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Comment by clnq | Hacker News Reader

I can't comment on laws, but I can comment on sleep hygiene. If you are dealing with revenge bedtime procrastination (it's a term) or a non-24 hour circadian rhythm, the later you have to wake up, the later you will go to sleep.

Many people are dealing with things like that. I would regularly see my co-workers online at 2 - 3 am when our core hours were 10 am - 5 pm. My company recently changed core hrs to 12 pm - 2 pm, and unsurprisingly, I see the same co-workers up at 5 am. I would expect to see people online throughout the night if we shifted core hours to 3 pm - 5 pm, even if that schedule perfectly accommodates typical working times.

N = 4 or 5, but I don't think delaying school times will solve much. Going to bed earlier can solve it, though it's difficult for people with RBP or unusual circadian rhythms. But keeping a regular schedule and getting 9+ hours of sleep becomes possible for many after a few weeks of sticking with a good sleep hygiene.

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    revenge bedtime procrastination

Well, of course I know him. He's me. Wake up late, start work late, end work late, do chores late, go to bed late, then waste hours in bed browsing the internet because I feel that I’ve had no time for myself during the day, so ruining next day by having low quality „me time” browsing the internet feels like somehow reclaiming that missing time.

But when you ruin your sleeping pattern its very hard to fix it. I skip the nigt of sleep so I am very sleepy next night. I fall asleep and wake up in the morning, but when I go to bed next day I just cant fall asleep, starting whole issue from scratch.

There was a serious study in the UK where high schoolers should be starting at 10 am school.

They changed school hours for them, so I have to disagree. I was seriously penalized because I was useless early in the morning, so I'm still quite annoyed by this.

> I would regularly see my co-workers online at 2 - 3 am when our core hours were 10 am - 5 pm. My company recently changed core hrs to 12 pm - 2 pm, and unsurprisingly, I see the same co-workers up at 5 am.

Not calling you out, and I mean this kindly… but this is kind of a smelt-it/dealt-it observation right? If you’re observing them awake at hours that aren’t healthy for them, you have to be awake at the same time to observe it?

More productive I hope: if people are shifting their sleep this way as core hours are clamped, it’s probably a sign that the core hours aren’t consistent with working hours, and people are moving demanding work around to fit their schedules as best they can. That’s not a problem the individual workers can address, it’s a process and culture problem.

On the original topic: my circadian rhythm wants to run either 30 or 32 hours. College was absolutely brutal for me, because I could arrange my classes to not start early at least several days a week, and that just made matters worse.

The only thing that got me back into a healthy rhythm was getting a job that forced me to be up at a regular hour every day. Without exaggerating too much, taking that job probably saved my life because the stress of classes on top of the mental and emotional consequences of being so out of the loop were very difficult to deal with.

Nowadays, I still find myself occasionally staying up until 3 in the morning. Sometimes I work late at night just because I can't flow during the day, and I make up for it by taking time off in-between my meetings. That's a personal choice that ends up working fairly well for our family, but also isn't exactly "healthy" in the strictest sense either, I suppose.

In any case, having a regular wake-up time that doesn't vary regardless of when I fall asleep is the only way to stay sane- otherwise I would almost certainly be living in a semi-perpetual fugue state of staying up 20-24 hours straight then sleeping a random amount.

Edit: Conversely, my dad grew up on a farm and was up with the dawn every single day. Cows don't care if you're a teenager or not. He ended up in a solid career and did quite well for himself. Survivorship bias, perhaps, but I often wonder how much better I would have done if I had the same schedule he still does.

I also suffered for a long time with an apparently long circadian rhythm. My experience with how that intersected with fixed schedules went much worse: poor sleep in school descended into insomnia, and absolute terror of the alarm clock. Insomnia persisted and worsened into my 30s. This all fed quite a bit into a whole lot of chronic mental health problems. And I’m not exaggerating, this all did very nearly get me dead.

The things which really helped:

1. Diagnosis and treatment of ADHD. Before which, I never would’ve imagined that a daily dose of amphetamines would help me get anything resembling consistent sleep and rest. Since then, my internal clock has been much more consistent with earth days.

2. Getting my pup. Partly for the reason you describe: she has needs that don’t care about my internal schedule, and my schedule has to accommodate her. Also in large part because she’s been singularly the best sleep aid I’ve ever had or could have imagined. We wake together, do our daily routine, play, wind down, then we snuggle... and it’s the best rest I’ve ever gotten.

Edit: I should add another thing that helped, for anyone who struggles with sleep. I stopped using alarms to wake, almost entirely, except for extraordinary circumstances. My sleep schedule does drift a bit and I have to consciously keep it in check when it does, but I get much more comfortable with the actual act of resting when there isn’t a hard time limit attached to it.

> On the original topic: my circadian rhythm wants to run either 30 or 32 hours.

In my teens and early 20s I had the same. It was fine most of the time, and then I'd crash and miss a day or two. Then I started taking midday naps, whether or not I feel like I need them. Well, it started out that I'd fall asleep in 2:00 lectures, and I noticed that it was some of my best sleep. Weirdly, napping a little (5-30min) during the day helps me sleep at night. When I miss it, it can be impossible to get to sleep -- right around bedtime I suddenly go from normal to buzzy and if I try to force it I just wake up more.

> but this is kind of a smelt-it/dealt-it observation right?

Yeah, I’ve had years in my life when I had poor sleeping habits and years when the habits were okay.

I usually deal with heavy revenge sleep procrastination when I’m crunching at work (games industry) and I try to reclaim some hours for myself at the cost of sleep.

Yeah, it’s a process and culture problem. Though individuals have some say in it. Even with crunch in the games industry, you get to set some personal boundaries. You can always put your health first. And our industry has been crunching less and less because people have started doing that. It used to be that when a company prescribed crunch (6 day a week, 16 hour a day schedules), almost everyone would do it. Now almost everyone quits. And that’s good, people have reasonable control over that. Besides, if someone flat out chooses not to adhere to crunch, they have options. Just not doing it is enough - there are rarely serious consequences.

With schools, it’s different. The question is not about reducing workloads, but about just moving them to a different time in the day. That, in my experience, is meaningless.

According to the link, the laws say “class must start after 8:30am”, and there’s often an earlier scheduled bus pickup to make, so you have to account for that in waking times, unlike WFH business hours where you can roll out of bed and open slack/zoom in 10 minutes if pressed. I think the concerns are different at that time range.

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