When I wake up in the morning, I’m scarecly more aware than a zombie. I’m sluggish, mentally slow, incoherent… basically the ultimate “not a morning person” person. Yet late at night, I am frequently at my peak. I am more creative and energized in the evenings.
I also know people who wake up full of energy, brite and alert, and who usually crash early in the evening.
What gives? We’re all sleeping. Why is it that some of us have our batteries drained while we sleep, while others charge their batteries in the exact same process? And is there a way to consciously change from one type of person to the other?
IANAPsychologist, but I’ve taken Psych101 at Virginia Tech. As it turns out, there are multiple different phases of sleep. Waking up in the middle of some of them is a lot more pleasant that others. If you want to partake of this, set a regular pattern for going to bed at night, and set your alarm clock to go off at advancing (or retreating) intervals, over a week. When you find a time at which point you wake up feeling good, make a note of it. Also, I personally feel very nice when I wake up during a dream (which is stage 5, or REM sleep). Not sure if this is just me, though.
I never want to get out of bed. No matter when I go to bed, if I have to routinely get up before 630am, it ruins my life. If I can sleep until 730am, it’s much better. If I go past 9, I might as well have gotten up at 5am, in terms of feeling sluggish.
It also turns out that 8 hours is not my ideal sleep number. Around 5 hours seems to be perfect.
It would be really nice if people didn’t just blind-link. It’s much nicer to have some idea what I’m looking at to decide if it’s worthwhile. For instance, “A previous thread in which I gave my own solution to the problem” or “An article about a new technology designed to solve this problem.” Not every link is interesting or relevant to every person, and it’s really discourteous not to spend a sentence or two explaining it, especially as the two URLs in question don’t give much clue as to the contents of their destinations.
Anyway, I’ve read stuff to suggest that people’s natural day-night cycles actually vary some around 24 hours (the notion that everyone actually has a natural 25-hour cycle has been disproven.) If your cycle is a little short of a day, you’ll feel tired in the evenings and end up getting up early and quite refreshed in the mornings. If it’s a little long, on the other end, you won’t feel tired at bedtime and you won’t feel like getting up. Essentially, most people’s cycles just are not exactly 24 hours, so you’ll always end up struggling a little bit around the natural rhythm. Most people end up being either morning or night people, and while your cycle tends to shorten with age (which is why old people get up so damn early in the morning), there’s probably not much more to be done.
If you hold your mouse arrow over the link you’ll see it’s web address; the first is an SDMB thread, the second is a New Scientist article… I haven’t actually clicked on either.
I know, which is why I noted that the URLs don’t really tell me anything - I don’t know if it’s an SDMB link to a previous GQ answering the question, or what. And in this case, it wasn’t really an answer to the question.
A link in GQ tells you that “there is relevant information to be found at this position.” Certainly that information could be summarized, but the poster might have reasons that he cannot provide a proper response at that time.