I wish people would understand that "just get up early" simply does not and cannot work for a significant portion of the population (20-50% depending on which study you choose).
Therefore it is aggravating advice to constantly receive, from those for whom it worked, to those for whom it won't.
In the US military, new recruits are put on a very early schedule (think: 5:00am wakeup) and an appropriately early bedtime. Within a matter of weeks, they become habituated to it such that everyone's body automatically starts operating on that schedule, even if no one wakes them up in the morning. I am skeptical that there is a biological reason 20-50% of the population can't get up early because it doesn't seem to be an issue in the myriad environments where waking up early is a general requirement. These environments aren't selecting for people that can get up early, they habituate people into getting up early. It clearly is possible most of the time.
I've had points in life where school or work demanded I wake up early. After a few weeks I could go to bed and sleep at something approximating the time required for an appropriate night of rest and would automatically wake up at the time required - true.
This sounds like success, but is significantly less so than it sounds:
- It didn't change the time my body wants to do those things.
- Waking up: I'd wake up because it's the time I currently wake up daily and know I need to, but the feeling of wanting to go back to bed for hours was still there - not even feeling like I'm not rested, just a vague sense of "this is a time for sleep". Performance for the first 3-5 hours of my day was noticeably poor.
- Going to bed: With enough practice I could usually sleep early enough. I never once wanted to sleep early enough or actually felt tired when I had to go to bed. I had to have multiple alarms set to go to bed, because even though that was the time I'd been going to bed for months - my body still does not give off a single signal to sleep at that time.
- One single night off-schedule would completely blow up the whole thing and take a week or more to feel back on the schedule fully. Months of being on the "early" schedule could be instantly thrown away and I'd be back on the "late" - adaptation is only required in the unnatural direction, the natural one is instant.
- I have actually spent weeks off-grid hiking and away from screens/artificial light before and the behavior still persists. It's not until hours after dark that I feel tired and I don't naturally want to wake up until far past sunrise. (I am also perfectly happy sleeping in full daylight, room light/darkness has no impact on my sleep).
I have the same feeling regarding much of what you said, with the slight difference that even though my body didn't feel the need to go to bed, strangely enough, after lying in bed for 20 minutes or so, I often fall asleep without noticing any sleepiness before that, just wide awake, and the next thing I know I am waking up in the morning.
While I was never in the military, I have been in environments where I needed to be an earlybird. It's exactly as you say: the adaption to the environment makes the early rising palatable. However, once left to my own devices, I quickly return to my nocturnal habits. For me, it's less revenge bedtime procrastination and more so that nights are better for long blocks of uninterrupted time than days.
I think people can train themselves to get up at any time, even in the middle of the night, but I have doubts that they'd all be fully alert at that hour even if they did it for months or years. I can train myself to wake up early, but my brain doesn't fully "wake up" until much later in the day. It might be genetic (https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/05/150514085748.h...) and there are groups looking at drugs to help night owls adapt to the artificial constraints modern society imposes on them.
I think is a combination of physical activity waking the recruits up and keeping them alert, as well as physical exhaustion helping them fall asleep. I suppose anyone who is chronically unable to stick to that schedule would get weeded out quickly.
I suffered from delayed sleep phase syndrome for years and years. Root cause was undiagnosed health issues causing chronic pain and alertness.
Once I nailed down the problem all it took from there was a mere complete lifestyle change, once which takes constant discipline to maintain. Which I manage to maintain mostly because lapses in discipline result in me being slapped hard back to reality.
I was told to try melatonin so - many - times. I had so many printouts on sleep hygiene handed to me over the years. I was told repeatedly both to wake up early AND to restrict how long I spend in bed. Being told to wake up early was given The idea of doing a differential NEVER occurred to people as my sleep problems were obviously a result of my poor ethics and laziness and could be fixed with nothing more than an attitude adjustment.
The point of this all being, is to say I agree with you rather strongly.
Fair point, but I find the kind of advice given goes beyond being unhelpful into being actually damaging. It's exasperating at best and makes the 'patient' feel as if no one understands them, or worse that the world is against them.
On balance I weigh the damage of that as more negative than the absence of advice that might help.
I used to be depressed and constantly received the same bullshit advice which led me to believe nobody understands me and that I’m incurable and I was about to give up. Please don’t be a cliche programmer and speak on matters outside of your expertise as if you know what you’re talking about, this is dangerous territory.
As someone who used to think I had unique physiology, I eventually appreciated people who kept suggesting sensible advice with no downsides to try it. Thanks.
We are all completely empowered to accept or reject all advice.
Separately from that, there's a question of "which strategy is most likely to yield a good outcome." EG - you are welcome to get 100% of your calories from junk food, which is separate from our ability to discuss that you'll probably have a better life doing something different.
On this sleep thing - one can do whatever the hell they want, and of course they may have limits in place that are unique to them. Which doesn't preclude us talking about what would be best and then whether we want to and can get there.
Yeah suggestions about what to do, sans anything helpful about how to do it, are just annoying, especially when the thing is hard to do.
That said, there’s a very big difference between doesn’t work and can’t work. Humans are pretty adaptable given the right circumstances, so I’d wager we’re talking mostly about the doesn’t category. Your comment totally reminds me of many conversations I’ve heard and read about weight loss where someone says “just consume fewer calories”, as if it’s somehow simple. Other person, annoyed, says “I’ve tried that, it doesn’t work for me” or “studies have shown that doesn’t work for most people”. It’s true that it generally doesn’t work for most people, I believe the failure rates are even higher than 50%, and yet it’s guaranteed that it can work, it’s physics. It’s not because people actually eat fewer calories and it fails, it’s because people generally aren’t able to reduce their calorie intake permanently, they revert. And trying to will yourself to overcome hunger tends to backfire, just like trying to will yourself to ‘just get up early’ tends to backfire. It doesn’t work because they don’t really know how to change their habits; habits are really hard to break, behavior is really hard to change. A lot of people fail to appreciate how hard it is, especially when some people do seem to be able to do it.
I’ve gone through long periods where I was unable to be a morning person and, maybe like you, I could have bopped someone lightly on the nose for saying to me ‘just get up early’. But changes in my life have made it easier; my job changed, my kids turned into teenagers, my exercise changed, my outlook on life has change, my evening activities have changed. I also have a better idea of how to wake up early, and it doesn’t need to involve setting alarms and trying to force myself, it’s much more about how to spend the time, much more about what I want to get done, and much less about when.
I think the point may have been more that many people have chronotypes [1] that negate the benefits of changing a sleep schedule to something that fits your waking schedule. Doing this may allow for better time allocations, but comes at the cost of the effectiveness of your forced circadian rhythm.
Oh no I might have accidentally stepped on a small land mine. Circadian rhythms aren’t permanent. If they were, international travel would be impossible for humans. Circadian rhythms are defined as entrainable, meaning adjustments to the environment must change the rhythm. I might have to walk this back some day, but right now that site you linked gives me vibes of homeopathy. There’s a non-zero amount of irony in asking if individual humans identify with different animal species, isn’t there? The idea that an animal species as a whole sleeps at a given time undermines the very idea that each human is a unique snowflake, and suggests that the variation in humans that we’re talking about is not fixed, but is a product of environment, habits, behaviors, situational preferences, etc., doesn’t it? I mean we have lots and lots and lots of evidence that humans can change sleep schedule when they have to, and that preferences largely come from what we’re used to, no?
> Circadian rhythms aren’t permanent. If they were, international travel would be impossible for humans. Circadian rhythms are defined as entrainable, meaning adjustments to the environment must change the rhythm.
Sure. That's why I'm a night owl in every timezone.
You seem to be assuming that circadian rhythms are driven by some stable 24h/cycle oscillator, with an offset that can be changed with some effort, whether self-directed or in response to environment changes. But if that was the case, international travel would be a chore - you'd probably be back home before you finished adjusting.
The way I see it, circadian rhythms are more like the oscillator with a floating reference point, constantly adapting to environmental cues, and a stable offset that's near-impossible to change (probably genetically fixed). Under this model, international travel is easy - the body will quickly adjust the reference point to the new timezone, based on environmental cues, but the offset remains fixed. And this is what I observe - I'm a night owl in every timezone.
> You seem to be assuming that circadian rhythms are driven by some stable 24h/cycle oscillator, with an offset that can be changed with some effort, whether self-directed or in response to environment changes.
I don’t know how you got that out of what I said above, but FWIW, Wikipedia does say that in order to call something a Circadian rhythm, it must be a cycle of about 24 hours, and it must be resettable [1], which seems to match your assumptions about my assumptions exactly... your description appears to fit the definition of Circadian rhythm almost exactly, you’re only missing the bit about temperature compensation.
> if that was the case, international travel would be a chore - you’d probably be back home before you finished adjusting.
I totally don’t understand what you’re saying here. Jet lag is pretty well understood, no? It takes a few days to adjust, and they you’re fine. If you fly home after a day or two, yeah, you’re home before your Circadian rhythm got reset. If you stay a week or more, and you’d be fine overseas and then have to reset again when you get home. It’s widely agreed that jet lag does make international travel a bit of a chore, no?
I mostly assume that the minute people start talking about Circadian rhythms, we’re probably in the arena of pseudoscience. I’ve just noticed over time that invocations of Circadian rhythms get used incorrectly a lot to justify bogus arguments, like with daylight saving time, for example, with claims that humans can be out of sync with their rhythms for months and months. That’s not true according to Wikipedia’s definition, because Circadian rhythms must also be able to be “reset by exposure to external stimuli (such as light and heat).” [1] And the reset generally takes at most a few days for most people. [2] The ‘sleep foundation’ article above certainly loses credibility by mentioning Circadian rhythms and then launching into the ‘what’s your spirit animal’ personality quiz blogspam fad.
I don’t know what evidence there is for an offset that changes when traveling but can’t change when staying put, or that it’s genetic. Do you have links to any? There’s a metric ton of evidence that superficially seems to counter that idea, because humans adapt and change sleep schedules all the time, they respond to light therapy, etc.
Look I’m generally a night owl too, and left to my own devices I wake up late and go to sleep late. I have absolutely no doubt that it’s very difficult for some people to change though, I’m not suggesting it’s easy. But - have you ever tried camping outdoors for a week or more? It’s quite surprising to me how fast I adjust to waking up with the sun. Try it! There’s also loads of evidence that people have a hard time changing any habits, and that use of electronic screens and artificial lighting mess with our sleep schedules, and that jobs and life stress can as well. We have to rule all those effects out first before saying it can’t be changed, and those are really hard to rule out, no?
I may have some terminology off. The point of chronotypes is to sort out the what, who, and why of "morning people", "night owls" and various states between. I don't care for the animal metaphors either, and they can easily be omitted with no loss of value. As a "night owl" myself, I have anecdotally found that while I can certainly force myself to function early in the morning on a regular basis, my body never stops hating that even after years of doing so. The best times for me to get up and go to sleep are closer to 10 am and 2 am, respectively. The chronotypes system proposed here was useful in helping contextualize all that.
It's incomplete advice, but it can't be separated from effective advice. Similarly, "just eat less" is not useful/workable on it's own, but at the end of the day, losing weight relies on caloric deficit; it's still true.
The missing piece with this, not unlike weight-loss, is the use of effective tools (that can include sunlight, scheduling everything differently, among other things).
Therefore it is aggravating advice to constantly receive, from those for whom it worked, to those for whom it won't.