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I'd love to see more information about the assertion that there are innate qualities in people which make them Larks versus Owls. I believe I am a night owl. O

by 013a 8y ago

I'd love to see more information about the assertion that there are innate qualities in people which make them Larks versus Owls. I believe I am a night owl. On an average day, I don't get tired until 2am, and without an alarm clock I could sleep until 10am; by any definition this makes me a night owl. But, I question how much of this behavior is environmental versus innate. I drink a lot of coffee (never after 6pm). I work on a computer all day (blue light). My hobbies generally come alive at night (video gaming, spending time with friends, concerts). I have a naturally addictive and obsessive personality combined with low self-control (when I get started on something, like a new work problem or video game, I can't put it down). Is there research in the area of identifying actual biological reasoning behind why someone would be an owl versus a lark (genetics, etc)? Or do all of these studies just rely on behavioral self-reporting, which even the article says, is completely vulnerable to the very real problem that people really only know their behavior in the face of all of their vices, and that behavior might be different if the vices weren't there. The reason I believe that's important is because it should be a factor in our response to this. Yes, people need sleep, and they need good sleep. But if a big reason why you get tired at 2am and thus wake up at 10am is because you're watching Netflix in bed until the minute you shut your eyes, we can't ask society to accept that starting work at 11am is fine.

pseudalopex 8y ago
There are many studies.[1] Large-scale genetic studies have found markers associated with self-reported "morningness".[2][3] At least some of these markers are near genes known to affect circadian rhythms. Observational studies control factors like caffeine intake and light exposure. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronotype https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronotype [2] https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms10448 https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms10448 [3] https://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1006125 https://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/jo...
bluntfang 8y ago
>I drink a lot of coffee (never after 6pm). This is insane to me. I've drank a lot of coffee before (6+ cups per day), but if I ever drink caffeine past 2PM I don't sleep until after 2AM. Have you experimented with your caffeine intake? I highly suggest it. Once I found the correct dose (1-2 cups before 10am, no more til the next day) I've found myself to feel much, much better.
- 0x8BADF00D 8y ago
  It depends on your tolerance. Caffeine has a half-life of 12 hours, so if you drink coffee at 6 PM, good luck sleeping before 6 AM. Unless you have a very high tolerance or are in an already fatigued state.
  - deleted 8y ago
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  - jjeaff 8y ago
    I think there is a lot of variation in tolerance and time horizon for caffeine. I can take a 100mg caffeine supplement (I don't drink coffee) at 3pm and go to sleep easily by midnight. And this is something I do, at most, 1 time per month. In fact, I sometimes am able to go to sleep easier either due to the crash or the fact that my activity level will have been higher the rest of the afternoon and evening and I'm just exhausted by midnight.
  - twodave 8y ago
    In my experience coffee does nothing to my ability to sleep, just allows me to focus better. I realize I’m in the minority but I literally just drank a cup and am headed to bed.
    - 40four 8y ago
      Tolereance is one thing, but sensitivity is another factor to consider, I think. Tollerence is a pure function of the frequency you put a substance in your body. I'm sure my caffeine tolerance is off the charts, as I drink 4-6 cups of coffee (no sugar, sometimes cream if its crap coffee) a day. But my sensitivity is also very low. My whole life, even before coffee as a kid drinking soda, I have never felt stimulated from caffeine. I sometimes wonder if I'm immune, haha. I could literally drink a cup before bed and be fine. So why drink it you ask? Because I think it's delicious, and I belive there to be myriad other health benefits to coffee.
      - shrimpx 8y ago
dorkwood 8y ago
I think the reason I’m a “night owl” is that my experiences with morning during childhood were all negative. Morning was when I was forced to wake up to go to school, it was when I’d have water thrown at me if I slept in on the weekends, it was when I’d have to get up early to help my father with the boat. At night time, I was left alone. And night time still brings me comfort. I suspect morning people had more positive morning-related experiences than I did during childhood.
- gboudrias 8y ago
  This is very possible, but also there could be multiple reasons. I don't drink any coffee and have a lifestyle very similar to OP's, and usually can't fall asleep before 2am. It strikes me as improbable that people with similar lifestyles would have different sleeping habits. However, some of us may have developed these habits for the very reasons you mention; I for one had a terrible time at school.
- niel 8y ago
  I'm fortunate to have had parents who let me sleep in on weekends, and I definitely felt like a night owl in my teenage years. Now in my thirties I seem to function best in the morning. Typing this at 7am on boxing day - I've been awake a while already without a reason at all. Keep in mind that your circadian clock changes with different life stages. Teenagers have been shown to have circadian rhythms that run a few hours later than that of adults. One example: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2820578/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2820578/
- YokoZar 8y ago
  "forced to wake up to go to school" implies you were a night owl back then too.
  - pavel_lishin 8y ago
    Kids have to wake up very early in America to go to school. 8am start time means you typically have to be ready to walk out the door at 7:30, and that's a pretty good scenario. If you have a longer commute to school, you might be getting up before 7am. It's pretty tragic, imo, and it's one of the biggest reasons I want opening hours to shift later.
Buttons840 8y ago
The book "Why We Sleep" talks about how all animals (and plants) have circadian cycles, and the low point of the cycle is marked by a low body temperature. They have done cross cultural studies and can see that the circadian cycles of teenagers are later, and that the cycles change throughout life. Regardless of your sleeping habit the circadian cycle seems to hit it's low temperature point at the same time. Thus, if you start going to bed at 8 PM every night your low body temperature will still arrive at the same time, regardless of your sleep habits. Take this all with a grain of salt, because my memory of the book is not infallible. It might give you a place to start researching how much of our sleep behavior is innate vs environmental as you ask. It's certainly not a new idea to sleep researchers, I bet there is an answer out there. As for the "Why We Sleep" book. I found it well written and it is well reviewed by many, so you might be interested in it.
- leesec 8y ago
  They also mentioned in the book a theory how humans might have evolved differences in schedule to optimize for keeping watch of the camp for longer, leaving the tribe protected for more hours.
  - Jach 8y ago
    Group selection isn't how evolution works.
    - Tehnix 8y ago
      It is actually very close to how it works. Evolution works by mate selection, and that’ll be heavily affected by group selection, since that alters the available choices of mates.
puranjay 8y ago
Same question. I'm not convinced that people are inherently Larks or Owls. I used to sleep late for years. 2AM was average bed time for me. Sometimes even up to 4-5AM. Then I worked to change my habits. Now I'm up by 6AM on most days and I feel more productive than ever.
- 013a 8y ago
  What were some of the strategies you used to change your habits?
  - puranjay 8y ago
    The biggest one was simply going to bed earlier. Every 3 days, I shifted my bed time by one hour. Within two weeks, I was going to bed by 11PM. The hard part is telling yourself that you won't do any work past bed time. You have to have a hard red line. Takes a bit of discipline but it's just about 2 weeks of effort before you switch to a new habit
  - matwood 8y ago
    I also used to stay up later and sleep later. Earlier this year I changed to a much earlier schedule. I didn't really have a strategy, just a process. First, I decided I wanted to get up earlier and be more productive. From experience I know I need ~7 or so hours of sleep, and I want to get up between 5-6am. That means in bed no later than 10pm. Next, set an alarm and get up. That part is simple. IMO, working out first thing is one of the key components. I go to a gym now, but am buying things like kettlebells to do quick workouts at the house. Finally, do it every single day. It's going to be hard if every weekend you keep sleeping until noon. This means on Saturday and Sunday, get up early and workout. I also have a social life and do adjust with life events. If I have something going on and am up until midnight on Friday night, I will set the alarm for 7am. I should also note that I have mostly stopped drinking alcohol. The hardest part to change was the habit of staying up late just wasting time on my phone, watching TV, or playing video games. For me it was mostly non-productive time. Even if I was productive, it was only partially productive because I had already been up all day. Now I crave that super productive time early in the morning after working out. I'm wide awake, with no interruptions, ready to go. There is also a bit of a psychological trick to beat procrastination baked in here. I wouldn't get up at 5am to play a video game or otherwise waste time. I pushed away from a comfortable pillow this morning, so I should make it worthwhile.
orev 8y ago
A 6pm caffeine cutoff is really very late. Most people would cutoff no later than 2 or 3. Not saying you’re not a natural night owl, but your approaching to caffeine is very likely not allowing you to get a clear picture of your natural cycle.
- deleted 8y ago
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- cocochanel 8y ago
  I can drink coffee after dinner and go to sleep almost immediately and feel great when I wake up. Coffee does literally nothing to my ability to sleep. It depends on the person.
- GordonS 8y ago
  I thought caffeine was only active for 4-5 hours, unless you have a particular gene mutation that causes slow metabolism?
  - orev 8y ago
    That’s the half-life. After that time it will be half gone, so the remaining half will still be active for a while.
Alterlife 8y ago
I've been an owl before kids and a lark after my kids were born. In my experience, it has to do with routine and much nothing else. If I force myself sleep everyday at 10:00 PM and wake up at 5:30 sharp, I find in about a week that my sharpest time is the hours after I wake up and before my kids get out of bed. When I have the luxury of choice, I stay awake and I find that I fall into focus post 11:00 PM when all is quiet and that deadline a couple of days ahead starts bugging me.
- yason 8y ago
  Surely people can hack themselves a routine to wake up early. But like you said, when having the luxury of choice you would likely start drifting back later again. I think that's the innate part people refer to when talking about larks vs night owls. It's not uncommon to not even be able to force yourself to sleep early, however. I've only ever managed to do that through severe sleed deprivation. For example, if I have a week when I have to wake up at 7 each morning I will only begin to fall asleep around 22 around Thursday/Friday. Up until that I've just fought my natural cycle: I can not force myself to fall asleep but I can force myself to get up early. So, I get less and less sleep until I practically fall asleep sitting. Now, if I continued the 22-07 rhythm I'd eventually stop being a zombie and become productive again (done that, too), but as soon as I finally have the luxury of choice again I'm very soon back at going to sleep after midnight, on the next day or so at the latest.
- rixed 8y ago
  I was about to report the same personal experience, so that's twice the amount of anecdotal evidence in favor of the environment/habits and against inner causes.
- stephen_g 8y ago
  As somebody with a pretty severely delayed circadian rhythm, I believe from my experience that you actually just have a normal cycle. With the abundance of electric lighting etc., everyone can be a bit lazy and go a couple of hours later than their normal cycle. But, if you actually were a night-owl, you’d be basically unable to force yourself to sleep at 10pm - at least, not until you become sleep-deprived enough (and not even then sometimes). This is one of the biggest problems people with actually delayed circadian rhythms have - people with normal rhythms (innocently, but incorrectly) believing that their experience means that it’s just a preference and routine/discipline issue for everyone.
xkcd-sucks 8y ago
When backpacking in the wilderness for weeks, I like to sleep around 12-2am and wake up at least eight hours later. When I need to wake up early for a long period of time, I do it and it never stops feeling suboptimal. I appreciate the your point re: lifestyle, technology and sleep hygiene. But I'm close to forty and it FUCKING PISSES ME OFF how seemingly everyone minimizes and deflects my concerns and observations about my own body. I function best when I sleep eight hours beginning at 2-4am. A consistent early schedule, plus daily exhausting exercise, minus artificial light changes nothing about my sleep preferences. Two plus two does not equal five.
- hammock 8y ago
  That's interesting, I find backpacking to be one of those activities where you have to get up early no matter what type you are. You want to hike during the daylight (and for alpine starts, even earlier- before the snow begins to soften by afternoon), and you want to reach your destination with plenty of daylight to make camp, cook and eat. Car camping is a little different, with electricity it's much easier to eat in the dark and stay up late partying.
  - vict00ms 8y ago
    I completely agree: even my can't-sleep-before-3am backpacking partner falls asleep before 11pm reliably when we were out. In a lot of places it's hard to sleep much past sunrise in a tent.
    - village-idiot 8y ago
      I am normally a early to bed early to rise type, and I find myself crashing early and hard when camping the moment the sun goes down.
- mindslight 8y ago
  Talking about "sleep hygiene" is still perpetuating this backwards paradigm based around expecting that people must wake up early to be productive. The early bird may get the worm, but the early worm gets eaten. I've personally found that dark hours are more productive for mental tasks like programming. AFAICT not because of secondary factors like quietness or people being around, but simply that bright light undermines my ability to concentrate. After loading a problem into one's head, and getting "in the zone", one is supposed to interrupt what they're doing to go to bed at a "reasonable hour" to live up to someone else's expectations of what a productive person should look like? Give me a break. The times I've driven across the country car camping, I've naturally fallen into waking up much earlier. And I'd much rather do physical tasks when it's light. But consciousness is not a scalar, and so it's inappropriate to extrapolate these patterns as indicative of some "true natural cycle" that's being distorted.
topkai22 8y ago
See “Internal Time” by Till Roenneberg, which is a very accessible book by a researcher in this field. If I remember correctly, the book gives some good evidence of a potential genetic basis for chronotypes, although not to the level of identify particular genes. Your case may be a bit extreme, but certainly describes me in my early 20s (not coincidentally, also the peak years of night owlism). But there are much moderate Night owl/lark situations. My kids school starts at 8a. Some in our area start at 720a. In order to reliably get my (young) children to school on time, I need to be up by 645a. This means my absolute last moment to be asleep for 8h of sleep is 1045p. No matter when I climb into bed, I have trouble managing to fall asleep by them, and I’m regularly in bed before 10p, and I have data from various fitness trackers to back this up. 1115-1130 is really the norm. Which is a long way of saying that there are definitely people with strong, biological driven sleep preferences. Modern screens and lights can exacerbate these tendencies, but assuming that people can just “fix themselves” ignores the body of evidence.
- rsfinn 8y ago
  We also have to be up by 6:45am to get our son to school, but after he's on the bus at 7:30 we typically go back to bed for an hour and a half. Would that not work for you?
  - yason 8y ago
    We did this too. But it was ever so sad ripping the kids off their beds and sending them off to school in those inhuman hours while you knew you could fall back to sleep afterwards yourself. I've tried to let them know they would be right in sleeping in longer and it's the school schedules that are wrong and perverse, from their/our perspective. And during the weekends all time in the morning is sacred: nobody can talk normally until everyone has woken up.
    - fjsolwmv 8y ago
      Little kids naturally wake up earlier.
deleted 8y ago
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rconti 8y ago
check my reply to the OP about the Why We Sleep book. I really appreciate your comment and recognize myself in a lot of it.
yason 8y ago
But, I question how much of this behavior is environmental versus innate. Is this as such an interesting academic question or would you actually want to be a early-riser instead? If so, why?
feanaro 8y ago
> I have a naturally addictive and obsessive personality combined with low self-control (when I get started on something, like a new work problem or video game, I can't put it down). How much of this is environmental vs innate? Even your hobbies could be argued to have a genetic component or perhaps how strongly blue light affects your rhythm. It's unlikely it's entirely "innate" (i.e. hereditary), but it's also unlikely that it is something that is easy to change.
dkersten 8y ago
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090623150621.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090623150621.h... https://www.livescience.com/53624-morning-person-genetic-influence.html https://www.livescience.com/53624-morning-person-genetic-inf... https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0065266017300202 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00652... I didn’t read all of these (and their references) in great detail, but there seems to be studies suggesting that chronotype is genetic. Some studies seem to be more reliable than others (ie as you said, some seem to rely on self reporting, but others seem to rely more on genetic testing or other things). But this isn’t even close to my area of expertise so take with a grain of salt and read up on it yourself.
freedomben 8y ago
I am currently reading the book "why we sleep" by Matthew Walker, and it is a fascinating scientific look at the reality of sleep schedules by an expert in the field. It sounds like you would be very interested in this. You should check it out.
fjsolwmv 8y ago
> we can't ask society to accept that starting work at 11am is fine. Why? You gave no rationale, just asserted it. What's wrong with sleeping 2-10? Why should society accept that rush hour is acceptable?
itchyouch 8y ago
Supposedly genetics plays a part in whether someone is a night owl or early riser. Ive always been in the night owl camp, however an interesting experience I have had was when I went on a full 4 day water fast. By day 2, my circadian rhythm completely reset and My 12-8 sleeping schedule became 9-5. As soon as the fast was broken with a dinner around 7pm, I became wide awake beyond 12a rether than getting tired at 9p. Dr satchin Panda has been researching body clocks and food and has pointed out that the ingestion of food starts the liver’s clock and kicks off bodily processes tbat start the clock. So it seems that food plays a very large environmental role in our sleep schedule.
krinchan 8y ago
I have delayed sleep phase and no amount of sleep hygeine (both valid and crazy hyppie nonsense) has helped. All the suplements in the world didn't help. I've done it all, no screens, special bulbs in my lamps, all of it. My therapist told me my only option was sleep medication or just finding a job that would let me use my natural waking time of 9 am. I managed the later and my life is amazing. I get a full 8 hours of sleep every night. The best way to explain my sleep schedule is count off 5 hours from sunset, that's about when I start to feel tired. Count off 9 hours from there, that's when I'll probably wake up. Summer is pretty obnoxious with how late I get to sleep. Winters I can maintain an almost normal schedule. It probably makes sense that we evolved a variety of offsets (both late sleepers and obnoxiously early risers) for our circadian cycles. It creates a natural subset of tribe members that are alert during some of the natural sleeping hours of the majority. The fact that such owls are more mentally stimulated or creative might be selecting for skills that were productive during the dark hours and furthered survival such as repairing or improving hunting weapons, baskets, and the like. As we've outgrown most of our survival pressures, it'd make sense for those genetic minorities to be more freely distributed and for the circadian rhythms of the population at large to drift and become more mixed since it no longer matters if a majority of your "tribe" has a suboptimal rhythm.

by 013a 8y ago

pseudalopex 8y ago

There are many studies.[1] Large-scale genetic studies have found markers associated with self-reported "morningness".[2][3] At least some of these markers are near genes known to affect circadian rhythms. Observational studies control factors like caffeine intake and light exposure. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronotype https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronotype [2] https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms10448 https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms10448 [3] https://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1006125 https://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/jo...

bluntfang 8y ago

>I drink a lot of coffee (never after 6pm). This is insane to me. I've drank a lot of coffee before (6+ cups per day), but if I ever drink caffeine past 2PM I don't sleep until after 2AM. Have you experimented with your caffeine intake? I highly suggest it. Once I found the correct dose (1-2 cups before 10am, no more til the next day) I've found myself to feel much, much better.

0x8BADF00D 8y ago
It depends on your tolerance. Caffeine has a half-life of 12 hours, so if you drink coffee at 6 PM, good luck sleeping before 6 AM. Unless you have a very high tolerance or are in an already fatigued state.
- deleted 8y ago
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- jjeaff 8y ago
  I think there is a lot of variation in tolerance and time horizon for caffeine. I can take a 100mg caffeine supplement (I don't drink coffee) at 3pm and go to sleep easily by midnight. And this is something I do, at most, 1 time per month. In fact, I sometimes am able to go to sleep easier either due to the crash or the fact that my activity level will have been higher the rest of the afternoon and evening and I'm just exhausted by midnight.
- twodave 8y ago
  In my experience coffee does nothing to my ability to sleep, just allows me to focus better. I realize I’m in the minority but I literally just drank a cup and am headed to bed.
  - 40four 8y ago
    Tolereance is one thing, but sensitivity is another factor to consider, I think. Tollerence is a pure function of the frequency you put a substance in your body. I'm sure my caffeine tolerance is off the charts, as I drink 4-6 cups of coffee (no sugar, sometimes cream if its crap coffee) a day. But my sensitivity is also very low. My whole life, even before coffee as a kid drinking soda, I have never felt stimulated from caffeine. I sometimes wonder if I'm immune, haha. I could literally drink a cup before bed and be fine. So why drink it you ask? Because I think it's delicious, and I belive there to be myriad other health benefits to coffee.
    - shrimpx 8y ago

dorkwood 8y ago

I think the reason I’m a “night owl” is that my experiences with morning during childhood were all negative. Morning was when I was forced to wake up to go to school, it was when I’d have water thrown at me if I slept in on the weekends, it was when I’d have to get up early to help my father with the boat. At night time, I was left alone. And night time still brings me comfort. I suspect morning people had more positive morning-related experiences than I did during childhood.

gboudrias 8y ago
This is very possible, but also there could be multiple reasons. I don't drink any coffee and have a lifestyle very similar to OP's, and usually can't fall asleep before 2am. It strikes me as improbable that people with similar lifestyles would have different sleeping habits. However, some of us may have developed these habits for the very reasons you mention; I for one had a terrible time at school.
niel 8y ago
I'm fortunate to have had parents who let me sleep in on weekends, and I definitely felt like a night owl in my teenage years. Now in my thirties I seem to function best in the morning. Typing this at 7am on boxing day - I've been awake a while already without a reason at all. Keep in mind that your circadian clock changes with different life stages. Teenagers have been shown to have circadian rhythms that run a few hours later than that of adults. One example: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2820578/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2820578/
YokoZar 8y ago
"forced to wake up to go to school" implies you were a night owl back then too.
- pavel_lishin 8y ago
  Kids have to wake up very early in America to go to school. 8am start time means you typically have to be ready to walk out the door at 7:30, and that's a pretty good scenario. If you have a longer commute to school, you might be getting up before 7am. It's pretty tragic, imo, and it's one of the biggest reasons I want opening hours to shift later.

Buttons840 8y ago

The book "Why We Sleep" talks about how all animals (and plants) have circadian cycles, and the low point of the cycle is marked by a low body temperature. They have done cross cultural studies and can see that the circadian cycles of teenagers are later, and that the cycles change throughout life. Regardless of your sleeping habit the circadian cycle seems to hit it's low temperature point at the same time. Thus, if you start going to bed at 8 PM every night your low body temperature will still arrive at the same time, regardless of your sleep habits. Take this all with a grain of salt, because my memory of the book is not infallible. It might give you a place to start researching how much of our sleep behavior is innate vs environmental as you ask. It's certainly not a new idea to sleep researchers, I bet there is an answer out there. As for the "Why We Sleep" book. I found it well written and it is well reviewed by many, so you might be interested in it.

leesec 8y ago
They also mentioned in the book a theory how humans might have evolved differences in schedule to optimize for keeping watch of the camp for longer, leaving the tribe protected for more hours.
- Jach 8y ago
  Group selection isn't how evolution works.
  - Tehnix 8y ago
    It is actually very close to how it works. Evolution works by mate selection, and that’ll be heavily affected by group selection, since that alters the available choices of mates.

puranjay 8y ago

Same question. I'm not convinced that people are inherently Larks or Owls. I used to sleep late for years. 2AM was average bed time for me. Sometimes even up to 4-5AM. Then I worked to change my habits. Now I'm up by 6AM on most days and I feel more productive than ever.

013a 8y ago
What were some of the strategies you used to change your habits?
- puranjay 8y ago
  The biggest one was simply going to bed earlier. Every 3 days, I shifted my bed time by one hour. Within two weeks, I was going to bed by 11PM. The hard part is telling yourself that you won't do any work past bed time. You have to have a hard red line. Takes a bit of discipline but it's just about 2 weeks of effort before you switch to a new habit
- matwood 8y ago
  I also used to stay up later and sleep later. Earlier this year I changed to a much earlier schedule. I didn't really have a strategy, just a process. First, I decided I wanted to get up earlier and be more productive. From experience I know I need ~7 or so hours of sleep, and I want to get up between 5-6am. That means in bed no later than 10pm. Next, set an alarm and get up. That part is simple. IMO, working out first thing is one of the key components. I go to a gym now, but am buying things like kettlebells to do quick workouts at the house. Finally, do it every single day. It's going to be hard if every weekend you keep sleeping until noon. This means on Saturday and Sunday, get up early and workout. I also have a social life and do adjust with life events. If I have something going on and am up until midnight on Friday night, I will set the alarm for 7am. I should also note that I have mostly stopped drinking alcohol. The hardest part to change was the habit of staying up late just wasting time on my phone, watching TV, or playing video games. For me it was mostly non-productive time. Even if I was productive, it was only partially productive because I had already been up all day. Now I crave that super productive time early in the morning after working out. I'm wide awake, with no interruptions, ready to go. There is also a bit of a psychological trick to beat procrastination baked in here. I wouldn't get up at 5am to play a video game or otherwise waste time. I pushed away from a comfortable pillow this morning, so I should make it worthwhile.

orev 8y ago

A 6pm caffeine cutoff is really very late. Most people would cutoff no later than 2 or 3. Not saying you’re not a natural night owl, but your approaching to caffeine is very likely not allowing you to get a clear picture of your natural cycle.

deleted 8y ago
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cocochanel 8y ago
I can drink coffee after dinner and go to sleep almost immediately and feel great when I wake up. Coffee does literally nothing to my ability to sleep. It depends on the person.
GordonS 8y ago
I thought caffeine was only active for 4-5 hours, unless you have a particular gene mutation that causes slow metabolism?
- orev 8y ago
  That’s the half-life. After that time it will be half gone, so the remaining half will still be active for a while.

Alterlife 8y ago

I've been an owl before kids and a lark after my kids were born. In my experience, it has to do with routine and much nothing else. If I force myself sleep everyday at 10:00 PM and wake up at 5:30 sharp, I find in about a week that my sharpest time is the hours after I wake up and before my kids get out of bed. When I have the luxury of choice, I stay awake and I find that I fall into focus post 11:00 PM when all is quiet and that deadline a couple of days ahead starts bugging me.

yason 8y ago
Surely people can hack themselves a routine to wake up early. But like you said, when having the luxury of choice you would likely start drifting back later again. I think that's the innate part people refer to when talking about larks vs night owls. It's not uncommon to not even be able to force yourself to sleep early, however. I've only ever managed to do that through severe sleed deprivation. For example, if I have a week when I have to wake up at 7 each morning I will only begin to fall asleep around 22 around Thursday/Friday. Up until that I've just fought my natural cycle: I can not force myself to fall asleep but I can force myself to get up early. So, I get less and less sleep until I practically fall asleep sitting. Now, if I continued the 22-07 rhythm I'd eventually stop being a zombie and become productive again (done that, too), but as soon as I finally have the luxury of choice again I'm very soon back at going to sleep after midnight, on the next day or so at the latest.
rixed 8y ago
I was about to report the same personal experience, so that's twice the amount of anecdotal evidence in favor of the environment/habits and against inner causes.
stephen_g 8y ago
As somebody with a pretty severely delayed circadian rhythm, I believe from my experience that you actually just have a normal cycle. With the abundance of electric lighting etc., everyone can be a bit lazy and go a couple of hours later than their normal cycle. But, if you actually were a night-owl, you’d be basically unable to force yourself to sleep at 10pm - at least, not until you become sleep-deprived enough (and not even then sometimes). This is one of the biggest problems people with actually delayed circadian rhythms have - people with normal rhythms (innocently, but incorrectly) believing that their experience means that it’s just a preference and routine/discipline issue for everyone.

xkcd-sucks 8y ago

When backpacking in the wilderness for weeks, I like to sleep around 12-2am and wake up at least eight hours later. When I need to wake up early for a long period of time, I do it and it never stops feeling suboptimal. I appreciate the your point re: lifestyle, technology and sleep hygiene. But I'm close to forty and it FUCKING PISSES ME OFF how seemingly everyone minimizes and deflects my concerns and observations about my own body. I function best when I sleep eight hours beginning at 2-4am. A consistent early schedule, plus daily exhausting exercise, minus artificial light changes nothing about my sleep preferences. Two plus two does not equal five.

hammock 8y ago
That's interesting, I find backpacking to be one of those activities where you have to get up early no matter what type you are. You want to hike during the daylight (and for alpine starts, even earlier- before the snow begins to soften by afternoon), and you want to reach your destination with plenty of daylight to make camp, cook and eat. Car camping is a little different, with electricity it's much easier to eat in the dark and stay up late partying.
- vict00ms 8y ago
  I completely agree: even my can't-sleep-before-3am backpacking partner falls asleep before 11pm reliably when we were out. In a lot of places it's hard to sleep much past sunrise in a tent.
  - village-idiot 8y ago
    I am normally a early to bed early to rise type, and I find myself crashing early and hard when camping the moment the sun goes down.
mindslight 8y ago
Talking about "sleep hygiene" is still perpetuating this backwards paradigm based around expecting that people must wake up early to be productive. The early bird may get the worm, but the early worm gets eaten. I've personally found that dark hours are more productive for mental tasks like programming. AFAICT not because of secondary factors like quietness or people being around, but simply that bright light undermines my ability to concentrate. After loading a problem into one's head, and getting "in the zone", one is supposed to interrupt what they're doing to go to bed at a "reasonable hour" to live up to someone else's expectations of what a productive person should look like? Give me a break. The times I've driven across the country car camping, I've naturally fallen into waking up much earlier. And I'd much rather do physical tasks when it's light. But consciousness is not a scalar, and so it's inappropriate to extrapolate these patterns as indicative of some "true natural cycle" that's being distorted.

topkai22 8y ago

See “Internal Time” by Till Roenneberg, which is a very accessible book by a researcher in this field. If I remember correctly, the book gives some good evidence of a potential genetic basis for chronotypes, although not to the level of identify particular genes. Your case may be a bit extreme, but certainly describes me in my early 20s (not coincidentally, also the peak years of night owlism). But there are much moderate Night owl/lark situations. My kids school starts at 8a. Some in our area start at 720a. In order to reliably get my (young) children to school on time, I need to be up by 645a. This means my absolute last moment to be asleep for 8h of sleep is 1045p. No matter when I climb into bed, I have trouble managing to fall asleep by them, and I’m regularly in bed before 10p, and I have data from various fitness trackers to back this up. 1115-1130 is really the norm. Which is a long way of saying that there are definitely people with strong, biological driven sleep preferences. Modern screens and lights can exacerbate these tendencies, but assuming that people can just “fix themselves” ignores the body of evidence.

rsfinn 8y ago
We also have to be up by 6:45am to get our son to school, but after he's on the bus at 7:30 we typically go back to bed for an hour and a half. Would that not work for you?
- yason 8y ago
  We did this too. But it was ever so sad ripping the kids off their beds and sending them off to school in those inhuman hours while you knew you could fall back to sleep afterwards yourself. I've tried to let them know they would be right in sleeping in longer and it's the school schedules that are wrong and perverse, from their/our perspective. And during the weekends all time in the morning is sacred: nobody can talk normally until everyone has woken up.
  - fjsolwmv 8y ago
    Little kids naturally wake up earlier.

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rconti 8y ago

check my reply to the OP about the Why We Sleep book. I really appreciate your comment and recognize myself in a lot of it.

yason 8y ago

But, I question how much of this behavior is environmental versus innate. Is this as such an interesting academic question or would you actually want to be a early-riser instead? If so, why?

feanaro 8y ago

> I have a naturally addictive and obsessive personality combined with low self-control (when I get started on something, like a new work problem or video game, I can't put it down). How much of this is environmental vs innate? Even your hobbies could be argued to have a genetic component or perhaps how strongly blue light affects your rhythm. It's unlikely it's entirely "innate" (i.e. hereditary), but it's also unlikely that it is something that is easy to change.

dkersten 8y ago

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090623150621.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090623150621.h... https://www.livescience.com/53624-morning-person-genetic-influence.html https://www.livescience.com/53624-morning-person-genetic-inf... https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0065266017300202 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00652... I didn’t read all of these (and their references) in great detail, but there seems to be studies suggesting that chronotype is genetic. Some studies seem to be more reliable than others (ie as you said, some seem to rely on self reporting, but others seem to rely more on genetic testing or other things). But this isn’t even close to my area of expertise so take with a grain of salt and read up on it yourself.

freedomben 8y ago

I am currently reading the book "why we sleep" by Matthew Walker, and it is a fascinating scientific look at the reality of sleep schedules by an expert in the field. It sounds like you would be very interested in this. You should check it out.

fjsolwmv 8y ago

> we can't ask society to accept that starting work at 11am is fine. Why? You gave no rationale, just asserted it. What's wrong with sleeping 2-10? Why should society accept that rush hour is acceptable?

itchyouch 8y ago

Supposedly genetics plays a part in whether someone is a night owl or early riser. Ive always been in the night owl camp, however an interesting experience I have had was when I went on a full 4 day water fast. By day 2, my circadian rhythm completely reset and My 12-8 sleeping schedule became 9-5. As soon as the fast was broken with a dinner around 7pm, I became wide awake beyond 12a rether than getting tired at 9p. Dr satchin Panda has been researching body clocks and food and has pointed out that the ingestion of food starts the liver’s clock and kicks off bodily processes tbat start the clock. So it seems that food plays a very large environmental role in our sleep schedule.

krinchan 8y ago

I have delayed sleep phase and no amount of sleep hygeine (both valid and crazy hyppie nonsense) has helped. All the suplements in the world didn't help. I've done it all, no screens, special bulbs in my lamps, all of it. My therapist told me my only option was sleep medication or just finding a job that would let me use my natural waking time of 9 am. I managed the later and my life is amazing. I get a full 8 hours of sleep every night. The best way to explain my sleep schedule is count off 5 hours from sunset, that's about when I start to feel tired. Count off 9 hours from there, that's when I'll probably wake up. Summer is pretty obnoxious with how late I get to sleep. Winters I can maintain an almost normal schedule. It probably makes sense that we evolved a variety of offsets (both late sleepers and obnoxiously early risers) for our circadian cycles. It creates a natural subset of tribe members that are alert during some of the natural sleeping hours of the majority. The fact that such owls are more mentally stimulated or creative might be selecting for skills that were productive during the dark hours and furthered survival such as repairing or improving hunting weapons, baskets, and the like. As we've outgrown most of our survival pressures, it'd make sense for those genetic minorities to be more freely distributed and for the circadian rhythms of the population at large to drift and become more mixed since it no longer matters if a majority of your "tribe" has a suboptimal rhythm.