I am very much a night owl and I have a really hard time getting into a routine of getting up early in the morning, even if I do manage to get my hours of sleep.
It took a long time to find a balance of forcing to sleep and forcing to get up. But now I have to be very concious, if I have a late weekend I am out of sync for the rest of the week.
I’m in the same boat. It’s very hard for me to operate on a schedule compatible with the rest of society. I can force myself into it, but I never really feel well rested. What makes matters worse is if I don’t keep my sleeping schedule for two or three days, everything gets messed up again and I see myself reverting back to falling asleep at 3am.
It’s really hard and it limits greatly my employment options. I’m sure my career has been severely impacted by it, since most management positions require lots of early meetings. I am an engineering manager now, but it’s hard for me to enjoy my job, because it often requires early meetings. So it’s hard to really be good at it and progress in the career.
My perception at workplace is that most managers are early risers, and people who stay forever at senior engineering level are the night owls.
One of the worst things that happened to me in my last job is that I became important in the mid-level at work. Suddenly, I was expected to be at work earlier, be ready to rock at 8am, knocking meetings out and making decisions. I ran on fumes for years.
A few times, when critical bad shit happened after 5pm and I had to stay at work until midnight, I felt like I was the competent and motivated person that got me into that position to begin with. There was no way my bosses were going to let me saunter into the office at 1pm, after all the client meetings had already wrapped up... I definitely tried to convince them though lol
Maybe it’s just the small subset of software engineers who frequent HN, but I swear 99.9% of the people on here are night owls, and they very much let their opinions be known on every thread about sleep.
Nearly everywhere in US society where productivity comes up, the “early bird” is held up as the standard of efficiency. Thus, those people who instead prefer a schedule that doesn’t begin pre-dawn have been chastised in books, talks, and in media despite there not being any proof that that they are “lazy” but rather are simply naturally attuned to a different schedule.
Interestingly, this early=virtue thing goes back more than a century. Before electric light, the common sleeping mode was in two chunks, first and second sleep. Moralizing busybodies, kin to the anti-alcohol movement, decided that second sleep was self-indulgent and unnecessary. The history podcast Backstory had a great set of segments on sleep a while back: https://www.backstoryradio.org/shows/on-the-clock-4/
Even as an early riser, I think the virtue part is horseshit. Not everybody has to be the same. Indeed, my (entirely unsupported) theory is that sleep schedule variation is natural and useful. In the wild, it's safer for everybody if somebody is always awake keeping an eye on things.
Perhaps because this is one place where kindred spirits feel comfortable sharing without fear of the denigration we've experienced our entire lives -- the overt and the subtle, conscious and inadvertent, the malicious and the good-intentioned.
Makes an amusing change from the percentage of people on LinkedIn who need to share morning rituals involving getting up at 4am to ensure they have time to read inspirational business stories, go to the gym, update their inbox over green tea and freshly baked bread and enjoy an hour of contemplative meditation before cycling to work to arrive before everybody else. :D
If the passive aggression from early birds weren't so intense, us night owls wouldn't have such a chip on our shoulder. But it is. Just look at the early birds in this thread: nearly every post equates their schedule to virtue.
It's refreshing to have a space that is welcoming of all sorts of circadian schedules instead of subtle shaming. But it's not just software engineers who decry the early risers - writers, artists, and PhD students constantly speak up about their need to stay up late in deep focus mode on a creative project. Maybe that's the common denominator - the need to be able to focus for hours without the disruption of emails or meetings.
I am an early-morning person and I am not feeling condescending towards you right now. Just slightly put off that you decided that all early-morning people have something against you.
Used to have nasty insomnia, now I've sorta forced myself to sleep earlier cause I know if not I will not function at work. However, my wife's a night nurse so when she has days off and on weekends, it screws with my sleep schedule. I wish I could just function on less sleep honestly, but I can't anymore.
One thing I read from a fellow insomniac though was that sometimes when you just can't sleep, laying down on your bed helps vs walking around or being on a computer. Even if you don't fall asleep, and sure enough it does help.
I read it here on HN coincidentally but I couldnt remember by who, but I felt way better later on that day. I think the best I can do is force myself to sleep though. I'll watch shows on Netflix till my eyes start to shut down nowadays.
Read up on melatonin and how light, esp. blue light, will tell your body through the eyes that you're supposed to be awake still. Turn the Netflix off!
You definitely don't want bright lights in your eyes (computer) if you're trying to sleep. I've heard getting up and doing a menial task (dishes, knitting, etc) for a few minutes can help if you've laid in bed for a long time with no luck.
Yes there's value in just lying there with your eyes shut and one of the books I read supported that. Throw in some meditation if you're into that too.
The common refrain is to avoid it because you'll associate the bed as a place of not-sleeping, but that ship has sailed for most of us anyway. The same book said "rituals" (such as getting up and reading a book instead) can be harmful as the habits become normalised and become just one more required step to sleep, instead of an occasional help.
> Yes there's value in just lying there with your eyes shut
I never read the book you mentioned, but I do this almost every morning, as a way of mental preparation for such a simple thing as getting up. It sounds so stupid saying it out loud but I completely live this.
Reviews are mixed, it's written in a worksheet format to help you get a grip on your thoughts and habits to change or accept them as necessary. Didn't help me a lot but it helped a lot of others.
No, it is not and it is equally frustrating if people shut down early in the evening. Granted, the normal work hours favor early-birds, but I think that changes a bit in some occupations.
There is certainly some form of habituation and I mostly don't need a clock. But I am still considerably more grumpy on week-days after waking up.
Early risers have to "force" themselves to stay up late, since they got up so early in the morning. Really, changing one's "chronotype" is mostly just a matter of what you're used to, and what kinds of "stressors" you incur during the day. If you don't want to be a "night owl", don't do stressful stuff late in the afternoon or at night.
It took a long time to find a balance of forcing to sleep and forcing to get up. But now I have to be very concious, if I have a late weekend I am out of sync for the rest of the week.
People say its a lazy thing, but its really not.