6 ms·

>We wake up students too early I agree, but... you were staying up until 1-2am playing video games. C'mon.

barry-cotter 7y ago
I stayed up til the same time reading books for the same reason OP stayed up, not being tired. Teenagers have a delayed sleep cycle compared to adults, it’s not a matter of choice, it’s when your body says to wake up or sleep autonomously, same as my baby wakes at 5am and sleeps at 8pm, because that’s what his body is telling him to do.
- wrktanice 7y ago
  Were you not tired because you didn't need sleep, or because your mind was being stimulated? It's quite easy to not feel tired when you're stimulated, but it doesn't mean you don't need sleep.
  - cgriswald 7y ago
    Sleepiness in humans is driven by the number of hours they remain awake and by time of day, more or less independently. In teens sleep onset as a result of these are both delayed relative to children and adults. Certainly there are cases where tired teens stay up because they are stimulated the same as happens in adults. But generally speaking, teens don’t stay up because they are playing Starcraft. They play Starcraft because they are up.
    - wrktanice 7y ago
      > teens don’t stay up because they are playing Starcraft. They play Starcraft because they are up. This is, at least in my experience, completely untrue. When I play Starcraft, I'll easily play till 2-3 am before I start feeling tired. And I'd continue playing, but I'm literally succumbing to exhaustion at that point. If I force myself to before that, say midnight, I start feeling tired almost immediately. And if I don't play at all, and don't substitute gaming with some equally stimulating activity, I can easily be tired and ready to sleep by 10 or 11 pm. Not to mention, in addition to the mental stimulation, the impact of staring at bright blue light on natural melatonin production.
      - jay_kyburz 7y ago
        Yeah, I'm nearly 50, and I never start a new game of anything after 9 because it wakes me up to much, I can easily find myself still playing and not tired at all after midnight. I need at least an hour of winding down after gaming before bed.
        matwood 7y ago
        Back when I played MMOs (DAoC and WoW) I thought I was a night person. When I finally quit those games, I realized I wasn't a night person at all. I had just been forcing myself awake. Not only did I start going to be earlier, but sleep came much easier.
      - cgriswald 7y ago
        Sure. But “Starcraft” in this instance is a metaphor for any activity. And he’s wasn’t staying up until 2-3 but until 1-2, and he wasn’t an adult. I didn’t have Starcraft growing up and I was still up that late, even if I was just lying in bed.
  - pfranz 7y ago
    I'm sure gaming and screen-time don't help, but it's fairly well known that younger people tend to stay up late and have difficulty waking up in the morning. In high school I never understood why they did certain things like offer AP classes only at 1st period or offer any "difficult" core classes 1st period (well, I knew it was convenient for them, but horrible for the average student). California just passed a law saying schools must start after 8am. I remember hearing talk about a theory why younger people stay up late and older people get up early. It helped provide close to 24/7 monitoring of the village for danger.
- watwut 7y ago
  Babies dont wake up at 5 not go to sleep at 8. Their sleep can be highly irregular or regular, may be affected by light or not. And when it is affected by light, you can make the room dark in the morning. Babies don't have a clock.
  - barry-cotter 7y ago
    I didn’t say babies do anything. I was talking about one specific child, with whose behavior I have intimate experience. His sleep and wake patterns are definitely not precise enough to set a clock by them but he really does generally go to sleep around eight and he’s awake between five and six in the morning, dark or bright, usually closer to five.
webkike 7y ago
how is this any different from a chess club of a sports club? Seriously, all of those clubs demand many hours of dedication. If you do a sport in highschool you basically have to be able to get 4 hours of sleep and deal with it
- ApolloFortyNine 7y ago
  I played football all Highschool, started school at 8am (so bus at 7-715), done with football by 6pm. This leaves you 4-5 hours depending on how long it takes you to get ready. This is more than enough to do homework, though some days definitely sucked more than others. In my opinion it helped develop valuable time management skills.
  - lotsofpulp 7y ago
    In my opinion, that leaves you no time to do anything "unstructured". No time to socialize with family or neighbors, no time to just go explore and wander or experiment, no time to learn to cook with one's parents or participate in cultural activities that may not be reflected in the school year. I don't mind sports, but the way it's placed on a pedestal in the US above all other activities is ridiculous to me. Not keen on homework that takes over after school hours either.
    - ApolloFortyNine 7y ago
      It's hard to argue you don't develop social skills in football, and it'd be really hard to put in 3 hours a day for 4 months (8 hours a day for the month of August) and not make friends. The teamwork aspect of any sport is difficult to teach in a school setting. After football season I got out of school at 3.
    - astura 7y ago
      Um you know football isn't year-round, right? Also, why the fuck is it "impossible" to socialize with family and neighbors at 6pm? They are probably at work until 5pm anyways. By the time someone is old enough to play football they should already know how to cook.
zeta0134 7y ago
I also stayed up until 1-2am, regularly, starting around junior high. I performed a great many tasks, mostly teaching myself various programming languages, always at the relative expense of my concentration in the next day's classes. Two things were the primary motivating factors in developing this habit: - My parents wouldn't leave me alone for very long in the evenings, so I felt like I wouldn't get a chance to really concentrate until they were off to bed - My brain gets tired around 10pm like a normal person, but then it gets a "second wind" and is up happily until 3-4am, with intensely increased clarity of focus. The first trait was obviously correctable and probably circumstantial, but the second feels far more innate. I just focus better right after the sun goes down, and I'm not really sure why. It's like all the stress from the day melts away, and I get a chance to finally be myself for a few hours. So, I work an evening shift (my work day starts at noon and gets out quite late) and I couldn't be happier for it. It's a shame that this combination is both common, and regarded as lazy by society at large, because it seems to be quite the opposite. I get my best work done in the evenings, and so do lots of other people. I wish that we were generally more accepting of these traits, because if I hadn't had the good fortune to stumble into a job with such a well-aligned shift, I would still be struggling to sleep properly most nights.
- hwillis 7y ago
  > My brain gets tired around 10pm like a normal person, but then it gets a "second wind" and is up happily until 3-4am, with intensely increased clarity of focus. Not saying this isn't your natural predisposition, but FWIW this is pretty much exactly what happens to everyone with a disrupted sleep schedule. Or any disrupted normal cycle, really[1]. Probably the large majority of people have experienced this. [1]: Fasting is one example- you will be starving by lunch or dinner, but if you wait a few hours longer the hunger will go away pretty much entirely. You may feel sluggish and slow when you're hungry, but once your brain realizes you aren't going to eat you will feel lighter and more energetic. If your body needs to go past its normal cycles, your brain will give you the resources to do so. The hunger and tiredness you feel normally are more like periodic maintenance reminders.
  - zeta0134 7y ago
t34543 7y ago
Which is normal for most teens. School starts way too early.
sbochins 7y ago
Part of the problem is adolescents tend to have a later internal clock. Ideally we would structure school around a later day to compensate for this. This doesn’t only apply to Starcraft players ;)
MperorM 7y ago
In my defense I was a teenager! Whether my choices were wise is not too important. What's important is that I almost failed mathematics because of my poor choices. If every other teenager makes equally stupid choices, causing them to not learn vital skills, we should still change up the system. Teenagers will teenage, build the system around it!

I stayed up til the same time reading books for the same reason OP stayed up, not being tired. Teenagers have a delayed sleep cycle compared to adults, it’s not a matter of choice, it’s when your body says to wake up or sleep autonomously, same as my baby wakes at 5am and sleeps at 8pm, because that’s what his body is telling him to do.

wrktanice 7y ago
Were you not tired because you didn't need sleep, or because your mind was being stimulated? It's quite easy to not feel tired when you're stimulated, but it doesn't mean you don't need sleep.
- cgriswald 7y ago
  Sleepiness in humans is driven by the number of hours they remain awake and by time of day, more or less independently. In teens sleep onset as a result of these are both delayed relative to children and adults. Certainly there are cases where tired teens stay up because they are stimulated the same as happens in adults. But generally speaking, teens don’t stay up because they are playing Starcraft. They play Starcraft because they are up.
  - wrktanice 7y ago
    > teens don’t stay up because they are playing Starcraft. They play Starcraft because they are up. This is, at least in my experience, completely untrue. When I play Starcraft, I'll easily play till 2-3 am before I start feeling tired. And I'd continue playing, but I'm literally succumbing to exhaustion at that point. If I force myself to before that, say midnight, I start feeling tired almost immediately. And if I don't play at all, and don't substitute gaming with some equally stimulating activity, I can easily be tired and ready to sleep by 10 or 11 pm. Not to mention, in addition to the mental stimulation, the impact of staring at bright blue light on natural melatonin production.
    - jay_kyburz 7y ago
      Yeah, I'm nearly 50, and I never start a new game of anything after 9 because it wakes me up to much, I can easily find myself still playing and not tired at all after midnight. I need at least an hour of winding down after gaming before bed.
      - matwood 7y ago
        Back when I played MMOs (DAoC and WoW) I thought I was a night person. When I finally quit those games, I realized I wasn't a night person at all. I had just been forcing myself awake. Not only did I start going to be earlier, but sleep came much easier.
    - cgriswald 7y ago
      Sure. But “Starcraft” in this instance is a metaphor for any activity. And he’s wasn’t staying up until 2-3 but until 1-2, and he wasn’t an adult. I didn’t have Starcraft growing up and I was still up that late, even if I was just lying in bed.
- pfranz 7y ago
  I'm sure gaming and screen-time don't help, but it's fairly well known that younger people tend to stay up late and have difficulty waking up in the morning. In high school I never understood why they did certain things like offer AP classes only at 1st period or offer any "difficult" core classes 1st period (well, I knew it was convenient for them, but horrible for the average student). California just passed a law saying schools must start after 8am. I remember hearing talk about a theory why younger people stay up late and older people get up early. It helped provide close to 24/7 monitoring of the village for danger.
watwut 7y ago
Babies dont wake up at 5 not go to sleep at 8. Their sleep can be highly irregular or regular, may be affected by light or not. And when it is affected by light, you can make the room dark in the morning. Babies don't have a clock.
- barry-cotter 7y ago
  I didn’t say babies do anything. I was talking about one specific child, with whose behavior I have intimate experience. His sleep and wake patterns are definitely not precise enough to set a clock by them but he really does generally go to sleep around eight and he’s awake between five and six in the morning, dark or bright, usually closer to five.

webkike 7y ago

how is this any different from a chess club of a sports club? Seriously, all of those clubs demand many hours of dedication. If you do a sport in highschool you basically have to be able to get 4 hours of sleep and deal with it

ApolloFortyNine 7y ago
I played football all Highschool, started school at 8am (so bus at 7-715), done with football by 6pm. This leaves you 4-5 hours depending on how long it takes you to get ready. This is more than enough to do homework, though some days definitely sucked more than others. In my opinion it helped develop valuable time management skills.
- lotsofpulp 7y ago
  In my opinion, that leaves you no time to do anything "unstructured". No time to socialize with family or neighbors, no time to just go explore and wander or experiment, no time to learn to cook with one's parents or participate in cultural activities that may not be reflected in the school year. I don't mind sports, but the way it's placed on a pedestal in the US above all other activities is ridiculous to me. Not keen on homework that takes over after school hours either.
  - ApolloFortyNine 7y ago
    It's hard to argue you don't develop social skills in football, and it'd be really hard to put in 3 hours a day for 4 months (8 hours a day for the month of August) and not make friends. The teamwork aspect of any sport is difficult to teach in a school setting. After football season I got out of school at 3.
  - astura 7y ago
    Um you know football isn't year-round, right? Also, why the fuck is it "impossible" to socialize with family and neighbors at 6pm? They are probably at work until 5pm anyways. By the time someone is old enough to play football they should already know how to cook.

zeta0134 7y ago

I also stayed up until 1-2am, regularly, starting around junior high. I performed a great many tasks, mostly teaching myself various programming languages, always at the relative expense of my concentration in the next day's classes. Two things were the primary motivating factors in developing this habit: - My parents wouldn't leave me alone for very long in the evenings, so I felt like I wouldn't get a chance to really concentrate until they were off to bed - My brain gets tired around 10pm like a normal person, but then it gets a "second wind" and is up happily until 3-4am, with intensely increased clarity of focus. The first trait was obviously correctable and probably circumstantial, but the second feels far more innate. I just focus better right after the sun goes down, and I'm not really sure why. It's like all the stress from the day melts away, and I get a chance to finally be myself for a few hours. So, I work an evening shift (my work day starts at noon and gets out quite late) and I couldn't be happier for it. It's a shame that this combination is both common, and regarded as lazy by society at large, because it seems to be quite the opposite. I get my best work done in the evenings, and so do lots of other people. I wish that we were generally more accepting of these traits, because if I hadn't had the good fortune to stumble into a job with such a well-aligned shift, I would still be struggling to sleep properly most nights.

hwillis 7y ago
> My brain gets tired around 10pm like a normal person, but then it gets a "second wind" and is up happily until 3-4am, with intensely increased clarity of focus. Not saying this isn't your natural predisposition, but FWIW this is pretty much exactly what happens to everyone with a disrupted sleep schedule. Or any disrupted normal cycle, really[1]. Probably the large majority of people have experienced this. [1]: Fasting is one example- you will be starving by lunch or dinner, but if you wait a few hours longer the hunger will go away pretty much entirely. You may feel sluggish and slow when you're hungry, but once your brain realizes you aren't going to eat you will feel lighter and more energetic. If your body needs to go past its normal cycles, your brain will give you the resources to do so. The hunger and tiredness you feel normally are more like periodic maintenance reminders.
- zeta0134 7y ago

t34543 7y ago

Which is normal for most teens. School starts way too early.

sbochins 7y ago

Part of the problem is adolescents tend to have a later internal clock. Ideally we would structure school around a later day to compensate for this. This doesn’t only apply to Starcraft players ;)

MperorM 7y ago

In my defense I was a teenager! Whether my choices were wise is not too important. What's important is that I almost failed mathematics because of my poor choices. If every other teenager makes equally stupid choices, causing them to not learn vital skills, we should still change up the system. Teenagers will teenage, build the system around it!