Waking up and work

Factual Questions
21

More likely they need to go to bed earlier, which is practical enough, but maybe not desirable. I understand that, I’m often guilty of staying up later than I should and paying for it the next morning. I didn’t need coffee in the morning though, I needed to have better sleep habits.

Speaking as someone who has had odd shift patterns for the last couple of decades, I don’t have a whole lot of sympathy for someone who can’t manage to wake up the same time every morning for their whole working life. You can get used to, early or late, in about a week.

22

I sailed with a guy who was a true old salt. He’d done a lot of single handed sailing before autopilots etc were a thing.

I’d be on watch at three am and a sail would flap and he’d be on deck fully awake and have the sailing situation worked out within 30 seconds. Then 5 minutes later he’d be back in his bunk and snoring.

It’s training and long experience I think. Wish I could be like that.

23

It’s honestly not always practical. Between kids and jobs and exercise and house hold management and other expectations, going to bed early enough to get the sleep you need, especially if you need more than the normal amount, is pretty tough. And even when it looks possible on paper, expecting people to easily give up the only hour or 90 minutes a day that they get to pursue their own interests or relax is not a little thing–especially when the “cost” is just drinking a cup of coffee and being a little cranky in the morning. The cranky at least is on someone else’s time.

It’s also not easy for people to fight against natural rhythms. I’m an extreme morning person, myself. It would be so difficult for me to adjust to a night shift job. I can’t imagine what would entice me to such a job. So I have a lot of sympathy for people who feel the same way about early shifts.

Finally, I think you are missing the social hyperbole in “Gah! Need my coffee!”. It’s a thing you say to fill the space in the morning, a way to bond. It’s as meaningless as “how you doing?”

24

They’d have a few miserable mornings and then get over their lack of caffeine, obviously - I’m not sure why you’d presume anything else. Luckily, in our modern first world society, coffee isn’t about to become unavailable, and unless you’re chugging multiple cups a day, there aren’t really any health risks to a cup a day. But if knowing that they have a minor dependence on caffeine and you don’t makes you feel better, you do you.

25

Going right back to the OP there is the idea of “sleep inertia” that folks waking naturally have some interval while their brain is only partly functional. When awoken artificially, such as by an alarm, how much sleep inertia one has depends a bunch on which of the 4 stages of sleep they were when the alarm randomly fired. At the “right” point in the cycle inertia is minimized. And in the “wrong” part of the cycle it’s maximized.

Separately how long sleep inertia lasts is pretty individual. Following a natural untriggered wake-up I’m going full speed within a couple seconds; my wife is more like 15 minutes before she’s fully hitting on all cylinders. That difference has been constant over 30+ years.

A very different issue is what time of day anyone is best suited to sleeping. The folks doing the multiple snooze button and roll over thing in the morning aren’t having issues with sleep inertia. Instead they’re having issues with trying to be asleep and awake at the wrong times in the 24-hour day versus their body’s preferred cycle. If they could sleep from 4am to noon then show up for work at 2pm they’d probably leap out of bed fully functional … at noon. Just don’t expect them to pull that off at 6am for an 8am report to work.

26

In the US flying biz there are no regs about minimum time from awake to at work. As a practical matter the process of getting ready and getting from wherever you’re sleeping to the airplane take long enough anyone has overcome their sleep inertia.

All the following is simplified to the main case, ignoring a lot of fine print.

Like truckers, our regs essentially require 10 hours off containing an “8 hour uninterrupted sleep opportunity” before work. Where we differ is that we must certify, upon pain of fines, license suspension, etc., that we are fully and adequately alert & legally rested before commencing any workday and any single flight within that workday. Out in the real world when stuff gets fouled up it can take a couple more than 10 clock hours to have that 8 hour sleep opportunity. Which can trigger follow-on delays.

For those airplanes and operations where an inflight nap is an expected part of the process, there’s recommendations (not regulation) to avoid being hands-on for 15-20 minutes after awakening. Compliance is usually pretty automatic just by the nature of the handover process from napping to working. I personally have never done that work so can’t share any insider insight. I recall a well-publicized incident 20+ years ago where somebody fell asleep in the seat (or was legally napping under their applicable regs) in cruise and awoke to seeing a bright light right in front of them heading their way! Chaos ensued as they grabbed the controls and aggressively evaded a collision … with Venus. IIRC only a few people were injured, none fatally. That is sleep inertia at work over a span of seconds, plus taking hasty action before you know you understand the whole situation. Don’t do that.

From having flown with a lot of people over a lot of years in this biz, some people are early morning people and can be monster alert and effective from 4am to 4pm, but not the opposite. And vice versa there are people happy to be finishing working at 3am, but don’t ever ask them to start at 8am; they’re useless.

Despite the “useless” comment just above, the nature of this work requires greater circadian flexibility than somebody with a conventional M-F day job. In the last 6 weeks I’ve been on the van from the hotel to the airport at 3am body time to start my day. Having already showered, shaved, pooped, packed, and snacked. I’ve also landed at 3am body time at the end of a 12 hour workday and not gotten to the hotel room until 4am, and not into bed until 430am body time. And I don’t even fly long haul to crazy different time zones; I only deal with at most 5 of them and usually just 3.

Some folks can hack this, some can’t. One of the filters in the early stages of a flying career is your natural aptitude for handling circadian disruption. I’m a (pre-)dawn patrol guy myself, but armed with adequate sleep can do plenty OK most any time of day or night.

27

I think I’m saying that the whole “need coffee” thing is largely about routine, social norms, and so on, rather than actually needing coffee.

Anyway, I won’t continue the hijack.

28

Those of us who’ve survived the wringer to stretch our circadian flexibility to the max can sometimes forget how extremely rigid other folks are on this point.

Witness the many people who share every six months that they’re screwed up for a month by the daylight savings time changeover. I have a hard time even noticing DST changeover. With all automated self-setting clocks I don’t even get to do the change-all-the-clocks ceremony any more.

Different people’s reactions aren’t good or bad; they’re just real different.

29

I have to agree with @Mijin. I also think @LSLGuy summed it up well in posts #25 and #26. People are different in the degree to which they are subject to “sleep inertia”, and the extent to which they tend to be “morning people” or “night people” tends to reflect their relative degrees of alertness at those times of day.

I’m definitely a night person and always have been. I’m not particularly a regular coffee drinker, but coffee definitely perks me up in the morning (that is, those times when I’m very reluctantly forced to be up in the morning!). So if I’m going to be driving in the morning – especially if I’m going to be driving any significant distance or in heavy traffic – I consider coffee essential both for its stimulant effects and for the extra wake-up time that cup of coffee and toast affords me. There have been a few times when I’ve had to drive when somewhat sleepy, and I am definitely a much less alert and less safe driver then. A couple of times I’ve almost ruined my lifetime accident-free record just due to not being sufficiently alert. And that’s just driving a car – the critical takeoff and descent phases of flying an airplane have to be 10x more demanding in terms of alertness.

30

Railroading is another industry with rest regulations, IIRC like truckers a maximum of ten hours on duty. I’ve read Railroad magazines published in the 1930s with reminiscences of guys who’d been railroading since 1900 or even earlier, before the ICC and unions had such laws in place and crews would work until they were dead on their feet.

One memory was from a brakeman who, as a rookie, had been carefully taught by his conductor the proper procedure for meeting another train. When his train stops in the siding, alight, close the switch (i.e. set it back to the main line) and lock it, return to the caboose to turn the marker lamps,* then if the other train is expected shortly, stand on the side of the track opposite from the switchstand.

One early morning when they’d been hours and hours on duty he followed most of the procedure except he decided to hell what the old goat said, he would stand by the stand for a quicker getaway. The noise of the approaching train jarred him out of the doze he’d been in and he knew he’d forgotten to close the switch. He leaped for the switch stand and had time to give several sharp tugs on the locked handle before the train was upon him.

He never broke procedure again.

*A moving train’s markers show red to the rear, yellow or green to the sides. When it is safely in a siding the markers are turned so the red lenses are pointing towards each other and the yellow or green show to the rear.

31

Prior to about 2014 the FAA regulations stated that if a workday had been scheduled according to the rules it could be extended indefinitely if “stuff” happened. Yup. Indefinitely.

I never personally did any real horror stories but they were out there. Dad did one in the 1980s where they were on duty continuously for about 28 hours and crossed the Atlantic 3 times as “stuff” kept happening.

The airlines howled like stuck pigs when the FAA put a stop to that insanity. We gave up a bunch of other day-to-day limitations to “pay for” this big improvement in worst-case abuse of safety. Of course the regulatory changes had to be dollar cost neutral according to the industry lobbyist team. How else could it be?

32

Only slightly tangential to the OP …

Allergies, diet, exercise, (un)diagnosed sleep apnea, sleep hygiene, … myriad things in addition to one’s basic ‘constitution’ (whatever that means) might play a huge role in how/whether one wakes up in the morning.

So I suspect a lot of factors play into who ends up in what careers. A bit of chicken/egg, too.

I once sparred with a guy online who insisted that long-haul truckers never become nearsighted1. I offered that maybe (highly) nearsighted people – maybe like pilots – don’t generally become OTR truckers.

I used to wake up bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, and annoyingly perky … very early in the morning. My then-girlfriend was fashioning a noose in the late evening hours. Not a morning person, that one.

This is definitely something where compatibility means more than “right” or “wrong,” in relationships, too.

1 He was probably more right than wrong. I remember a study showing a very high relative rate of nearsightedness in submariners …

33

I’m more or less mentally alert when I wake up. But my body is a different story.

I need to do some stretches before I get out of bed, or I’m hurting by noon.