7 ms·

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 peri

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.
- wallace_f 8y ago
  It seems to make evolutionary sense that groups benefit from night owls, etc., and so would develop them. Unfortunately, my non-normal sleep not only doesn't qualify me for any subsidized treatments, recognized disorders, non-discrimination statutes, or not even sympathy from most people.
- de_watcher 8y ago
  > 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. It's more like the Balmer's peak effect: the brain is so numb that it can't lose the concentration.
  - mindslight 8y ago
    Why are you using negative terms to describe something you seemingly have no experience with? I wasn't talking about running on fumes at 2am to pounding pounding pounding techno music. I'll have days where I do not feel fully awake until it starts to gets dark. Given many mammals are nocturnal, I would presume there's some bona fide physiological reason for this rather than a deficiency of something else. At any rate, there's a huge difference in stating advice in a personal-constructive way (for instance, I'm fully aware I presently need to detox caffeine cold turkey, and am waiting for the opportunity to do so), and pushing paternalistic "one size fits all" social mores whereby people on later schedules are assumed to just not be taking responsibility for themselves.
- Sargos 8y ago
  > The early bird may get the worm, but the early worm gets eaten. This makes no sense. All worms get eaten randomly because all worms have to surface at the same time. Earliness and lateness don't change the chance you will be eaten by the early birds. But the original phrase is true that the early bird gets the worm because it shows up in the window the worms are all surfacing and the late bird misses the window and goes hungry. Leave the original phrase intact and maybe ditch the added second part.
aaronblohowiak 8y ago
Delayed sleep phase syndrome is an ada protected disability, your employer must make reasonable accommodation. I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice, but might be worth looking into.
- pishpash 8y ago
  Never heard of this, details?
  - efoto 8y ago
    https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/14295-delayed-sleep-phase-syndrome-dsps https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/14295-delayed...
- CryptoPunk 8y ago
  Just goes to show that anti-discrimination laws are a ridiculous imposition of arbitrary social demands onto private contracts. We now have an enormous rule book on how people are allowed to exercise their contracting rights with other consenting adults, when the only rule that should apply is whether the terms are mutually agreed upon.
  - beefield 8y ago
    I am a bit curious whether you think that people actually are capable of understanding the terms they are about to agree in any non-trivial case or just that people that do not understand the terms properly deserve every ill they get because they made contracts they did not understand? Sorry to be blunt, but you do understand that the first one makes you simply stupid in the sense that you have no clue about people's capacities (for a well defined and simple example that most people seem to get wrong even after trying hard, see [1].) And what comes to second possibility, I hope you understand you would be evil by a textbook definition[2]. So, which is it? Are you stupid or evil? Or maybe both? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_problem [2] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/evil https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/evil
Spooky23 8y ago
I don’t know that people are minimizing you. It’s just that your observations aren’t consistent with how it works. Sleep cycles exist and aren’t innate. Your engrained behavior or schedule is something that sets your cycle, but is changeable. Based on what you’re saying, it sounds like from time to time you need to wake up early, and you do so by rolling back bedtime or compressing by losing sleep. (By accident or design) Yup — doing that will make you feel like crap. You need to roll forward, not back. You can take a long weekend and roll your sleep schedule forward 6-10 hours at a time and sleep from 9P-5A without much “suboptimality”. There is lots of research about this in industrial and military contexts... “rolling back” your schedule is unhealthy and increases accident rates in workplace situations substantially. As someone who had similar habits, I’d respectfully suggest that you consider changing it. Living your life out of cycle with the world is bad for you... you experience more stress as a result. It made a measurable positive medical impact on me.
- thisiszilff 8y ago
  Curiously the book Why We Sleep says the exact opposite: we all have natural sleep cycles that differ and it's genetic, impossible to change. What I've noticed is that it's possible to keep a consistent schedule and overcome all of that inertia, but if you slip up you'll find yourself back in your natural cycle. Interestingly, the cited reason for this is that evolutionary, it's an advantage to not have everyone asleep at the same time.
- grumdan 8y ago
  > Sleep cycles exist and aren’t innate. Your engrained behavior or schedule is something that sets your cycle, but is changeable. How do you know this? Not trying to be snarky, I'm just wondering if you have any evidence for this claim.
  - hkt 8y ago
    This article (which I was reminded of by this thread) gives an overview of sleep for teenagers, and it isn't radically different for anyone else either: https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/sleep-and-tiredness/why-are-teens-always-tired/ https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/sleep-and-tiredness/why-are-tee... I expect that there is variation within the general population with regards to body clocks.
steve_taylor 8y ago
The way you feel about your own body isn’t science.

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.

wallace_f 8y ago
It seems to make evolutionary sense that groups benefit from night owls, etc., and so would develop them. Unfortunately, my non-normal sleep not only doesn't qualify me for any subsidized treatments, recognized disorders, non-discrimination statutes, or not even sympathy from most people.
de_watcher 8y ago
> 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. It's more like the Balmer's peak effect: the brain is so numb that it can't lose the concentration.
- mindslight 8y ago
  Why are you using negative terms to describe something you seemingly have no experience with? I wasn't talking about running on fumes at 2am to pounding pounding pounding techno music. I'll have days where I do not feel fully awake until it starts to gets dark. Given many mammals are nocturnal, I would presume there's some bona fide physiological reason for this rather than a deficiency of something else. At any rate, there's a huge difference in stating advice in a personal-constructive way (for instance, I'm fully aware I presently need to detox caffeine cold turkey, and am waiting for the opportunity to do so), and pushing paternalistic "one size fits all" social mores whereby people on later schedules are assumed to just not be taking responsibility for themselves.
Sargos 8y ago
> The early bird may get the worm, but the early worm gets eaten. This makes no sense. All worms get eaten randomly because all worms have to surface at the same time. Earliness and lateness don't change the chance you will be eaten by the early birds. But the original phrase is true that the early bird gets the worm because it shows up in the window the worms are all surfacing and the late bird misses the window and goes hungry. Leave the original phrase intact and maybe ditch the added second part.

aaronblohowiak 8y ago

Delayed sleep phase syndrome is an ada protected disability, your employer must make reasonable accommodation. I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice, but might be worth looking into.

pishpash 8y ago
Never heard of this, details?
- efoto 8y ago
  https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/14295-delayed-sleep-phase-syndrome-dsps https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/14295-delayed...
CryptoPunk 8y ago
Just goes to show that anti-discrimination laws are a ridiculous imposition of arbitrary social demands onto private contracts. We now have an enormous rule book on how people are allowed to exercise their contracting rights with other consenting adults, when the only rule that should apply is whether the terms are mutually agreed upon.
- beefield 8y ago
  I am a bit curious whether you think that people actually are capable of understanding the terms they are about to agree in any non-trivial case or just that people that do not understand the terms properly deserve every ill they get because they made contracts they did not understand? Sorry to be blunt, but you do understand that the first one makes you simply stupid in the sense that you have no clue about people's capacities (for a well defined and simple example that most people seem to get wrong even after trying hard, see [1].) And what comes to second possibility, I hope you understand you would be evil by a textbook definition[2]. So, which is it? Are you stupid or evil? Or maybe both? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_problem [2] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/evil https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/evil

Spooky23 8y ago

I don’t know that people are minimizing you. It’s just that your observations aren’t consistent with how it works. Sleep cycles exist and aren’t innate. Your engrained behavior or schedule is something that sets your cycle, but is changeable. Based on what you’re saying, it sounds like from time to time you need to wake up early, and you do so by rolling back bedtime or compressing by losing sleep. (By accident or design) Yup — doing that will make you feel like crap. You need to roll forward, not back. You can take a long weekend and roll your sleep schedule forward 6-10 hours at a time and sleep from 9P-5A without much “suboptimality”. There is lots of research about this in industrial and military contexts... “rolling back” your schedule is unhealthy and increases accident rates in workplace situations substantially. As someone who had similar habits, I’d respectfully suggest that you consider changing it. Living your life out of cycle with the world is bad for you... you experience more stress as a result. It made a measurable positive medical impact on me.

thisiszilff 8y ago
Curiously the book Why We Sleep says the exact opposite: we all have natural sleep cycles that differ and it's genetic, impossible to change. What I've noticed is that it's possible to keep a consistent schedule and overcome all of that inertia, but if you slip up you'll find yourself back in your natural cycle. Interestingly, the cited reason for this is that evolutionary, it's an advantage to not have everyone asleep at the same time.
grumdan 8y ago
> Sleep cycles exist and aren’t innate. Your engrained behavior or schedule is something that sets your cycle, but is changeable. How do you know this? Not trying to be snarky, I'm just wondering if you have any evidence for this claim.
- hkt 8y ago
  This article (which I was reminded of by this thread) gives an overview of sleep for teenagers, and it isn't radically different for anyone else either: https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/sleep-and-tiredness/why-are-teens-always-tired/ https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/sleep-and-tiredness/why-are-tee... I expect that there is variation within the general population with regards to body clocks.

steve_taylor 8y ago

The way you feel about your own body isn’t science.