Ask HN: Has anyone switched from being a night owl to being a morning person?

Have you ever spent a full day in the outdoors? The moment you lay your stuff for sleep before sunset you’re out like a baby till sunrise. That’s because you’ve been walking and being active all day. There’s also less distractions.

Having said that, I do believe that if you were to wake up at 6 am, go to the gym and work daily, you would be ready to sleep like a baby at 9-10 pm.

Most of the time when I become a night owl it is because I’ve been physically lazy and eating like Fat Bastard. I’ll just sit by my computer till 3-4 am wasting away. Change the activity level and eating habits and you’re back to a normal routine.

Question: Are you still young?

Up until my mid 30's I was a night owl. Over the last few years that's started to transition to more morning hours.

Yes, I was forced to in my late 30s, and seems like it's just natural now in my late 40s.

Looking back, it would've been easier if I cut way back on the caffeine, stopped work way earlier (rather than working at 8pm), and just worked on converting slowly by slowly changing my habits. Alcohol also impacts my sleep. I also found my eating and exercise both had huge impacts on my sleep. All these things should've been obvious, but I only noticed after they had to change for other reasons.

I took a job in my mid 30s that required me to get up around 6am. It took my 2 years to adjust, it was brutal. Then I had kids, this ruined sleep for nearly a decade. Then, just as they started sleeping in, I wake up with the sun, no matter what. Luckily I seem to need less sleep now.

I have not. I've been working for 20 years and I still need the weekends to catch up on sleep. I'll try to get to bed on time (10p) but sometimes (at least once a week) I just can't sleep, or dread work, or whatever. I'll be tired all day, then when it comes time to go to sleep again, I'll be wide awake.

I have, and I also have done a lot of shift work too and easily switched regimes many times.

The trick is very simple - if you want to wake up and have breakfast in 6 am, your last meal must be 14 hours before that - which is 4 pm on the previous date. No snacks, no dinner not anything like this. You will be hungry but you will find yourself falling asleep at about 10 pm. If you don't stay in front of a screen you can go to sleep easily. You will then wake up at 6 am - fresh, but hungry. Its important to have a quick breakfast or you will fall asleep again. Try to keep this eating/sleeping schedule, you can relax it a bit (i.e. have dinner at 6) after the first week.

People are of course different, so while 14 hours work for me, some people do it with 12 or 16 hours, but the idea is the same.

This tip/lifehack also works for jetlag: https://hbr.org/2009/05/a-fast-solution-to-jet-lag

Listen to whb07. Through hike something like the Appalachian Trail. ;-)

Have a child, you'll change.

I just switched to being a morning person for the past few weeks. It was driven largely by a temporary shift in my work schedule and I'm pretty certain I will revert back to crashing at 4am eventually. Not because the morning schedule negatively impacts the quality or quantity of my sleep or anything, but because when I don't have a bunch of morning meetings, my sleep/wake cycles naturally start drifting 30 minutes to an hour forward each day until it settles on sleeping from 4am to noon.

I have multiple times. I came to believe that night owls and morning people both want to achieve the same thing; a few hours of uninterrupted work. I had success with both. The difference is that morning routines take more discipline, while being a night owl just takes a bit of willpower and stimulants. Ultimately I found that I preferred being up early and watching the natural world waking up, beating everyone else to the start of the day, and feeling ready to sleep at a reasonable hour. Learning how to go to sleep was the hardest part and probably varies a lot per person. For me the trick was getting in bed and reading with bedtime tea for a while before I wanted to sleep.

P.S watching the sunrise is a secret reward morning people get, and it’s beautiful.

Changing it requires discipline. Someone else pointed out being active but that requires discipline too.

You also have to be honest with yourself because discipline requires it. A lot of people make excuses for themselves. They measure their productivity and cite the news blurbs about sleep studies that confirm their bias. They tell themselves and others they can’t. But the reality is that if you’re not sedentary and actually go to sleep with lights and devices off instead of procrastinating you will adjust.

You also have to actually want it enough to deal with annoyance or discomfort. If you convince yourself that you’ll fail you will lay there in the dark for hours until you give in and pull out your phone or laptop. Without motivation you’ll read this and think “I’ve tried all of this, I need some trick or way to solve this that doesn’t require hard work.”

Yep. Got a dog. That furry little bastard is an unrelenting alarm clock.

Yes.

In college, I worked a third shift job, from 8pm to 430am one or two times a week. Staying up late was pretty much the way I did stuff.

Immediately after college, I started a job as a baker; work began at 7am Tuesday through Friday, and 4am on Saturday. I quit baking after two years, but I still wake up around 6am every day, even with no alarm set.

Yes, I have. In a desire to change some bad habits, I stopped using alarms to wake up, and I configured my router to stop providing me Internet access from 11pm every day. I also put a sign on my bedroom door, saying "this is a phone-free zone". The sunshine wakes me up. I kept this up at least for a couple of years. I genuinely feel like a morning person now, instead of a night owl that I used to be.

Yes. A light alarm is what let me do it, in particular the twighlight simulation, which allowed me to fall asleep consistently:

https://www.usa.philips.com/c-p/HF3531_60/wake-up-light

It also dramatically improved my depression.

I found some helpful information in here that may apply:

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20180424-what-i-learnt-by-li...

Also, I second “hiking the AT”. You don’t even need to hike the AT, just find a 5 day/night backpacking trip. It’s like a reboot for your circadian rhythms. A slightly costlier reset is to fly east 6 or 7 time zones and spend a week there! But no matter what, after you do a reset, you need a good plan for holding on to your new schedule. That’s where the morning daylight comes in...

I began making the change in January and was fully morning-person by mid-February. I'm thoroughly enjoying it, and would highly, highly recommend it.

The key for me was having both a reason to wake up, and a reason to go to sleep. To have a shot of waking up on time in the morning, you unsurprisingly need to go to sleep about 8 hours before you want to wake up. Part of the kick for me was the realization that the later it gets, the more likely I am to do mindless things I don't actually want to do (e.g. Facebook). So, I thought, why not sleep instead?

If you're productive that late, maybe there's no need to change. But I will say I used to be productive that late (read: every college problem set was completed between midnight and 6am), and I still think becoming a morning person was a great decision. More than morning productivity, I just feel better in general.

To actually wake up on the other end, I find I need a particular reason, i.e. something that I'm going to do the moment I wake up. For me, that's running to the gym. I'm sure the fact that it's exercise has some extra effect, but I really think it's mostly just the fact that every morning, by rote, I roll out of bed, put on running clothes, and walk out the door. No thinking involved. I suspect it would work about as well to roll out of bed, put on clothes, and fry an egg.

To address particulars of other comments: I'm 25, I don't have a physically intensive job, I often (usually) eat as late as 7 or 8pm, I never drink caffeine after 4pm (I've found that makes it harder to fall asleep). I go to bed at 9:30pm and wake up ~5:45am.

Many times. First, you need to force yourself to get out of bed at your target time. Do this for a couple days, have some coffee, find a routine. Eventually your body will adjust the its internal clock to make you feel tired earlier. It is also important, I have found, to ensure that you get dressed and groomed and ready soon after waking in the morning (even if you're not planning to leave the house) as this helps promote productivity. For some people this is easier than others, but it is certainly possible for all. Baby steps, my friend.

Just slowly go to bed earlier every day. Set your alarm for your go-to-bed time. Read a book if you can't sleep, but not on a bright-screened device.

I used to be such a nighthawk that I'd be waking up daily at 7 pm. Getting old naturally fixes that too.

I used to think I am biologically wired to be a nightowl but i am a morning person now.

I got a cat that wakes me up every morning at 6:30 am. I used to hate it but now i don't mind it :D.

Every time I come home from Europe. I'm joking, but I'm not joking too. I live in New York City. Last year I got into a long stretch where I would fall asleep at 4 AM and wake up at noon. Then I spent a week at the Web Summit:

http://www.smashcompany.com/philosophy/some-photos-from-the-...

When I came home, it seemed normal to wake up at 5 AM. And I stuck with that pattern for several months, before I started to shift to a later schedule again.

I think my first question would be "why do you want to switch to being a morning person?" I suspect there is a deeper underlying objective, and becoming a morning person may or may not be the best path to success.

That said, I made the switch from night owl to morning person. Like many lifestyle changes, I think the biggest part is establishing the habit, after which it becomes your standard existence. Create a regular pattern.

Take a moment to understand what behaviors keep you up at night and change the time you engage in those habits. I used to drink coffee even in the evenings, now I don't have caffeine after noon. Eliminating screens, both because of the engagement and the light, can help. I haven't used it, but many people I know swear by melatonin for correcting sleep schedules when traveling, and it may help you through an adjustment period.

Regular exercise, in addition to being a generally good thing for you, can also help ensure your body wants rest at the end of the day. There were some great tips in the replies, camping / backpacking does tend to force the issue of being a morning person. I also don't use an alarm clock for a few reasons, but I think alarm clocks enable staying-up too late... you're less inclined to worry about when you get to sleep if you know something will wake you up.

Finally, I sometimes have a problem getting to sleep when too many thoughts are racing through my head. I find listening to podcasts is a huge help, but it has to be a topic that is interesting enough for me to ignore everything I was thinking, but not so interesting that I am engaged enough to stay awake.

I made the change by forcing myself to wake up and go to the gym every weekday at 8 am, and then drink/eat a breakfast afterward. My entire body shifted after a month to the point where I easily went to bed at midnight, and woke up just before my alarm in the morning. I had a good amount of energy during the work day and generally just felt good

While I have not, I have made an interesting realization. I used to like being a night person and hate being a morning person. My like of being a night person comes from rare nights where I feel alive working on projects and it's amazing, but rare. However, I've realized my hate of being a morning person is incorrect. It all stems from a single thing - the alarm. When I wake up from an alarm, I feel a bit blah all day. I feel way better in the weekends when I sleep in.

So my advice would be not to try to make the transition by setting your alarm super early, because then you'll feel miserable and give up. Instead, focus on going to bed as early as possible. Leave the computer at a certain point (or at least use Flux), and pick up a book and read or something else relaxing.

If you can't avoid using an alarm, you could also try changing it. One thing that's helped me in general is a light alarm - 30 minutes before the alarm, it gradually starts turning a light on. Sometimes I wake up naturally to turn it off, and I feel better than waking to a blaring noise. The light alarm also doesn't use a standard alarm noise, it uses a noise like a flock of birds to wake me up. Another thing I've tried that's helped is a CD alarm, so that the blaring noise you wake up to is at least a pleasant song of your choice instead of annoying beeping.

Yes, I had a kid.