I’ve never met anyone who claimed to be a “morning person.” They simply get used to it. Many years ago, as a young radio DJ, I was hired to do morning drive, 5-10am, 6 days a week. I did it for five years, though part way through it became 6-10am. I never really got used to going to bed at 9pm and getting up at 3am, but that was the gig. I started drinking coffee pretty quickly (I never had before then) and that caffeine zip helped a lot.
Once I was interviewed for the local paper and was asked how it was possible to sound so cheerful so early in the morning when everyone else was just waking up. I said, “It’s easy. I’ve been awake since 3am, consumed at least one cup of coffee, and by the time you turn your radio on, I’m at least 2 or 3 hours ahead of you.”
Over the years I did fill-in for a week or two when the morning personality was on vacation, and it practically killed me. I could never do that as a full-time job again.
IMO waking up at 3am isn’t a “morning” person. That’s working the last half of a graveyard shift.
Left to my own devices I am sleepy at 10pm = now, and up by 6am. And as often as not it’s 9pm-5am. That’s a “morning person”. My wife is a night owl. Left to her own devices she retires at 2am and awakens around 10am.
I too had a job for decades where awakening at 3am was sometimes the plan. And sometimes it was 6am, and sometimes I could sleep as late as I wanted, but needed to start work in the afternoon / evening and remain at work to 2 or 3am.
All I can say is that qualitatively over all those years of every possible shift, the ones that involved waking up predawn, even 3 or 4 hours pre-dawn, were a hell of a lot easier on me than the ones that involved being at work at 11pm or later.
Many of my co-workers had the opposite experience and opposite preference.
Also unrelated is the “jump out of bed” effect. I am not a morning person, and usually sleep until 10:30-11, but I don’t sleep excessively (about 7 hours) and when I do wake up I’m bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. I do usually have a morning coffee, but I don’t need it. I can be alert and out the door in 15 min if required.
Falling asleep early is the problem. If I need to wake up early on an ongoing basis, what happens is that I fail to fall asleep at the required hour, and fight insomnia until sleep debt catches up with me. Then, sheer exhaustion gets me to fall asleep a bit earlier, but never to the point of comfort. So I hit steady-state at perhaps 5 hours and feel like shit on a constant basis.
To be honest, I’m not sure why falling asleep early is so difficult. It doesn’t seem like a sunlight effect, since it’s long after sunset no matter what, and doesn’t change with the seasons in any case. I’m thinking it’s a human activity thing. I’m up for several hours after most people have fallen asleep and stopped making noise. Only then do I feel a need to sleep.
I’m not quite that nocturnal but I do have short patience with diurnal chauvinists who think there’s something morally superior about keeping farmer’s hours.
I’m a morning person. Left to my own devices, I’d sleep 9-4. It’s not as bad as being a nightowl in a world that treats it as a moral failure, but there have certainly been times in my life when its been really hard to explain that I’m pretty much exhausted and useless after 7. When I was in my 20s, it was a genuine problem for my social life.
I am an evening person. I concur with the people who said that much if the most creative things happen after midnight.
Fortunately, I work the evening shift: start at 15:00, end at 23:00. I typically do things after work (eat, write, draw, etc) until 3:00 or so. And I set an alarm for 11:30.
I found an old diary where I was going to work for 7:30 and finishing at 15:30. Then I would go downtown and do things for the evening. Now I wonder, how did I have the energy to do that?
When in medical school years ago, we learned very little about sleep apart from its restorative nature. Still not well understood.^. Turns out getting enough sleep is very important for health and most people need 7-9 hours. Again, I am not judging. I can get by on eight hours divided up however (but not less over the medium term). But I am very skeptical of a claim 40% of people get by adequately on less six hours sleep no matter what self-reported survey says so. There is a stigma to too much sleep, going back to “ten o’clock scholars” and people are not always accurate about these things.
Anyone go to the gym at five am? Is it full of high powered tech bros?
^New York Times recently had a fascinating article on a study beginning in 2017 that has discovered more than three thousand types of new neutrons in the human brain. We don’t know what most of them do.. (Come to think of it, this is worth a separate thread. Done.)
I was a night person for most of my life, but for the past ten years or so, I haven’t been able to sleep past about 7 am, even when I don’t have to get up. If I stay up late, I end up not getting enough sleep until I’m finally so sleep-deprived that my body lets me sleep later one or two mornings. Left to my own devices, I wake up around the time it gets light and get sleepy about 8 hours earlier.
I kind of miss being a night person. It was fun feeling like I was the only one up in a sleeping world. My only consolation is that the other members of the household sleep late whenever they can, so I get the house to myself in the mornings now.
When I still worked at the office, I didn’t typically roll in until 8:00 AM. When I do come in early, the CEO was almost always aready there. (I used to handle parking at work, and parked in the same area our executives parked. Yes, I abused what little authority I had.) Typically our COO and CFO were also in the office fairly early as well. I don’t know our CEO’s habits, but our former COO claimed to get up early every day and jog a few miles. He was the type of guy who kept a fairly rigid schedule so I believed him. i.e. I knew when he checked his mail, if I wanted anything from him that day I knew I had to send it before 2:00 PM.
In graduate school, I learned how to “read” academic history books by not actually reading the whole thing. I’m sure people who read multiple newspapers follow the same general principles I did. i.e. They’re not reading the whole newspaper. Still, six seems excessive.
My first job was working the breakfast shift at a restaurant. So I was always up and working early, fairly typical to take an afternoon nap and then stay up later than I should’ve. Now my “day job” (also have a few businesses I pretty much work on in my “free” time but were fulltime for over a decade) is working 10-12 hour shifts overnight. I go to sleep around 6am at the earliest. I prefer to wake up around 2pm but I tend to wake up anywhere from 11am-4pm. I just start my waking-up/getting-ready-for-work routine whenever I get up. If I wake up earlier I fit in more exercise or errands or business stuff.
I wake up 2 hours before I plan to leave the house so I can wake up, eat breakfast, clean up myself and get dressed.
I mean, I could roll out of bed and charge out the door 15 minutes later, probably forgetting a sock and to brush and braid my hair, and I would be OK driving but judging by the honks, squealing tires, and rude gesture no one else likes my driving that soon after I wake up…
I’m not a morning person although I am currently paid to act like one (my current schedule has me starting my shift at 5 am). I learned a long time ago that if I have to start early I have to get up even earlier to give myself time to truly wake up and be functional. My coworkers assume that because I am that way at 5 am I’m a morning person. Nope. I’m a night person who, through strict self-discipline and the occasional OTC sleep aid manages a schedule that doesn’t really suit me.
Once or twice I’ve covered a night shift on an emergency basis. That means I stay up all night and go home at 7 am. It always draws amazed comments that I can see to do that effortlessly. Well… I do get tired by the end but I’m a night person. “Forcing” myself to stay up is really not that hard because my body wants to be active later than most other people. I’d be quite happy to be going to bed in the pre-dawn hours rather than waking up in them as I do now.
I manage a morning schedule because I’m an adult and I can figure out how to make it work so I can keep my current job. It’s not at all what I would prefer. When I retire I’m going back to late hours.
I’m very much a morning person; my brain functions much better early in the day. I generally wake up around 5 am of my own accord, no alarm needed. But I need sleep, and lots of it. I feel best if I can get a solid 8 hrs, or at least a nap and then 6 hrs. Generally by 10pm my eyelids have turned to lead and I fall asleep, even if I want to read or finish a tv show.
I can work long, late hours, but not happily and not for days in a row.
Several people is this thread seem to be conflating “morning person” with “less sleep”, but in my experience, they arent at all the same thing. Yes, I like to get up between 4 and 5 . . But I like to be in bed by 9.
You perfectly prefigured my next point. Thank you. Great minds and all that.
I’m an eyes open = full speed ahead person. Conversely …
When still healthy my late first wife was not quite the early bird I was, but she was no night owl either. Her natural sleep schedule fit pretty well with the standard workday. But from when she opened her eyes until she was fully functionally conscious was about an hour. Lotta groggy “wading through oatmeal” in her words.
I have never seen my current wife wake up since I’ve already been up 4 hours before that happens. I know she loves to dawdle in bed with her phone for another hour-ish, so I suspect she’d kinda slow to become fully functional also.
I find the claims of night owls that the only good creative work ever happens after midnight to be laughable. I don’t doubt that their only good creative work happens then. Mine happens between the 5am I’m awake and the 8am everybody else begins to think about moving. I suspect the same is true of most early birds.
They have a point in recognizing that deep thought works better with fewer interruptions from other people. The mistake is assuming that only happens at 3am after being awake for 16 hours rather than at 3am after having just awakened from a long and sound restorative sleep.
Morning person here. And it keeps getting earlier and earlier.
My Wife is too.
Now that I work from home, I have quite flexible hours. But I still get up around 4am. Wife is the same way. Wish I could sleep in, but I can’t anymore. It’s a very rare thing for me to need to set an alarm.
This is absolutely my experience, as well. I’m stupid after 7 pm. Hell, Im pretty stupid after about 4pm. I can’t tell you how many times ive struggled with a problem in the evenings, ginally said the hell with it and gone to bed, only to find it simple in the morning. It never seems to work the other way: if I walk away from a problem in the morning, the solution isn’t there that night.
Like, the number of good ideas I’ve had on my morning commute is orfers of magnitude higher than the ones ive had driving home.
The weirder thing is this low-key idea out there that night owls are, in general, more creative than morning people in general. I think this is because night owls percieve morning people as being willing and able to fight their own inclinations to conform to expectations. They sometimes dont seem to grok that it’s just how others are wired.
A minor point of detail, if I may. I didn’t say the only time creative work can be done by night owls is late at night, I said that it typically produces some of their most creative work.
So what to make make of your anecdotal example of you doing your best creative work shortly after getting up in the early morning hours versus me doing my best creative work very late at night? Simple. You are chirping the experience of an early bird, and I am hooting the experience of a night owl.
Objectively, however, the argument that creative work “at 3am after being awake for 16 hours” cannot be as effective as “having just awakened from a long and sound restorative sleep” is early-bird hooey. The reality is that the two species obviously have vastly different circadian rhythms. As a night owl, it takes me a long, long time and much coffee to become functional in the morning, and intellectual/creative functions are just about the last to come online. Conversely, the winding-down at night tends to happen in the opposite order. We may be less physically alert, maybe even feeling some fatigue, but to us night owls that seems to energize the creative functions even more. Tiredness doesn’t necessarily inhibit cognitive function; to the contrary, we (all of us) even engage in cognitive processes in our sleep! …
It takes me a long time to become functional when awoken earlier than my natural preference even if I’ve had sufficient sleep OR
When I awaken at my preferred time after adequate sleep it takes me a long time to become functional.
The point being whether the issue is time of day or instant-on versus gradual warm-up. I maintain (perhaps erroneously) that those two things are unrelated to each other. Although it’s certainly true that a night owl forced to live an early bird schedule will probably suffer slow start-up as a consequence.
Generally speaking, the answer is that it’s “long and gradual warm-up” in both cases; no particular correlation with time of day. What it does correlate with is length of sleep. If I’ve had one of my short naps of a few hours or so, I come up to speed fairly quickly. But if I’ve had one of those “long and restorative sleep” things that early birds rave about, I’m going to be semi-comatose for a long time. Conversely, it also takes a long time to wind down at night. I suspect that this is typical night-owl behaviour. We seem to be almost exact opposites in this regard. It’s hard to say how much of this is the result of long-term habituation and how much is intrinsically physiological.
