I’ve never been much of a morning person when I was still a kid in school. I think that the combination of the relatively short days (oh how I long for 8-3pm schedules again) and youthful energy fooled my body into late nights and exhausted mornings. When I reached college and basically got to dictate my own schedule, I picked late morning/afternoon classes so I could stay up until 1am and sleep until 10am. I thought it was torture to be forced to get up anytime before 9am.
Until I got a job, that was never a problem. However, once with a job, I had to adhere to the standard worker drone schedules of early mornings that didn’t mesh well with my lifestyle up until that point. It took years of training my body to do that, and only until after I graduated that I was able to fully embrace being an early riser.
However, I still have friends who lead almost dual lives: waking early on weekdays and sleeping until 9 or 10 on weekends. I don’t know how they do that.
So my question is: if you wake up early routinely for your job, do you still wake up early during weekends? And I’m talking about waking up, not getting up. Or, if you’re like my friend, you are forced to wake up early on weekdays but somehow your body just knows it’s a weekend and you sleep in.
My body cannot sleep past 7am. Unless I run a marathon or something the night before, I can go to bed from 10pm to 1am and like clockwork, I will naturally wake up before 6:30am. Are you that type of person too? Or am I the weird one and everybody else can sleep in late when they want to?
I used to work nights, and I loved to sleep late. I was a very good sleeper.
But I spent a few years getting up everyday for 8 am, 7 days a week. It was challenging to sleep later but I could still do it when the opportunity presented itself.
But as I’ve gotten older, though I no longer need to be up at any specified time, as a rule, I now wake up early every morning. Like 6 am early, sometimes earlier.
I used to try and force myself back to sleep, but all that would happen is I would end up either with a stiff neck or a headache, or both.
I am not fond of it, one little bit. My husband can still sleep till noon, no worries. Not me. And, of course, I now have difficulty staying up past midnight, understandably. If I’m busy and moving around, or out it’s not too bad, I can make it to 2am or later. But if I’m just quietly reading or watching a movie I’m a goner by midnight.
I feel your pain, I miss lazing around and sleeping late.
That’s pretty nice, I envy you. After a week of waking up for work, if I shut off my alarm on Saturday, I’d wake naturally at about 11:30. But I sleep really late at night too, so I’m pretty sure I’m steadily accumulating sleep debt during the week. Maybe you’re just getting sufficient sleep.
My eyes snap open at 05:30 if it is a workday. For some unknown reason I can sleep late on weekends and holidays. Maybe it just requires more years of training. I’ve been working the same schedule for 30 years.
My kids wake me up somewhere between 5 and 6 a.m. every blasted morning. Both like to snuggle with mommy, so I’m generally locked under a pile of children (well, assuming that two make a pile) until about 6:30. If it’s a Sunday, my husband will take them both out of the bedroom so I can sleep in. Every other day I generally get up first. My husband is terrible about waking up in the morning and we take turns on weekends so each of us gets to sleep in once a week.
Even on days when I’m supposed to be sleeping in, I usually only doze until 7:30 or so after everyone has left the room. Sometimes I hide in the bed and read until 9-ish, though.
Don’t forget too that age affects sleep. Younger people are naturally more night-owls; us old fogies wake up with the chickens. For me at least this morning it was an extremely loud cardinal right outside my window at 5:45. WHOOOOOITTT-cheer-cheer-cheer-cheer. Loud.
I’ve always been a morning person. I don’t bother with an alarm because I’m always very early to work. I typically wake up between 6am and 7am on weekdays.
I can usually get back to sleep on a weekend, but it’s rare for me to remain in bed beyond 8:30 or so even then. I get restless.
I tend to fall asleep between 10pm and 11pm, if that matters.
Up at 6:30 or so on weekdays, usually 8 or 8:30 on weekends. Such is the way of the working life. Frankly it makes me miserable and if I could change one thing about my life right now, it would be to change the working world to have a sleep schedule that worked better for me.
My natural sleep schedule is something like 2-10 am, and I gravitate towards that whenever I have more than a couple of days off in a row.
If left to my own devices for a week I end up going to bed about 1 or 2am and wake about 10am, so that must be what my natural clock does. I have to set an alarm to get up at 7 for workdays, and I never wake before it goes off. I go to bed between 12 and 1am. I’m always quite groggy on work mornings, but at night I wake up and am not sleepy until very late.
My problem with oversleeping is not that I will automatically wake up, but that I will often feel like I’ve been run over by a truck, due to allergies. And, even outside of alergy season, it will just make me more tired.
“Define younger.” I’m 34 and I still go to bed very late on Friday and Saturday nights, and wake up very late on Saturday and Sunday. I find that as long as I’m out of bed by 11 on Sunday morning, I can get enough sleep that night to get up properly Monday.
That reminds me, whenever we have Daylight Savings Time changes, it usually takes me about 2 weeks to convert my body to the new schedule, never more than a month. When I was younger and woke up at 9 or 10am, it would take me forever, usually more than a month, before I got used to getting up earlier or later. I used to hate DST but now I just roll with it.
It’s not so much that I can’t sleep in on Saturday as it is that I can’t stay awake on Friday night. I get up by 5 most days during the school year, and by 9 I am ready to at least go lie down and read. Unless there is something really exciting going on Friday night (which is rare), I am still going to be yawning and looking for my bed by ten. So by Saturday at six, I’ve had more than enough sleep and can wake up.
If I were one of these people that can work all day and then go out until the wee hours of Friday night, I imagine I’d sleep in more easily. But I am not!
Naturally I’m a night person. Up all night, sleep until noon.
However, if I have to work on a day-based schedule, I start early. This has the interesting effect of having me up at 0500 on work days, but up UNTIL 0500 on weekends and when I’m on leave. The day before I go back to work is always fun.
I’m still in grad school, but last semester I had to get up at 7:30 during the week. I did not wake up at this time on weekends; I slept straight through until noon or 1pm.
My schedule right now has me getting up around 9:30. On weekends, I’m still sleeping until noon or 1pm. My natural sleep schedule seems to be about 4:30am-12:30pm.
I used to try to go to bed “earlier” during the week (like 1am) but wasn’t able to consistently do so. Even if I’m totally exhausted, I’m generally lying awake until at least 2:30. So I just gave up. I try to manage about 5 hours/night during the week and then just sleep more on weekends. I literally cannot remember the last time I went to bed before midnight. If I do, it’s a guarantee that I’m sick.
I have always been a night owl. I hate mornings with a passion. The first 10 minutes of each morning, from opening my eyes untill getting into the shower is sheer torture. The kind of torture that makes me contemplate quitting my job, abandoning my family and living on the street just so I can enjoy sweet, sweet sleep.
I was this way as a kid also. Hated getting up for school. I WILL get up on time, though. I am never late for work. And I also WILL stay up way too late every night.
On Fridays and Saturdays, I am up until after 3 a.m. at least. If I got to NYC for the weekend, then I’m up till about 8:00 am before I go back to sleep. I will then sleep until about 3:00 pm.
It is common for me to sleep at least till 11:00 a.m. on weekends and maybe till 2 or 3. My daughter has been getting her own morning cereal since she could toddle.
I wish I could take a pill every morning that made me instantly ‘awake’. I would pay big money for that pill.
I set my alarm for 3:40 every morning and am out the door at 4:00. I get home about 6:30, get the kids up, and get one out the door at 7:00, then I catnap until the second one leaves at 8:00. Then I catnap some more (usually til 8:25) until I have to leave at 8:40 for the second job.
On the rare occasion that I don’t have to get up, I usually wake about 4:00 and read for a while, then back to sleep until…forever. When I take a no-deadline nap, I sleep hard and long.
I’ve been doing this so long that I have a hard time sleeping more than 5 hours…my back starts to hurt and I get really restless. I’m also very good at the internal alarm for naps up to about an hour–I can remind myself, “Gotta be up in 45 minutes” and I’ll be wide awake in 43. It’s actually kind of weird.
