Ask HN: how to become a morning person?
I feel like my body just can't accept a static bedtime on a 24 hour cycle. I remember many a summer where I would operate on something closer to a 27 hour day which is pretty awesome but messed up in terms of integrating with the rest of society, which I assume most of us need/want to do. Also, I've never been a morning person - the closest thing I've had to a regular sleep schedule is like 3:30am to around noon.
Anyone else experience similar issues and shift their schedules accordingly? What helped out, and what kept it sustainable long term?
103 comments
[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 195 ms ] threadHope that helps.
I myself have found myself to be more productive at night as well. For some reason I am just able to get more work done, faster, and more efficiently and best of all with less distractions from "the real world".
Only exhausting your brain without exhausting your body will just make you weary without making you feel sleepy. Your mind needs rest but your body is restless because it wants action :)
I remember when I had to do a mandatory 6-month army service period after college and during that time it took me about 2 minutes after lights-out to fall asleep. Actually, I was sooo sleepy all of the time that I learned how to take short naps whenever and whenever I could (especially after lunch).
The experience made me realize that, for most of the people who have it, insomnia was not a health problem that should be treated with drugs but just an imbalance between body and spirit, if I may say so :)
Two staph infections this past year that have prohibited me from running, my preferred exercise, causing me to be completely unable to sleep without drugs. Fortunately, a symptom of a staph infection is a prescription for hydrocodone.
As Richard Branson declared, the secret weapon to productivity is exercise.
I can't tell you how many parents I know that complain (sometimes bitterly) about how early their kids wake them up, and I find out they put the kid in bed at 7pm. Or 6pm, even.
My wife works best in the morning (and I work just fine whenever), so we play with our almost-2-year-old in the evenings and she generally goes to sleep at 11pm or sometimes later, then wakes up normally about 10am. She's never had a bedtime earlier than 10pm.
I don't know about every other parent (and how this would fit in with life) but this works great for us. We can go out to dinner and/or see friends in the evening when we want to (we take her along), we get lots done in the morning, and she gets her sleep.
Is there some other factor I'm missing? Why, when a child wakes up at 5:30am, is it not automatic for the parents to think "we're putting her to bed 2 hours too early"?
A possible enabler, now that I think about it -- we have great shutters on our windows, so it's dark until we open them.
I do know of another couple who have a similar system to you though; Dad works all day so they keep their boy up later and let him sleep in to get more family time.
I was born a morning person, but high school and college forced me to abandon that lifestyle. Eventually my body caught up to me (10 years later) and I had to go back to being a morning person again. It was a simple thing to fall back into... I just started going to sleep around 9 or 10 in the evening. The nice thing is I now wake up without an alarm after 8 hours. Getting some early morning exercise and a decent breakfast help, too. Cutting back on caffeine as well - I dropped coffee for a few blends of tea, mostly green.
(The one thing that doesn't help is being up at 12:30 AM on a Saturday morning waiting for the cross-compile of a linux kernel for my used-to-be-Nook to finish. This is almost as slow as bootstrapping Gentoo from stage1.)
I'm not a morning person, but if I've been up for more than an hour or two, eaten breakfast and gone for a walk before the events of the day start, I could probably fool you. The trick is to get up and get started.
That said, not everyone is a morning person. If you feel better being a nightowl, just try to adjust your life to it as much as possible.
I will cheat if I went to bed > 12:00.
Why rise at insane times? Because there are far too many awesome things I want to do that day, and as soon as I wake up they pop into my head. Between 6 and 9 I do whatever I want, so I use it to read about interesting tech stuff, perhaps do a little planning, check Facebook without being stalked, etc.
Sounds like a description of what it's like to be a morning person, rather than how to become one. I do not wake up full of excitement and ideas for the day. I wake up pissed. But by the end of the day I'm full of inspiration and generally get a lot done in the evenings. I don't know if this is something you can change about yourself, at least not easily.
Looking out of your window onto sunny empty streets, with a whole day of hacking (and lazy breaks outdoors) ahead of you, is fantastic.
I stumbled across an illuminating graph on the trends page of my Google Web History: http://imgur.com/Or18c
I've got that 3 am to noon gap, just like the OP describes. I used to think I was on a 25+ hour cycle, but now I'm thinking I just generally like to go to sleep late. If something grabs my attention and I end up staying awake a few hours later than usual, the sun comes up and that makes it harder to go to sleep... thus leading to what seems like a > 24 hour sleep/wake cycle.
Exposure to sunlight seems to help somewhat.
Maybe consulting a professional would be a good idea. Prescription drugs. I never cared enough to go that far.
I'm lucky to work at a company that isn't retarded--I can show up at noon and as long as I get my shit done, they don't care and I don't feel like a slacker. However, waking up at 10 is still hard, and I drink about 2 cups of coffee a day to cope. My last job I had to be there at 8am sharp--I worked there 2 years and wasn't much more than a zombie with computer skills. Not worth it if you ask me, which sort of, you (by you I mean OP) did.
Turns out that you can go about 40 days without food and sustain no irreversible damage (although only 1-2 days without water). The first two days are often hard, but that's because you're experiencing carb withdrawal symptoms (yes, you ARE addicted to carbs). Afterwards, you just don't think of food at all until at some point (in my experience, 7 to 30 days later), all of a sudden you can think of nothing but food - THIS IS HUNGER. what most people call hunger is appetite or carb additiction.
And each and every time I did this (would be around 10 now), it fixed my sleep schedule for a few months afterwards.
NOTE: This is not medical or nurtitional advice. Please research this yourself and consider getting advice for a medical professional.
- I drink a lot of caffeine (studies show that after a regular, high level of caffeine intake it doesn't affect your sleep patterns anymore).
- I take a 1 hour nap every day (usually around 3 pm)
- I go to sleep around 11 pm
- I naturally wake up around 4 am with no alarm
I like this schedule because I get a lot done before everyone gets up and then I have the whole day ahead. Plus, I really like taking naps.
Edit: Just wanted to add that I'm not naturally what you would consider a "morning person". My previous schedule for the last several years was something like: wake up at 2 pm, work, go to sleep at around 6 am, rinse, repeat. I kind of stumbled into my current schedule by accident.
2. Have child
Nothing turns you into a morning person faster than the first time you get 6 straight hours of sleep after 6 months of 3am feedings.
1. Caffeine and you: You have a certain sensitivity to this drug. You may also be misusing it. Generally speaking, it's a late morning, early afternoon only drug. Late morning is the only place it starts working as its an adenosine antagonist, and you don't start getting adenosine in any really effective amount in your brain until then. (Adenosine is the neurotransmitter which makes you sleepy because you've been up for a certain period of time).
If you drink coffee (or soda) when you wake up stop. Cup #1 of coffee is the Earliest you should use it, and shouldn't happen before about 13 hours before you want your "bed time" to be or about 3 hours after you get your butt out of bed (so let's say "11 am". All it does before then is a brief heart rate spike from the adrenaline surge, or possibly help with caffeine withdrawal from yesterday (which you will not have issues with if you use your caffeine only between say 11a-4p)
The bloodstream half-life of caffeine is 4.9 hours That means it takes about ~10 hours to 1/4 the amount of caffeine in your system as when you stopped drinking it. Additionally, as its an adenosine antagonist, its effectiveness skyrockets the later in the day you have it in you. So if you're shooting for a 12pm bedtime, stop drinking by 2pm-5pm to significantly reduce your blood stream level by bed time.
2. Your bed and you: What are you allowed to do in your bedroom from now on? Have sex, sleep, get dressed. That's it. If there is a tv in your bedroom, say bye bye. If you read in there, say bye bye. If you touch your bed during the day, stop it. If you're sitting there with thoughts for tomorrow, stop that. If you can't stop that, you have to schedule a time of day considerably earlier than bedtime where you lay out tomorrows tasks.
If you're laying in bed for more than 30 minutes without sleep, up and at em, go read in a different room.
3. Routine: You need to get into a set pattern. Set yourself a bedtime. Start winding down before that, not playing video games or watching TV, (especially sports or TV with lots of faces) in that hour before bed. Setup a ritual for sleep, including oral hygene, preparing for tomorrow, etc.
4. Reduce alcohol consumption: Alcohol lightens the depth of sleep. Especially while getting used to a schedule, restrict your intake.
5. Cool down your house at night. I don't care if you like the thermostat in the high 70's most of the time, at night you want high 60's and hide under warm blankets. It really really really will knock you out.
6. Lights are something people are sensitive to in varying degrees. I suggest erroring on the side of expecting yourself to be light sensitive. Use tools like f.lux to drop monitor brightness after sundown. Use timers to turn on/off lamps to make your house have a sundown. Eschew bright, overhead lights before bedtime. If your TV has multiple video settings, even make a TV setting that's overly dark to use past a certain hour.
On the flipside, try to get a North eastern room with lots of windows. Try to live as far south geographically as you can. Make lights turn on like crazy (again, timers) before you want to be waking up. Create lots of noise in your living space (not alarms, but things like tvs, etc) around the time to get up.
7. Eat breakfast, and to really reset yourself, eat nothing 16 hours before you want to wake up. (This works VERY well to fix jetlag).
I don't agree with the "don't read in bed" advice. It's good to read in bed. Read something interesting enough to wipe your mind away from work or project-related thoughts, but avoid a book that will keep you awake for too long, prefer non-fiction or short stories.
http://www.sleepassociation.org/index.php?p=sleephygienetips
I know it's nice to read in bed, but it's bad for sleep. It's not like you have to do everything in the list up there to get sleep, but the sacrosanct "Bed is for sleeping, only" is the #1 thing for many people.
I often read Before bed, but on the couch, not IN bed.
I leave in China right now and these tips look very weird, exotic from here. For example, what do they (ASA) have against a short nap? Here the countryside girls selling vegetables in local markets do nap on their lines of carrots. I bet you they do not have any sleeping problems.
They (ASA) say "When you watch TV or read in bed, you associate the bed with wakefulness". That's true for most recent TV programs, because they punch you in the face constantly (it has not always been the case), but most books I read do not push me in a "state during which [I am] conscious and aware of the world." On the contrary, good reading brings a soft transition between full awareness of the real world and the dreams I'll get during the night. Maybe it is a drug, but I tell you: I always read in bed before sleeping, even if I'm too tired. I just can't climb the couch and sleep right away. Sorry for not being able to agree with this American Sleep Association advice.
I stick to the rules for caffeine consumption, except I can always go for decaf in the evening.
I've been using Flux on my computers, I think that also helps.
Finally I just set a timer now when I go to bed. Usually 7.5 hours sleep plus 12 minutes to fall asleep is perfect for me, so when that timer goes I actually feel like getting up. And also if I wake up earlier I never stress about what the time is because I know I'm still on the countdown.
I actually generally agree with the advice -- my wife and I only use the alarm clock when we have some kind of morning appointment or travel -- but in that case the one we have works well -- it gradually increases the lights and fades in the "alarm" (mostly white noise), and it's gentle enough that when only one of us needs to get up, it's pretty rare that it wakes both of us, just the one who's "primed" to wake up unusually early. And it never wakes the baby (who sleeps in the bed with us).
So yeah, any kind of "jolt" alarm clock is a really bad way to start the day, but they're still useful devices (and waking to an alarm doesn't need to be so painful).
I'd also recommend drinking lots of water and a large glass before bed.
Another thing that has always helped is going to bed 8 or so hours before wake up time, consistently. Even, yes, weekends.
It's a bit boring and 'old people' in my mind, but the ideal schedule IMO is 10:30-6:30, every single night of the week. Really killed late-night hackfests though. :-/
And fwiw, Redshift is another alternative, in case you have trouble with f.lux. I couldn't get f.lux to actually flux on my Ubuntu 10.04 workstation or UNR netbook, but Redshift works fine on both.
Inapplicable for me - I often lie in bed for a long period of time with my mind buzzing about work/responsibilities/projects/news/... But if I read a few pages of a novel in bed, it shifts my brain right out of "active" mode into "sleep" mode, and I can fall asleep easily. Reading in another room involves climbing the stairs and puts me right back into active mode.
The important part is that in-bed activities prepare you for sleep, rather than encouraging wakefulness. (e.g., my wife will read to the end of the novel rather than going to sleep...)
I've read about this, but also noticed a pretty strong effect personally... when I eat any significant amount of sugar late in the day, it's noticeably less pleasant to get up the next morning (like a kind of mini-hangover).
Going to sleep isn't ever a problem (unfortunately, this is at least partly because I'm normally relatively sleep-deprived...) but of course sending your blood sugar spiking up (and plummeting down) all day is likely to make it harder to settle down at bedtime for most people.
Edit: forgot to add -- I'm interested to notice disagreements with the "no reading" rule. In my personal experience, this is an iron-clad rule. If I read "before" bed, even if the material is fairly dry, my brain kicks into gear, and all sleepiness disappears unless I'm seriously deprived at the time. And I don't generally have much sense of time passing when I'm absorbed, so I've had many experiences of slowly realizing that the room's appearance has changed (and there are new noises) because the sun is up, and the birds are going nuts outside my window. And the 2-hour drive I have to make that day (or whatever it may be) is going to be painful.
Melatonin (fails after a few months for myself, 1-3MG)
The trifecta: GABBA ZMA Holy Basil Extract
Really helps with ASSISTANCE to sleep, these are not medications such as Ambien, Lunesta, etc.
I post these as Assistance to sleep. The goal of supplementation is to get on a good natural sleep cycle.
Another point, do not sleep in so heavily on the weekends if your work / life schedule demands an early wakeup on the weekdays.
Eventually, your body becomes a "natural" alarm clock where you cannot sleep in past 7am, 9am.
Don't fight it, be productive :)
Edit: Snoozing has been the devil for me waking fully in the morning (meaning, get UP when you actually wake from sleep).
[1] http://stereopsis.com/flux/
"f.lux was created by people who care a lot about accuracy in colors. We know you want to make sure your colors are perfect so there is an option to disable f.lux for 1 hour at a time (for example, while using Photoshop). This setting returns your screen to its normal settings. In the future we plan to allow automatic disabling of f.lux when you launch certain programs. f.lux is not designed for use during advanced color work, but it's fine for layout or HTML. Currently, we don't recommend running f.lux on calibrated systems running Windows, but we expect to have a solution for this soon."
I went all kindle | paper in bed (no more backlit things), and simultaneously also started using Flux, and it seems to have helped me actually stop working and fall sleep.
You get used to it in about three days, and then if you use the temporary-disable command to see what your monitor looked like before, it really does sear the eyes like when those nazis opened the ark...
I heard about this one guy who mastered never sleeping by taking a number of power naps per day - and that it makes for more productivity working around the clock...
When I was working, my trick was this:
I made a stack of stuff on top of my alarm clock (my iPhone) by my bed in the morning, and kept it far enough away from me that I couldn't just slap it. On top of it, I put my work out clothing and my running shoes.
I also make sure that the alarm clock is loud enough to scare me awake as the adrenaline dump into the system makes it impossible to fall asleep. My wife wears earplugs.
First thing I do is run, usually a 5k or 10k run in the morning depending. It helps clear the head, and I'm awake for the day.
Right now I run at night, which makes me wired, but I find showering and benadryl takes care of that. And also the 22 month old that I'm now home with every day.
When I was a teenager, the schoolbus came at six f#@%ing fifteen in the morning (because they needed to use the same buses for waves of middle school then elementary school kids), to a stop about a half-mile from my house. Waking up was always a horrible experience. Though I did end up doing pretty well on the track team, with the extra half-mile sprint every morning....
Hacks for getting to sleep at a specific time:
- Take an hour long walk, go to the gym or go running during the day to get more tired.
- Try to get exposed to direct sunlight during the day, this is supposed to do something in your brain that helps it maintain the circadian cycle.
- Use F.Lux to keep your monitor from blasting your brain with sunlight analogue wavelengths in the evening.
- Try a cold shower or a cold bath about an hour before bedtime. Several people have reported that this helps them sleep.
- Have a schedule for doing specific non-open-ended stuff that doesn't get you anxious or worked out for half-an-hour to an hour before bedtime. The repeating ritual will prime your brain for sleep.
- Don't read in bed. Make your brain associate being in bed only with sleeping.
- Try meditation. Either do sitting meditation right before bed, or do mindfulness meditation while lying in bed.
- Maintain a very small sleep deprivation, like sleeping half an hour less than you would without any alarms, to fall asleep quickly.
- Fast during the day and eat a carbohydrate heavy meal right before bed. Post-dinner coma will knock you out.
Hacks for waking up:
- Set an alarm 60 or 90 minutes before the time you really wake up, eat a 100 mg caffeine pill and go back to sleep. The caffeine will kick in while you're asleep and you'll wake up when it's fully effective.
- Get a sunrise lamp or rig one up yourself with a power timer. The light will prime your brain for getting up when it's time to wake up.
- If you have a smartphone with an accelerometer, see if there's a smart alarm clock app that will detect when you're sleeping lightly and wake you up then. There's ElectricSleep for Android and EasyWakeup for iPhone.
- Committing to attending something early in the morning like 8 AM will make you anxious to wake up and get up in time. Anxiety isn't very fun though.
- Use mind judo to get up from bed without willpower: http://lesswrong.com/lw/fh/willpower_hax_487_execute_by_defa...
- If you've gotten yourself out of the bed at the time you want, but feel like going right back in, try a shower, a walk, or a run to make your body wake up a bit more.
It's much harder to spend two consecutive nights sleeping much less than usual to adjust to an early wakeup time than a single night.
Very interesting, will give it a whirl. Hydroxycut could be an alternative. It tends to give me less "jitters" when drinking 4-6 cups of coffee, and more of a longer-term boost with just a single cup.
I COMPLETELY agree that waking up WITHOUT a stimulant is highly effective (natural waking). I tend to drink coffee in the morning out of either habit, or, the love of coffee's flavor.
After enough practice runs, the poster claimed that in the morning he would automatically rise when his alarm went off and begin his morning routine. He claimed that he didn't really fully wake up until later.
http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/04/how-to-get-up-right...
I'm slowly starting to feel less groggy every morning therefor enjoying more my days. This, inevitably makes me be more productive during the day which in turn makes me spend more energy feeling more tired earlier, thus going to be at more reasonable hours. A good vicious cicle if you will.
Also, I started swimming for about 45 minutes around two to three hours before bed time. Guaranteed Knockout.
So this advice may not work for everyone.