Can a night-owl become a morning person?

In My Humble Opinion
21

[QUOTE=BlueKangaroo]
I just respond to light very well. When I needed to be up before the sun previously (grar!), I eventually bought a dawn simulator. I love it and will never, ever give it up. I’m still not entirely happy about getting up in the mornings before the sun, but the chance of a morning slab of homicide with my cup of tea goes down a great deal.

I’d say get a dawn alarm clock if you can’t rise with the sunlight.
[/QUOTE]

We got one of these about 5 years back, and it really helps. Here in Minnesota, there are long stretches of the winter when you are getting up before dawn. Waking up to a room that has some light in it makes it much easier.

22

I’m glad to know I’m not alone. I am definitely a night owl, and have tried and tried, but cannot break it…

What bothers me the most is the ridicule and disdain with which others treat me because of my schedule. It’s assumed that I must just be lazy because I sleep until noon. But they forget that while they’re off work or going to bed, I am at my most productive.

I’ve been a night own since I was a kid, and I’ve always gotten disapproval from all sides, and still do. I hate the pressure to conform to everyone else’s schedule, and the assumption that I’m lazy since I keep a different schedule. :mad:

23

While I’ve been in the bar industry for most of the last twelve years, I have also dabbled in “day jobs” and I’ve also had to work day shifts…which means getting up at the (horrendous) hour of 9 or 10 in the morning.

I can do it, but I don’t like it. It feels unnatural. Ever since I was a kid, I’ve gotten wound up at night, and I’ve been sluggish in the morning. Regardless of how much sleep I’ve gotten. I find morning people actually quite annoying, because the concept is so foreign to me; these are the same people who call me at eleven in the morning because “everybody should be awake by then!”

Um, I go to bed between 4 and 7 in the morning. Eleven a.m. is not normal for me; I’ve thought about calling these people back at three in the morning just to prove the point.

I don’t think a night-owl can become a “morning person,” as in “I-Love-Mornings!” but I do think it’s possible to adapt. A morning person could probably stay up late and be productive if necessary, but that doesn’t mean they’d enjoy it or that it would feel normal. IMHO I kinda think it’s a trait you’re born with, like being left or right handed; one just feels more normal inherently. You could use the other hand if you had to, and you’d get the job done, but that doesn’t mean you wouldn’t wish you could do it the other way around.

24

[QUOTE=Sam Stone]
I’m a night owl with a 9-5 job. I’ve never been able to adapt. I get 5-6 hours of sleep a night. I’m usually exhausted by the end of the day, sleepy, and I just want to go home and rest. But even if I don’t get any rest, by 9 PM I’m totally wired again and wide awake until 1-2 in the morning. It’s always the same.
[/QUOTE]

Exactly the same here! I’ve heard that you can’t “catch up” on your sleep, but, come the weekend, I can easily sleep for 12 hours in a row!

25

For me, it changed naturally. From the age of 10 to about 22 I wanted to stay up until 2:00 am and sleep until noon. Then I just gradually…didn’t. Part of it had to do with the discovery of how great I felt having the whole morning and getting things done, so I could take a break in the evening.

Maybe if you try forcing yourself up early on the weekends when you can associate pleasant thoughts with the early mornings and be sleepy in the evening? I think the real trick is to have something that you *have *to do, but that you don’t *mind *doing, and let your mind wake up before your body. 7:00 am is really nice on a warm, sunny morning, so the coming summer might help you.

26

Used to be a night owl, am now up at 5:00 and in bed at 9:00. Of mostly it is because I drive so far that it is easier to get there if I start early. Even leaving the house 20 minutes late can make a big difference in how long it takes to get to work.

27

[QUOTE=Audrey Levins]
A morning person could probably stay up late and be productive if necessary, but that doesn’t mean they’d enjoy it or that it would feel normal.
[/QUOTE]

I fronted a band for years. I hated being up that late every single time I had a gig. I wouldn’t exactly call that my best work ever.

28

When I was a caffeine addict I was a night owl who slept until at least noon. Now I get up early without trouble, but I’m far less creative. I’ve lately been wondering if I should once again be an addict in order to program and write more than I do now.

So I guess I’ll ask the question that hasn’t been asked yet, what’s your diet like?

-Eben

29

Not in my experience. I do not function as a sentient human being before 10am. As an undergrad, there were a couple of classes I wanted to take so badly I caved and signed up for the only section running, at 8 or 9am. I have never gotten higher than a D in any of them. I can keep it up for two, two and a half weeks, but after that I start sleeping through alarms. I do not seem to have a choice. Alarm clock, cell phone, DS, computer blasting music, sleep timer on the TV – I have come very close to sleeping through dormitory fire alarms, too. It doesn’t matter whether I’ve gotten 2 hours or 12 hours of sleep before the noise starts.

When I was a teenager, the only way to actually get me to my 7:20am-start high school on time was to have an entirely separate human being, usually my mother, come check on me every ten minutes and wake me back up. I then dozed off in my first two classes on a daily basis.

If there is an important one-off event starting early in the morning, I can probably arrange for my physical presence. After two NoDoz – that’s 400mg of caffeine, usually washed down with Pepsi – I can follow simple instructions and perform rote tasks. I will then come to somewhere between 10 and 10:30am, hunt you down, and ask you what is going on.

I’ve tried sleeping pills at night, wake-up pills in the morning, sleeping pills at night AND wake-up pills in the morning, slowly adjusting by going to sleep later and later every day, slowly adjusting by going to sleep earlier and earlier every day, suddenly and violently adjusting by staying up for two or three days running, and trying to force myself awake by scheduling something I desperately want to do early in the morning. None of it works. When I had unstructured time over school vacations as a kid, it only took two or three days to rotate around to going to bed between 8 and 9am, and waking up when my father got home from work at about 4:30 in the evening.

I’m sure I have some complicated medical thing that’ll be featured on a Discovery Channel special someday, but I also have no medical insurance, so the odds that I will be giving someone a few grand to run a sleep study and give me an official diagnosis are slim. In the meantime, I have just gotten very stubborn about working only swing or overnight shifts if at all possible.

30

Not gonna happen. I never liked the term “night-owl;” “vampire” is way cooler. Anyone’s guess why Circadian rhythms come out the way they do, but I’ve yet to hear of a case where changing them was anything other than impermanent and miserable.

31

Left to my own rhythms, my body likes to sleep from 4am-12pm; adjust two hours back in the winter. I can get up in the morning, and be disciplined about it and stay on a schedule, but that is not the same thing as being a morning person. Not by a long shot.

32

[QUOTE=Hazle Weatherfield]
Exactly the same here! I’ve heard that you can’t “catch up” on your sleep, but, come the weekend, I can easily sleep for 12 hours in a row!
[/QUOTE]
That may be part of the problem that many people have with mornings. If you’re trying to become a morning person and having trouble, Don’t Sleep In. Ever. Have an evening and a morning routine, and stick to them. Do something relaxing before bed.

In extreme cases, people have had luck timeshifting themselves later and later until they’re “normal”. Obviously this requires not needing to be at work when you’re waking up at 6PM.

33

It all hinges upon eating for me. Being young, in college, and a residence advisor, I can do pretty well on 35-40 hours of sleep a week whenever I can get it. All nighter research papers or late night emergencies don’t really care about 8:00am classes, as long as I can get a gut full of food before I leave my apartment. When I work construction or whatnot over the summer my best hours are 4-6 pm, and my worst are 1-2pm.

34

I tried. I failed. Now I work third shift.

It was manageable when I had a regular 8-5 job. I was tired and miserable but I could survive. Then I started working at Home Depot. My schedule was always changing. I’d get out of work at 10PM and have to be back at 7AM. I ended up with a severe case of sleep deprivation. I was taking Ambien and Requip and my doctor had scheduled sleep clinic. Then, I realized that I’m just not a daylight kind of person. I started working third shift and all is mostly well. Even when I only get 2 hours sleep (like today) I feel more alert and productive at night. If I’m trying to work during the day, I need a minimum of 10 hours sleep to function and with my insomnia it’s just not going to happen. My insomnia is also more severe if I try to sleep at night. For some reason, my body wants to sleep when it’s light outside. I couldn’t force it so I made the necessary change.

35

[QUOTE=Mrs Johnson]
Is it possible for a night-owl to become a morning person? What does it take?
[/QUOTE]

Have kids. Sorry if this is the 50th time this is posted, but I don’t bother even reading theads anymore. I just wanna spew my putrid vile and move on.

36

I did.

I’ve always been a night person. Ever since, oh… 1985 or so.

Even when I worked regular hours, I’d stay up until at least 1:00am, sometimes later, and then just get up in time to shower and rush out the door. Heavily caffeineated.

You can check my posting history for affirmation of my conversion. The time has been that I used to try to rush a word in here before the small-hours maintenance took the board down for that interminable period.

Now I am asleep by 9:30 every night.

I don’t know if it’ll work for you, but here’s what did it for me: For the past two years, I share my bed with an early-to-bed type. I don’t want to wake her, creeping in later.

…and besides, I start to realize that I feel generally better during the day, because I’m getting eight solid hours of sleep every night. That’s something I haven’t done since I was a pre-teen.

37

[QUOTE=Eben]
When I was a caffeine addict I was a night owl who slept until at least noon. Now I get up early without trouble, but I’m far less creative. I’ve lately been wondering if I should once again be an addict in order to program and write more than I do now.

So I guess I’ll ask the question that hasn’t been asked yet, what’s your diet like?

-Eben
[/QUOTE]
I’ve been a vegetarian since October, but my sleep habits haven’t changed any. I don’t smoke or drink coffee and have just a couple sodas per month - so I don’t have a caffeine problem. I try to eat a healthy balanced diet. Rarely any junk food or fast food.
I set my alarm clock as well as 3-4 separate alarms on my cell phone. They all get snoozed at least twice. My mornings always feel rushed.
I do try to “catch up” on the weekend. I have no idea if it works or not but it sure does feel good to sleep for 10+ hours.

38

Well, it sort of depends what the OP is asking: does (s)he want to be able to get up early in the morning and be at least somewhat rested and functional, or does (s)he want to be a morning person (i.e. be able to EASILY get up early in the morning refreshed, and completely able, if not eager, to do his/her best work during those hours)?

One is a lot easier than the other.

39

I’m another person who can’t fall asleep before 11pm, at the very earliest. It’s really sucked this semester because I’ve had to get up at 5:30am twice a week to teach morning classes in the suburbs. I sleep on the bus, but luckily I can slip into a kind of “zone” once I’m in front of my students - it’s like I’m on crack; no matter how tired I am I forget everything once I start lecturing. Of course, once classes are over I come crashing down and end up napping once I get home.

I tried not napping for a while, thinking that if I was tired enough I’d fall asleep earlier, but it never worked.

40

My own pet theory, based on my own experience working every shift under the sun (and otherwise) and my observations of others adjusting to same, is that a good number of people who believe themselves to be “night owls” are actually “people whose natural day is longer than 24 hours”.

By that, I mean that their tendency to stay up late is less to do with enjoying being awake at night, and more to do with the fact that their bodies naturally require a longer period of being awake, followed by a longer period of sleep (hence the reason these are often the same people who need a solid eight hours or more to feel even remotely functional). Because the average person A) begins work in the morning, and B) goes to work immediately after waking up, the “extra” time that the body needs to get tired occurs in the evenings…and so we end up with a collection of “night people” who can never seem to get enough sleep before the alarm goes off exactly 24 hours after it did yesterday.

This, combined with a half-joking resentment of sleep in general, is why I have trained myself to function at near-full capacity on 4-6 hours per night. It’s not ideal, but what can I do? During a brief period of extended vacation (read: time between jobs), I slept whenever I felt like I should…and, to my surprise, I slept wonderfully and regularly given a 30-hour “day”.

Don’t know if this applies to you, but I thought I’d share…at the very least, it’s something to consider. Good luck finding a solution!

ETA: I once tried to convince my former employer, a 24-hour operations center, to allow me to work a staggered schedule where each workday began two hours later than the previous day did, resetting on the weekends. They didn’t go for it, but it was worth a shot.