes on paper) of the things to do, get away from the screen and go over the items in my head. It's not supper productive but it does contribute to the process without screen time.

> unless I go to bed hours after I've eaten I don't sleep and tend to get heartburn

FWIW YMMV going low-carb completely cured my heartburns who were particularly annoying when laying down just like you. I had been taking proton pump inhibitors for 10 years before finding that out. And every time I eat carbs, I need to take antacids. It doesn't seem like it's been studied much, but insulin stimulates the proton pump and the stomach produces more acid.

> People will say, "just go to bed earlier"

This is the advice you need to avoid. Don't go to bed earlier. Go to bed when you are tired. Then get up at exactly the time you set your alarm for the next morning. Then repeat that over and over, every single day (even weekends). You will adapt and start going to bed earlier so you get the amount of rest you need.

Or you'll make an excuse for why you can't do this and why it certainly won't work for you.

> I go to bed hours after I've eaten

I feel like this is extremely important. I try very hard to eat no late than at least 4 hours before I feel like going to sleep. And get as sober as possible before that too.

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