My schedule tends to drift later by nature. What I mean is that, if I do not set an alarm, I tend to stay up about forty-five minutes later than I did the previous day. Unchecked, this can lead to me sleeping until four in the afternoon after only a week or so of unattended schedule driftage.
Some people call themselves “morning people”. What I think some of these people mean is that that don’t mind getting up in the morning, or that they enjoy the fresh air. But I’ve yet to meet somebody who is actually a morning person in the sense that I’m a night person. Namely, I’ve never met somebody whose schedule drifts earlier if unchecked. I’ve never met anybody whose natural tendency was to get up earlier and earlier.
Is anybody here like that? Do people like that even exist? Is there anybody who, if they don’t stop themselves, starts getting up earlier and earlier, and eventually they’re going to sleep at 5 PM and waking up at 1:30 AM?
I used to be a night person. That helped when I worked crazy late shifts in the ER or the clinic.
But then I got a regular 9-5 job, M-F (yes, they exist in medicine). At first it was hell, then I started getting used to it, then I came to enjoy it.
I also started waking up earlier and earlier. So I rolled back my hours to 8-4, then 7-3.
Now I refuse to get out of bed before 5:40 AM, as I know that if I do, creep will set in, and I’ll get earlier and earlier, and I’ll eventually have to start working 6-2. But then I’d have to go to bed by 9 PM.
ISTR that if you took someone and isolated them from external clues like daylight and clocks, the average person “lived” on something like a 23 hours and change day.
So, if my memory is worth a flip, yes, most people drift earlier by nature.
My natural tendency is to sleep no more than four to five hours at a stretch. Problem is that I don’t get enough rest and that leads to an increased frequency of migraines. So, I have to resort to sleeping pills and even though I sleep more and the migraines are reduced, I feel drugged most of the time. Life’s a bitch.
Not quite what you’re looking for, but; I used to be a night owl by nature, but then shifted to a day sort because of job neccessity. Wake up with the light, by 6AM, easy enough. Now, with later light, it’s harder to get up in the morning, will be glad when next week’s time change happens.
So, I do experience an earlier drift by natural light cycles in summer, since I’m totally cued to that, but then experience a harder change when that light goes, like right now.
Gotta relate one experience had many years ago in Iceland, at a youth hostel there, with one gal commenting on the bright summer light there: “AHHHH, is it light AGAIN??? Crikes!” It was, and early.
Funny, I remember the opposite, isolate someone and their body clock runs at around a 25 hour day. I’ll see if I can find anything further.
Edit: It looks like my memory is correct but out of date. More recent studies show the natural circadian rhythm for people to be 24 hours 11 minutes with a variation of plus/minus 16 minutes.
It’s partially sun-dependent, I’m less horrible about this in the summer, but yeah, in general I drift forward. I’m definitely a morning person and can’t work in the night shift for more than two nights without becoming too dead-looking for the cast of a Romero movie. Normally I force myself to not go to bed before 8pm (the daylight lamp helps); otherwise there comes a point when I’m wanting to go to bed already and haven’t left work yet!
LouisB, can you sleep on a split schedule instead? Several of my relatives do.
I was like you when I was in my teens and twenties- unchecked, I would tend to sleep later and later. But as I’ve become older, I need less sleep, and now at 38 I think I’m pretty much bang on a 24 hour schedule. If this process continues, I expect to be doing a lot of early-morning pottering about when I’m in my sixties.
I think my normal cycle is about 23 hours and 50 minutes. I have to constantly fight to keep on a 24 hour schedule. My favorite day is when we switch to Daylight Saving Time and we “lose” an hour. The worst day comes this weekend when we switch back to Standard Time and we “gain” an hour that I definitely don’t need.
Yeah, I’m another “sunlight” person – in the absence of other people affecting my schedule, it’ll tend to drift earlier until it coincides with about when the sun comes up. I had horrible sleep issues my first year or two in college for precisely this reason – this kind of schedule doesn’t really work when you’re working on problem sets with night owls (and all my friends/study partners were night owls). I learned to deal with it, which is good because then I went on to grad school (even worse – I think grad school selects for night owls) and then married one – so now I’m pretty much permanently on a somewhat later schedule than I would naturally be. Occasionally my body still gets annoyed about this and wakes me up at 6am or whatever even though I’ve gone to bed at midnight.
Yep, I’m an early-morning “drifter”. Left to myself, without reference to a job or hours of the day, I’d probably go to bed earlier and get up earlier every day. Pretty soon I’d probably come all the way around the dial to being a night-owl.
Another one of the daylight people chiming in, I have never liked sleeping in past sunrise and I have a hard time in the winter when I wake up before the sun. I also have trouble staying up much past sunset in the winter I find myself fighting to stay up past 8.
If I don’t have a reason to get up in the morning, then I have no reason to go to bed at a reasonable hour. So I drift “later” until I’m going to bed at 8 AM.
Without a reason to get up in the mornings, it’s my natural state to stay up till the wee hours and sleep till noon-1:00. Over the last week I haven’t had to be anywhere and I’ve drifted about 30 more minutes per night each night. I went to bed at 4:00 am this morning and got up at 1 today. If I need to get back on schedule, I’ll have to have chemical help.
Yes. I’m a teacher, and during Christmas break (we work straight through the summer), I find I go to bed later and later until I finally hit about 1:30 a.m. and get up about 9 or 9:30 a.m. Even when I’m working, I rarely go to bed before 11:30, and I have to force myself to do that. I am wide awake and relaxed at night and feel awful in the morning, no matter how early or late I get up. During the work week I find I’m always tired, and during breaks when I can follow my natural sleep rhythm, I feel much better, eat better, etc.
