I am just noticing that until about 3PM, I don’t have much motivation to do anything at all (complicating my 9-5 job). I can wake up just fine, I just really find it hard to concentrate and get motivated before midafternoon.
Anybody else have similar experience? It’s starting to bug me, wondering if it’s a legitimate thing that I could maybe get a work accommodation for.
I am a night owl. I can get more done in the wee hours that during the daylight. I am never rested, though. I don’t sleep well at any hour.
Maybe you should look for work with an evening shift.
Using blue light therapy, orange glasses therapy and modafinil may help you adjust your sleep schedule. I did those things when I had to wake up extremely early for a job.
Mine shift daily. If I get a good night’s sleep of 8-10 hours, I can’t fall asleep again for 18-20 hours, so I average about a 28-hour “day.” Of course, I couldn’t do this when I was working and/or married, so I had permanent jet lag. Now that I’m retired and single, I feel much more rested.
My good sleep times are around 10pm, 7am and 3pm. I have no idea why this is but it’s been pretty consistent for years (before I had kids I could basically just go to bed any time I was tired - since then, not so much).
Because I don’t have a traditional 9-5 job I can just take to bed at around 2:15 and set the alarm for an hour if I think I’m going to need it. Then I’m set up for the rest of the day.
How you can swing things if you work 9-5 in a conservative kind of workplace I don’t know. My housemate used to literally sneak under desks and take a quick nap, but he was an architecture student, and creative-type workplaces are more tolerant of eccentricities
This is pretty much me. Most comfortable being awake for 20 hours and then sleeping 6 to 8 hours. I have always had trouble falling asleep. Now, as I get older, I am also having trouble staying asleep.
This was a real problem when I was working 12 hour shifts. When you only have around 6 hours to sleep anyway, wasting 3 of them getting to sleep makes you exhausted the next day.
I am highly in favor of using drugs to solve problems, but modafinil is a great big nope for me. Makes me irritable, unstable, and generally a titanic asshole.
What I was mainly asking about was if other people have the same thing I do, a.k.a not giving a shit about anything before 3pm or so.
I can say that. About 3 days a week I am useless til the afternoon. I don’t work. So I haven’t got a problem with it. Now my children are grown I really have no problem. I still think you should look into a job in the swingshift. It may be a blessing.
I’m not a good sleeper, but I’m sure I do my best between 2 and 10 am which would be great if I didn’t have a job. I’m a night owl, and I try to get to bed early when I need to work. I find as I get older, getting up at 5:30 hits me like a ton of bricks if I’m up past 10:30. That’s a conflict being a night person.
I’m generally useless until around 2pm. I’ve worked 2nd shift for about 17 years and it suits me well. Twice a month, I have to work the weekend, back-to-back 12 hours shifts from 10am-10pm and it’s really hard when the rest of my weekday shifts are 4pm-1am. In fact this is a weekend “on” for me and I’m still up. I did nap earlier, but tomorrow will be rough.
It’s called being a night person. Move to southern Spain, you’ll fit in just fine if the heat doesn’t melt you down.
The Bestest Boyfriend was like that, I’m a morning person. Since both of us were ok in the afternoon/early evening and we lived in Florida it worked out fine (lots of the events we attended together would have started between 2 and 4 hours later in Spain; not good for me). When he started working an office-hours job we used to kid him that his coworkers must be real bad, since his manager hadn’t noticed he didn’t begin to open half an eye until 1pm at the earliest and wasn’t awake for real until 3pm. Being able to move to a night shift (and get paid more for “the inconvenience!”) made him super happy.
I"ve never tried modafinil, but back when Olmifon brand adrafinil was on the market, I had great luck with that in dealing with shift disorder. No irritability, rage or instability. However I know for some people (plus higher anxiety) that is a risk.
I have no idea about your situation of not really caring until late afternoon. The human body is complex, could be any number of situations. I assume a job that matches your natural rhythm isn’t really realistic right now.
I worked the night shift for nearly 20 years. Although there were times that I didn’t get as much sleep as I might’ve wanted, it was mostly due to being a new parent rather than working hours. These days, I work during the day. I really dislike it a great deal. There are loads of reasons, but none of them really having to do with the time of day so much as the sort of people that are likely to be around. Douglas Adams once said “time is an illusion - lunch time doubly so”. I just picked a schedule & stuck to it. No fears at all.
That said, I had several coworkers with me at night who simply broke down over the years. They lost relationships and jobs and all the rest & blamed it on working at night.
Oh yeah. This is me. I would also prefer to stay up until 2-3am, maybe later. The world does not agree with my preferences.
I did have the shifted pattern for most of my life. Unfortunately now I have a complete sleep pattern disruption and without taking some heavy duty knockout pills I will only get 1 1/2 to 2 hours of sleep a day. After some side effects from the first pills i was taking I’ve just switched to something else, and hopefully if I can get some decent sleep for enough days in a row I’ll restore some kind of pattern, shifted or anything else.
I’m incredibly privileged to have a job (professor) that allows me to follow my internal clock. I go to sleep at 2am and get up at 9 or 10am.
The only drawback is that some Normal People Activities happen in the early morning. Tomorrow I need to be up at 6am for an autocross event, So I’ll take a shot at going to bed at midnight.
I’ve been a night owl all of my life and my body always resets to the 2-10am schedule when circumstances allow it.