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Night shift seems to have a very strong causal effect on my sleep cycles. Up until about ten years ago I was a night owl, rarely falling asleep before midnight
by lisper 8mo ago
Night shift seems to have a very strong causal effect on my sleep cycles. Up until about ten years ago I was a night owl, rarely falling asleep before midnight and rarely waking up before 8. Then I started getting serious about light hygiene and using night shift and now I'm a serious day person, rarely staying awake after 11 and rarely waking up after 7. But the real clincher is that when I travel I don't change the time zone on my computer (because it screws up my calendar). But my sleep cycle continues to track my home time zone for a very long time. I life in California, but at the moment I'm in Hawaii. I've been here three weeks so far. At home I'd fall asleep around 11 and wake up around 7, but here I'm getting sleepy at 9 and waking up at 5.
My wife, on the other hand, is a hard-core night owl even with night shift. So apparently there is a lot of individual variation.
This article has inspired me to do a control experiment by switching night shift off. Check back here in a week or so for the results.
- ndkdofococofo 8mo ago[dead]
- Barbing 8mo ago>inspired me to do a control experiment Delightful, see ya the 27th!
- lisper 7mo agoSo the results are in, and I haven't actually noticed much of a change. Last night I went to sleep after 11 and woke up at 5:30. So apparently night shift by itself doesn't have much of an impact one way or the other, at least not in a week.
- Barbing 7mo agoMaybe a few weeks or months… or nevers, who knows! Thanks for the update :)
- gowld 8mo ago> Night shift seems to have a very strong causal effect on my sleep cycles. > light hygiene and using night shift The OP article is primarily about separating the variables you lumped together.
- nandomrumber 8mo ago> light hygiene Awesome, hadn’t come across this term before. You might appreciate the concept of chronotypes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronotype https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronotype The DOAC podcast recently hosted Dr. Michael Breus on same. Apple Podcast link, or conjure your own: https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/the-diary-of-a-ceo-with-steven-bartlett/id1291423644?i=1000748859868 https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/the-diary-of-a-ceo-wit...
- Perizors 8mo agoBear in mind that chronotypes, as stated in the wiki, only varies about 2-3 hours from each other. This is just to say that there is no nocturnal person in terms of biology, we are all diurnal mammals after all.
- nandomrumber 8mo agoYeah, like anything, proponents like the guy in the podcast I referenced probably overhype the importance / impact.
- unparagoned 8mo agoYep, when you expose night owls to just natural light they go to sleep earlier like early birds.
- Perizors 8mo agoDo they? I am saying out of the top of my mind but I would guess that in the case of owls they have evolved to be nocturnal. So their physiology is problably synchronized to natural light but in way that keep their activity nocturnal. Hamsters are also nocturnal but you can force them to be diurnal in lab settings, but their physiology is at a constant jet lag state.
- lotu 8mo agoI remember when I found Flux (third party predecessor to night shift) sometime in 2013. It worked in a week, I'd been staying up until 3am for most of the year and a started going to bed at midnight.
- Barbing 7mo agoBeen more careful with my lighting this week :) how’s yours?
- lisper 7mo agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47185525 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47185525