
Maybe Your Sleep Problem Isn’t a Problem - dtien
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/25/style/sleep-problem-late-night.html
======
macNchz
The author's experience is very similar to my own–my parents called me 'the
sleepless wonder' when I was a kid, and by high school getting out of bed for
morning classes was excruciating. In college I mostly chose classes that
started later in the day and wound up doing much better academically.

Since college I've made a point of taking jobs that offer flexible hours,
which thankfully seems to be increasingly common. I have no interest in going
back to having that conflicted feeling around midnight, knowing that if I stay
up much later the morning will be torture, but feeling wide awake, productive
and creative.

In recent years I've found myself tending to wake up earlier in the morning,
but regardless of when I wake up my brain is still fuzzy until 10 or 11am. It
turns out that this makes the mornings an ideal time for me to get some
exercise, which I've discovered to be a great way to start the day.

~~~
gascan
1) I was much like you. My performance in college suffered as I couldn't rouse
in the morning. I recently discovered I actually did have a medical problem
affecting sleep quality (partially obstructed airway from childhood injury).
Can't help but wonder how things would be different if I'd figured it out
sooner.

2) Had a kid, and sleeping in late is simply no longer an option. Which makes
me think that despite how I covet late nights and sleeping in, it really was
never the natural order of things, at least for adults.

~~~
cortesoft
Right? I was going to say, all this shifting schedule stuff is great, but kids
don't care about your schedule.

------
wpietri
Based on the title, I was hoping it was about something else, something I talk
about frequently with people who think they have sleep problems: human sleep
is naturally biphasic.

I know a lot of people who think waking up in the middle of the night means
they have a disease, insomnia. When the truth is that before electric light,
normal sleep was going to bed when it got dark, being awake for a while in the
middle of the night, and then sleeping more until first light. A nice look at
it is in this history podcast: [https://www.backstoryradio.org/shows/on-the-
clock-4/](https://www.backstoryradio.org/shows/on-the-clock-4/)

(Especially the segments "Friday Night Lights" and "'Til Morning is Nigh".)

For those who prefer text, here's a writeup of the historian's book:
[https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-16964783](https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-16964783)

When I mention people to this they're generally both shocked and relieved. The
problem often wasn't with their bodies or their minds, but their expectations.

~~~
enceladus_ice
I recently listened to an interview with Matthew Walker (author of "Why We
Sleep" book mentioned in article). Dr. Walker stated the scientific consensus
is now trending toward historical biphasic sleep being a social trend rather
than how we're "supposed" to sleep.

~~~
medell
Matthew Walker's excerpt on biphasic sleep: [https://delanceyplace.com/view-
archives.php?p=3524](https://delanceyplace.com/view-archives.php?p=3524)
TL;DR: There's evidence of cultures untouched by electricity sleeping 7 hours
at night with a 30-60min afternoon nap, which he calls biphasic sleep, with
some tribes switching to monophasic in cooler months. All humans have a
hardwired dip in midafternoon alertness.

~~~
crazygringo
> _All humans have a hardwired dip in midafternoon alertness._

In my personal experience, if you don't have a post-lunch carbs crash and you
do have air conditioning, the dip doesn't exist.

He doesn't really seem to back up the existence of a biological dip at all
that is innate to human rhythms.

~~~
medell
Isn't he claiming the opposite? (But I don't have the book to dig into the
sources):

 _This brief descent from high-degree wakefulness to low-level alert­ness
reflects an innate drive to be asleep and napping in the afternoon, and not
working. It appears to be a normal part of the daily rhythm of life._

~~~
Izkata
I've always understood it to be related to the hottest part of the day, not so
much a post-lunch thing. Probably why GP mentioned air conditioning preventing
it.

------
dtien
As someone who also has atypical sleep patterns ( late sleeper, early riser ),
there were some interesting points in here.

I know there's been research done as well on the number of hours of sleep
required rather than 'when' it occurs, but those haven't seem to have reached
a consensus yet.

I will say some of these articles sometimes read satirically. Notably, they
have a diagnosis for people who can't sleep at 'normal' hours: Delayed Sleep
Phase Syndrome. Then the kicker at the end, "The term “chronotype diversity”
is starting to find traction, as business managers explore concepts like team
energetic asynchrony". At this point, I stopped and looked up at the URL to
make sure I wasn't on a parody site.

But all joking aside, it would be interesting to explore what societal as well
as productivity improvements could be had if people's sleep patterns were
viewed as varied rather than forcing everyone on the same schedule.

~~~
krapsna
Note: I pounded this out pretty quickly and don't have time to proofread.
Sorry for any grammatical errors.

 _I will say some of these articles sometimes read satirically. Notably, they
have a diagnosis for people who can 't sleep at 'normal' hours: Delayed Sleep
Phase Syndrome._

I have been struggling with being unable to sleep during normal hours my
entire life. My parents would yank the covers off of me in the morning, or
maybe my mother would start vacuuming my room at 8 AM frustrated that I wasn't
already up. All through my school years, from elementary to HS I was barely
functional. I was often late or missed the bus because I was a walking zombie,
struggling to get dressed and out of the house without falling asleep.

Keep in mind that I'm 45, none of this was due to too much TV time or smart
phone use. (One TV in the house, no such thing as notebooks, ipads, or smart
phones back then).

No matter how much I struggled through the day to just stay awake, and how
much I was looking forward to going to bed that night, at 9 PM I would be
fully awake. I laid in bed night after night watching the click tick by as I
tried to unsuccessfully "just go to sleep". Then, when my alarm went off I'd
be exhausted again and struggle to get up and out the door. I was a terrible
student to say the least.

You're told for years that you're lazy, unmotivated, a slacker, etc.

During my High School summers, I would get into a pattern of going to sleep at
between 3 and 6 AM, waking at noon. I was a fully functioning human being. I
had the most creative and productive days (evenings) of my life as an artist.
I was naturally alert and creative Ispent the wee hours of the morning
drawing, painting, reading.

Then I'd be plunged back into misery when the school year began. I once again
drove my teachers crazy. I got in trouble for falling asleep in class. I was
told again that I was a lazy slacker. I don't know how many times I was spoken
to by faculty about not living up to my potential.

When you're told your whole life that you're only problem is that you're lazy,
and you can't figure out why you can't find the motivation to do the things
you want to do, you start to believe it.

After HS, I had a few menial jobs, stumbling into one where I worked from 8 PM
to 4 AM. It was great, except for the fact that my mother still harassed my by
trying to wake me up at 9 AM because... I don't know. I guess she just didn't
want some lazy slacker sleeping the day away?

Later I worked my way into tech and had jobs requiring normal office hours. I
was self medicating by drinking most nights, trying to get to sleep to
maintain a normal-ish schedule. It didn't work all that well.

I was working at a company as a technical lead that I'd help get up and
running with a couple of friends from school, and even though we were supposed
to be "flex" hours, not surprisingly the morning people kept setting up 8 AM
meetings that I was almost always late for and sometimes missed.

Out of frustration I spoke to my Dr about it, and he sent me to a a medical
sleep center. I had a couple of sleep studies done, electrodes glued to my
head and all that. The Dr told me I had DSPS, something I'd never heard of,
nor sought a diagnosis of. This was roughly 20 years ago. I looked it up, and
found that it was a real thing.

So, I told my friends that I'd started that company with what was up... I had
thing thing called "DSPS" and what it was, how it worked and all that.

And I'll never forget how my best friend looked me square in the eye and told
me he basically had lost all respect for me, for coming to them with some kind
of bullshit made up medical diagnosis, trying to excuse my inability to keep
the same schedule as everybody else. The relationship between the two of us
quickly went down hill.

I spent some time after that out of tech, working jobs that were more amenable
to later hours. For the last 6 I've been back in it, and it's still a
frustrating struggle to stay on "normal" hours. In an effort to go to sleep
when I should, I take benadryl and melatonin almost every night. Sometimes it
works, sometimes it seems to have no effect.

I know that I'm not as effective at my job as I could be, my mind is often in
a fog during the day. And again... I spend the whole day looking forward to
climbing into bed at 9 PM to get a good night's rest, only to have my brain
begin firing on all cylinders that night. I get tremendously motivated to do
all of the things I was too tired to accomplish all day, and I have to try to
shut it down by taking that benadryl and melatonin cocktail so I don't stay up
all night. Then I get into bed and toss and turn, unable to sleep usually
until 1 or 2 AM.

My paternal grandmother had it. I have it. One of my four children has it.

The article linked to here says that genetic mutations have been found that
are linked to it.

And still, you make a comment illustrating society's skeptical attitude toward
DSPS. You obviously don't believe that it's real.

That's what we deal with, and I don't expect that it will change any time
soon.

~~~
njarboe
My more charitable reading of dtien's comment was that instead of society
understanding that different people have different preferred behaviors and
that some of those preferences are going to have a genetic reason for them, we
end up creating pathologies for normal behavior with names like "Delayed Sleep
Phase Syndrome". This name does sounds like it would come from a satirist, not
the medical establishment.

The quotes around the word normal to me is the clearest indicator of dtien
sympathetic view toward people with 'DSPS'. In a better world, people with
late night preferences are just people, not labeled people with DSPS.

~~~
krapsna
I see you point, but I'd like to add that for people such as me it's not a
preference, it's hard coded.

~~~
creep
From najrboe's reply:

>some of those preferences are going to have a genetic reason for them

It's hard coded for you, that's understood. The argument is that it's silly to
have a distinguisher for everything that doesn't fit into society's majority
notions, or for everything that falls outside a "normal" range (or, what we
perceive to be normal, even if it's not a true reflection of the average
population). Everybody has preferences that help them function-- some
preferences have a genetic basis, others don't, but in either case preferences
help people function and it would be productive to shift the notions held by
society that being flexible towards such preferences is going to lead to a
happier populace.

------
mmaunder
What really bugs me is the self-righteousness of the early riser. There's
definitely some kind of power dynamic going on. Perhaps the joke should be:
How do you know if someone gets up at 5am? Because they tell you.

~~~
danvasquez29
as an early riser myself, what bothers me about this is that I personally feel
like I'm only talking about because someone else is making a big deal out of
it. I don't think I go out of my way to bring the topic up, but I'm constantly
getting people saying things like "omg I saw when you sent that email/made
that commit/whatever, do you ever sleep", and then I gotta say something like
"well I was up at 5 so I knocked it out before I drove in..." and now it's a
thing we're talking about and I'm the crazy guy.

It feels like a much bigger issue to late-risers than early-risers.

~~~
LifeQuestioner
I really wish I could sleep by 2am. It would make life possible. My natural
sleep pattern is 5am-12. I've literally spent the last decade trying to solve
it. Until, I gave up.

~~~
Retric
Move to a new time zone and that 'natural' 5am-12 would shift to match that
time zone. So, it's really not about biology it's about how you set up your
environment.

That said, as long as it's working for you great! Just don't assume it's
impossible to change if it's causing you problems.

~~~
LifeQuestioner
This is not your fault, as you really do not know the lengths and depths and
tears and effort it has taken for me to change my sleep pattern to be
consistent. But there is no "assumption here".

A main problem is - even when i've had to be awake at 9am every day (yes awake
at 9am, not working at 9am) it causes me to fall really ill. Mentally and
physically your body feels wrecked and it doesn't matter how tired you are,
you wake up at night.

I now, after a decade, manage a sleep cycle that doesn't change every day by a
few hours and I can just about function enough for meetings.

I can just about get to 1pm meetings and it's taken so much effort just to be
able to get here!

I've written nearly 4 articles covering the different strategies i've used to
be able to wake up early in the morning. I've slept through some of the most
important things - which led me in my final exams to just stay up all night to
get to 9am exams incase I wouldn't wake up.

What has worked is accepting that it is a genuine disability and problem. And
as you say, adjusting my environment to suit my sleeping issues.
Unfortunately, changing time zones doesn't work. But it's a nice theory (I've
already tried this).

I'll be posting my articles soon which documents every strategy i've tried
over the last decade, in hope it might help someone find a solution for them.

~~~
Retric
>change every day by a few hours

I personally know someone that lived on a 28 hour day for a while (6 * 28 / 7
= 24). He was able to keep a fairly normal workday during the week but over
the weekend he was crashing in the day. It only worked because he was
religious about managing light levels at home with blackout blinds and
sunlamps on timers.

If your willing to try just about anything it might be worth a shot, but you
end up making a lot of sacrifices and must keep a very tight schedule.

~~~
LifeQuestioner
I've been on a non-24 hour rhythm :). My sleep would change every day by 4-6
hours.

I've had shutters for my windows so no light could get in the evening, light
simulation alarm clocks, only used the computer for a maximum of 8 hours a day
and got rid of my smart-phone so I had an old fashioned phone, to reduce phone
use. I don't drink coffee or tea. Melatonin, sleeping tablets, waking up every
day at the same time and going for a run.

Fyi, waking up every time at the same day makes me ill because I still can't
sleep early even if i've had a lack of sleep for several nights before.

You can't crash at weekends either. Because if you crash at weekends it messes
up your sleep cycle completely and you'll start Monday having slept at 6am on
Sunday night.

A tight schedule means you have to do it every day. Then there's the other
problem that happens when you crash out - you're really groggy for days.

When I was in school, I'd crash out at 4pm on a Friday night and wake up at
7am the next day. I'd have headaches and feel so drained. And I'd still go to
my weekend job.

It's not a lack of motivation.

If you know anything about this guy and the strategies he uses, please do
share. Always looking for suggestions.

------
danman1222
Love this article! There is some really interesting research on the sleep
patterns of indigenous tribes. Researchers found that while studying the tribe
for like a 3 month period there was only around 30 minutes where the entire
tribe was asleep. Humans are built to live together in communities to create
the greatest likelihood of survival. Its most advantageous for someone to be
awake to make sure that lion doesn't eat us after all. So while
industrialization and the workaholism of Americans has pushed us to all wake
up earlier - based on our chronobiology - its probably pretty unhealthy for
many.

I'm trying to get companies to realize this.

Just my 2 cent.

Dan Gartenberg, PhD, CEO of Sonic Sleep Coach

------
elhudy
>According to Dr. Walker, about 40 percent of the population are morning
people, 30 percent are evening people, and the remainder land somewhere in
between.

I'm not a sleep expert or a neuroscientist, but I take issue with being
branded into a sleep-band that is "hard-written" into my DNA. I perform at my
worst when I wake at times other than my current habit allows for - whether
that is early or late.

I don't believe this leaves me in the 30% of in-between people. It just means
that my habits are most telling of my performance. Don't assume my chronotype.

~~~
coldtea
It's not some random commenter that assumed the cronotype though, it's
scientists.

So, you can take it with them.

Or you could an outlier, but it's not like this flexibility you mention is
statistically true for most people. What has been studied is statistically
true.

~~~
yqx
> It's not some random commenter that assumed the cronotype though, it's
> scientists.

However, what is actually known about the human body is often a lot more fuzzy
and uncertain than how the popular press, or sometimes scientists, would have
use believe. If the second paragraph of the Wikipedia article on the
chronotype is to be believed there is plenty of room for believing that
environment and habits play a role in your Chronotype as is the case for most
behaviours.

> The causes and regulation of chronotypes, including developmental change,
> individual propensity for a specific chronotype, and flexible versus fixed
> chronotypes have yet to be determined. However, research is beginning to
> shed light on these questions, such as the relationship between age and
> chronotype.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronotype](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronotype)

------
collyw
Can someone convince me that this problem isn't in your head? I used to
consider myself a "night owl" until I observed something:

I was travelling in Chile and went up to Peru. There was a two hour time
difference despite being at more or less the same longitude (I think Chile
shifted its clocks in summer while Peru didn't, and there was a one hour
difference on top of that).

Guess what? I got used to it in a few days.

Likewise Spain is an hour ahead of the UK, despite being both being similar
longitude. We shift our sleeping patterns by and hour a couple of times each
year with daylight saving. It usually only takes a couple of days to get used
to it.

I enjoy my sleep and the answer seems to be going to bed earlier, and not
convincing yourself that you can't sleep because its too early. The time of
day is a social construct.

~~~
collyw
I was actually hoping for some constructive rebuttals of this.

------
5partan
First of all, I wouldn’t consider someone who sleeps from 2a.m. To 10a.m. A
night owl, everything before noon is stil morning for me :) And why do those
articles never mention daylight saving time or the fact that that there is a 3
hour difference between sunrise in winter and summer? I’m pretty sure DNA
doesn’t care about fixed time schedules but that it rather synchronizes to
natural sun and moon light. I’m convinced that a shifting sleep cicle
(compared to a fixed time, but fixed to the sun or moon or some overlap) is
the most natural and healthiest one, that’s also how our ancestors took
shifts, D.S.P.S. just being a fancy new name, while in reality nature selects
a few people being in tune with moon light, another few with sun light and
some being in between, or maybe even that changes during the year, so that
there are fair overlaps for everyone while watching out for those sabre tooth
tigers when others sleep, those tigers don’t attack just at night ;)

------
InclinedPlane
I've had DSPS for my entire adult life and it has been incredibly difficult to
manage. For me the biggest improvements have come with maintaining extremely
strict sleep hygiene: F.lux or the equivalent on all my devices, setting a
"start getting ready to go to bed" alarm on my smartwatch, generally avoiding
caffeine and alcohol entirely, wearing blue blocking glasses when I'm going to
bed, and maintaining the same bed time _and_ wake up times even during the
weekend. As well as using a light based alarm clock as my primary alarm. It
can still be a challenge to be well rested but I do a vastly better job of it
than I had previously. I don't always make it to work at the time I want but
compared to the "bad old days" where I might come to work on only 3-4 hours of
sleep one day and I might roll in at 1pm, 2pm, even 3pm some days it's like a
quantum leap improvement.

The other major factor is getting regular exercise.

------
komali2
>When night owls are forced to rise early, their prefrontal cortex, which
controls sophisticated thought processes and logical reasoning, “remains in a
disabled, or ‘offline,’ state,” Dr. Walker writes. “Like a cold engine in an
early-morning start, it takes a long time before it warms up to operating
temperature.”

My friends and I call this "poo brain." We all had the same rhythm back in
highschool which did not give with the 7:15am first bell. By about 2pm we'd be
zombies, capable of no kind of creative thought.

To this day if we're visiting each other and suffering jet lag, inevitable
accusations of poo brain get thrown around. It feels like every part of the
brain works except the part that thinks - that's a swamp.

------
mschuster91
I believe a big part of the problem is that the old larks, and with them their
belief about lark superiority, simply don't retire as they used to, thus
keeping young people and fresh ideas from moving up the "chain of command".

Being a hard night owl myself, I'm happy to work at a place with flexible
hours, but then again most of my company is <40-50 years of age. People in
BigCos often aren't as lucky and to make it worse "office politics" with the
competitiveness associated there (and mentioned in the article) effectively
kill off any motivation to chsnge.

~~~
nradov
This is the worst sort of ageism. In my professional experience there is no
correlation between youth and fresh ideas.

Big companies with competent leaders are perfectly capable of rapid change
when survival is at stake. The classic example is the pivot from desktop
software toward the Internet that Bill Gates led at Microsoft.

~~~
mschuster91
> This is the worst sort of ageism. In my professional experience there is no
> correlation between youth and fresh ideas.

Look into politics, no matter the country, or any big corporation - it is
usually an old-white-men club (exceptions confirm the rule). And they are
hell-bent on keeping the situation so that they benefit, and the younger
generations suffer for it.

The social contract was that at reaching ~65 (here in Germany) years, you
retire, and someone younger rises to your position. The current situation with
people working way past their 80s, either due to stubbornness (rich old white
men) or due to economic need (poor old people, PoC), breaks that contract, and
young people are locked into lower-paying positions because they cannot rise
up.

To provide my claims with data: average age of DAX company boardmembers is 61,
with some companies at 70 (!!) [1], only 7% of CxO posts are held by women
[2]. In addition, the government commission "Deutscher Corporate Governance
Kodex" actually has literally asked for "fresh blood" in boards [1].

1: [https://www.welt.de/wirtschaft/article137859180/Zu-viele-
Sen...](https://www.welt.de/wirtschaft/article137859180/Zu-viele-Senioren-in-
Aufsichtsraeten-der-Dax-Firmen.html)

2: [http://www.faz.net/aktuell/beruf-chance/beruf/dax-
unternehme...](http://www.faz.net/aktuell/beruf-chance/beruf/dax-unternehmen-
durchschnittsalter-im-vorstand-gestiegen-13586901.html)

------
commandlinefan
When I start to feel like I'm not performing like I used to, I worry that my
sleep patterns are the culprit. Then I worry that worrying about sleep
patterns is causing performance problems...

------
pg_bot
I'm the only person I've encountered that naturally runs on a 25 hour clock. I
get the same amount of sleep per day (~8 hours) but I follow it with 17 hours
of wakefulness so my clock moves forward by an hour every day. To my knowledge
there are no adverse health effects, but it's certainly out of the ordinary. I
often wonder if more people are like me since sleep problems are so common,
but they cannot follow their natural rhythm since it does not fit into the
traditional 9-5 work week.

~~~
mercutio2
Funny, I thought living with a 25 hour day was a nearly universal desire for
people under 40. Certainly most of my close friends in my teens and 20s would
regularly discuss that this would make our lives better.

Once I experienced the pain of needing to wake up for a small child, I was
forced out of my historical sleep pattern. Fortunately I, like my parents,
need less and less sleep as I get older, so 24 hours with an early rising
child is more tolerable now than when I initially experienced it.

~~~
rootusrootus
I suspect there is a pattern -- have kids, learn to wake up earlier. For me it
was self-reinforcing; the act of putting the kids down for bed at 8:30PM is
like drawing a line in the sand, with quiet hours afterward. It makes it
sensible to go to bed earlier and wake up earlier.

------
simonebrunozzi
Tangentially related, I am regularly waken up by garbage trucks at ~2am and
~4:30am, and then sometimes again at ~6am. (I live in San Francisco).

It's becoming unbearable. Unfortunately there are a couple of commercial
activities nearby, and my understanding is that there's no way to force these
trucks to come at a more decent time.

Any of you have any idea on how to fix this? Sorry if this is a bit off-topic,
but not sleeping well for months is something that deeply affects your well
being...

~~~
rootusrootus
Marpac Sound Machine and perhaps add some heavy, heavy curtains over the
windows. Other than that, I suspect moving somewhere with better soundproofing
or away from commercial traffic may be the only viable alternative.

------
soufron
So little research, so many anecdotes. There are MDS and scientists dealing
with these issues. The trouble is not so much when you sleep, but whether
you're well in the end. And as someone mentioned, our sleep cycles used to be
vastly different. Not to mention that people who take a nap during the day
might have a completely different type of sleep cycle.

------
acconrad
This feels like this article was written in response to this article from
Slate Star Codex since this also mentions DSPS:

[http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/07/10/melatonin-much-more-
tha...](http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/07/10/melatonin-much-more-than-you-
wanted-to-know/)

> _I have it fairly bad. My body naturally wants to go to bed around 2 a.m.
> and rise around 10 a.m._

That was my cycle as well and I wouldn't describe it as "fairly bad" it's
definitely later but not egregious.

The SSC article recommends .3mg melatonin 7 hours before desired sleep and it
worked like a charm for me (along with rituals for earlier sleep and better
sleep hygiene).

Within a few weeks I was going to bed at 10pm and naturally waking up at
around 7am. Now I regularly operate on this schedule and I was kind of
surprised at how quickly I was able to adjust.

~~~
wycy
Did you need to use melatonin only for those few weeks that it took to adjust
your schedule, or have you had to continue using it indefinitely to maintain
this schedule?

~~~
luminiferous
Not OP but I read the Slate Star Codex article, and buried about halfway down
was:

"These don’t “cure” the condition permanently; you have to keep doing them
every day, or your circadian rhythm will snap back to its natural pattern."

So it looks like you have to take the melatonin on a continuous basis.

------
creep
I've never been able to figure out my sleep schedule and have always conformed
to these positive ideas we associate with early risers, but this article,
despite its weird elitism, has given me some hope.

I like to go to bed late, but I also like to wake up early. Sometimes I can't
wake up until noon. Sometimes waking up at noon feels like shit. Sometimes
I'll spontaneously awaken at 7am and feel amazing until about noon. Sometimes
I'll be dead-tired at 9pm. Sometimes I'll set my alarm for 9am and wake up at
8am-- sometimes its the opposite.

It makes no sense because I go to bed at pretty much the same time every night
(between 1 and 3 am, usually 2am).

I feel inspired to monitor my natural sleep now and figure out what's going
on, rather than constantly trying (and failing) to conform to 10pm-6am.

------
sebringj
I've noticed if you are passionate about something, you don't track time, you
don't care about your surroundings and lose yourself in what you are doing.
That's when productivity happens and it doesn't respect sunlight always.
However, it is easier on most human beings to have a circadian rhythm aligned
with sunlight and workout first thing in the morning to jump start the day. It
is more sustainable in the long run to do that to have a healthy routine from
my perspective and backed by research. Shawn Stevenson has some good insight
on that to get you started.

~~~
InclinedPlane
Or... this could be ADHD hyperfocus or bipolar II hypomania. Not everyone is
the same, and not everyone experiences periods of just losing themselves in
their work completely without any knowledge of time passing.

~~~
stagas
Wow, what a quick jump to pathologize someone's behavior based on some pattern
you spotted that bares some resemblance to a mental disorder. Psychiatry is
not an exact science, and this labelling does more harm than good when used
out of context. A person can be classified with a mental disorder _only_ when
that behavior starts having negative effects to their lives, and not merely by
satisfying some of the symptoms. Someone can act hypomanic or depressed and
that can fluctuate through their life but until that starts having severe
negative effects that they can't escape from on their own, it is simply the
expression of their character and their uniqueness as a human being, rich and
complex. Otherwise you can classify with a mental disorder pretty much
everyone.

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person_of_color
I'm currently having an issue where I get to sleep on time but keep waking up
1-2 sleep cycles too early. Any ideas why? Help.

~~~
cimmanom
I’ve been having this problem too. It’s the worst. Going to bed at 10 and
waking up at 3 when your alarm is set for 6; exhausted but weirdly alert too.
Then feeling like a zombie all day, collapsing into bed, and doing it all over
again.

~~~
person_of_color
Do you think it's sleep apnoea? Or poor sleep hygiene?

~~~
cimmanom
I’m waking between cycles, not because of apnea; and apnea shouldn’t prevent
getting back to sleep afaik - it just prevents deep sleep and leaves you less
rested. I think my sleep hygiene’s been ok. The one cause that seems most
likely to me is a decrease in exercise (due to an injury).

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sn41
I am an early riser. One issue I have is that I am very sleepy around 2 pm. I
hope siestas are seriously studied, and the stigma on them removed.

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rootusrootus
I can tell you quite reliably when it is 2:30PM without looking at my watch.
That's nap time.

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d0m
TL&DR: Some people have different circadian sleep cycle and that's okay.

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tstieff
Well, it's only okay if you are able to function from 9-5, otherwise it's
probably a huge issue.

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NeoBasilisk
I can't remember the last time I went to bed before midnight. I think it was
in 2012.

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sguav
funny how I am reading this while trying to instill in my infant daughter the
"conventional time" habit...

I am really left with doubts on whether it's better to support a baby's time
schedule or to "force" the standard's.

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LifeQuestioner
'sever

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DonHopkins
And maybe my OCD is actually Obsessive Compulsive Order.

