4 ms·
I think there's a lot to be said for habits swaying it but I think "biological" night-owl-ism is definitely a thing. I've always been a night owl. The most in-
by ye-olde-sysrq 4y ago
I think there's a lot to be said for habits swaying it but I think "biological" night-owl-ism is definitely a thing.
I've always been a night owl. The most in-tune I've ever felt with my biological clock is when, one summer in college, I ended up going to bed at 5-6am and waking up around 3-4pm. I had friends on IRC who lived in new zealand who I ran a minecraft server with and did minecraft plugin coding with (enabled by the weird sleep cycle, not caused by it).
College and school etc always had me feeling exhausted. I maintain that I must have some innate mathematical ability because my 7:30 AM algebra 2 class in high school was performed exclusively by my subconscious as my brain got an extra hour of sleep regardless of what the external world was trying to impose upon it.
Anyway, blah blah night owl, then I had kids. Both the father and mother have a lot of hormonal changes (obviously the mother moreso but it's still nontrivial for the father) and all of a sudden I was able to wake up with the baby at 6:30am after 7 hours of shitty sleep with relatively no problem. Where was this in high school?? Well, the sleep part, not the baby part. But I digress.
Baby becomes toddler and start sleeping 10-12 hours at night, hormones recede, normalcy restores, and suddenly waking up to go to work at even 9am resumes being mild-to-moderately painful.
Have next baby. Cycle repeats.
Currently typing this having gotten up at 7 with baby #3 so this is top of mind.
- mlsu 4y agoThis is total speculation on my part, but it seems like there would be a strong evolutionary pressure, at a group level, to select for a mixture of night owls and early risers. The "night owls" stay up to watch for predators to keep the group safe. Those groups without some late sleeper DNA ultimately get selected out.