Ask HN: How do you become a morning person?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6793610

by kzisme • 13 years ago

9 19 13 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I've always been a night owl and enjoy being up late. I have a bad habit of not going to bed until I'm tired, so that leads to me not sleeping until late. Any ideas?

jaseemabid• 13 years ago

Throw the laptop out of the window.

Veus• 13 years ago

Whats wrong with being a nightowl? If that is your natural rythem then why change?

The only reason I can see for changing is due to lifestyle changes (kids e.t.c).

kzisme• 13 years ago

I feel like i waste most of my day in bed and in the upcoming semester I will have earlier classes and a more restricted schedule.

svennek• 13 years ago

I was a nightowl before (going to bed after 01 and getting out of bed around 09), but decided to change it.

The basic point is, the body needs enough (consistent) sleep.

I go to bed between 22 and 23 now, and get out of bed before 06 everyday (yes, that includes weekends as my body likes the consistency) with a success rate somewhere in the nineties (percent).

Also exercising helps getting your body more capable (whenever I drop it a few days in a row "to save time" my productivity drops due to being tired)

And a morning light (basically a clock radio connected to a STRONG lightbulb that turns up your light half an hour before you should wake) really works. I regularly wake up when the light turns on (half an hour early) and when I sleep away from home, I have a hard time getting out of bed consistently.

Lastly, make sure you leave the bed as soon as you are awake, "resting" in bed for a few minutes before getting up is a sure-fire way to oversleep (as you fall asleep again)

IanDrake2• 13 years ago

I've tried to shift my clock too. My biggest problem is that my restful dreaming phase of sleep doesn't seem to offset from the time I go to sleep, but just happens around 5-8AM. That means my alarm goes off while I'm dreaming and all I want to do is go back to sleep.

On a recent trip to Cali (3 hour time shift) I had the best sleep ever and during the time of night that I needed. Perhaps I should just move to the west coast, because nothing else has ever worked so well.

coralreef• 13 years ago

wouldn't you just adapt to the difference eventually?

IanDrake2• 13 years ago

I wonder the same thing.

cupofjoakim• 13 years ago

Start working out. You get tired earlier and I find it easier to focus on the tasks I have since I started.

pknight• 13 years ago

I've given myself some rules so I don't go overboard staying up late, like not doing anything work related after 3am or computer games after a certain time. When I don't follow these I generally get up later and later until I'm on a truly unworkable schedule. I find it's pretty easy to go to bed a little later each day, it's much harder to go to bed earlier, at least for me.

The other solution is to plan stuff early in the morning.

ariejan• 13 years ago

I was like that myself 6 months ago. I had some cool stuff to work on, and would to it in the evening, getting to bed late, tired the next day.

I changed it by planning small chunks of work for each morning, getting up at 5. Doing a bit of work before the rest of the family wakes up. Than at 22:00 you're feeling tired and you go to bed.

It takes a bit of getting used to, but after a few days you don't want to do it any other way.

Read more about my experience at http://ariejan.net/2013/05/21/early-birds/

gembird• 13 years ago

next time when you go to bed, just sleep at 22 and wake up at 6, the important thing is try to sleep early and just forget about your god damn projects

dack• 13 years ago

My wife and I have been going to bed a 9 and waking up at 5 for a few weeks now. We do all our "project work" in the morning before our day jobs, and are pretty exhausted by night time. If you shift 1hr a day until you get to this type of rhythm, then eventually it won't really feel any different than your normal schedule.

cafard• 13 years ago

Have a child. You are more or less guaranteed a dozen years of early wake-up calls.

d64f396930663ee• 13 years ago

Start exercising. I found my quality of sleep increased dramatically once I did this, and even though I was still going to bed at 2 or 3 AM at first, it somehow made shifting to a more reasonable hour much easier once I was actually sleeping eight hours a night.

rachelandrew• 13 years ago

I am a retrained night owl. I used to work in the theatre which meant I worked funny hours, long shifts (often doing a matinee, an evening show then going to another theatre to do a night changeover, getting to bed at 6am then sleeping all day. When I started working on the web I would work late and generally not have great sleep patterns.

I retrained myself by starting to go to the gym or for a run really early (at about 6am) every morning. I just did that consistently until my body learned to have a pattern and I'm now very much a morning person, I usually get up at about 5am. The trick is to be consistent especially in the 6 months or so it takes to retrain your habits.

japhyr• 13 years ago

Stop using an alarm clock, if you use one. Having an alarm clock lets you think you can keep your body up as long as you want, and then wake up when you want to. Getting rid of the alarm clock also lets you get up out of bed the first time you wake up, rather than drifting back to sleep and waiting for the alarm.

If you ditch the alarm clock, you will pay attention to the quality of your sleep. You might end up going to sleep a little earlier, and waking up earlier.

beat• 13 years ago

I'm trying to shift my habits around myself. Going from the problem/solution perspective, my problem is that I need to work in time for my startup around my dayjob hours. If I wait until evening to work on startup, I'm already tired and it's conflicting with life stuff. So I'm trying to have at least two hours a day before dayjob starts.

The blocker is that I often just drone late at night, surfing/shopping or watching tv. It's not productive time. So I'm kind of forcing myself to go to bed early, 11pm at the latest, and using a silent alarm (Fitbit Force) to get myself up and avoid the snooze button.

The hardest part has been dealing with when life forces me to stay up late anyway, not breaking the habit.

dllthomas• 13 years ago

There's no perfect solution; people are wired differently. The following may help:

1) Have something to do in the morning, get out of bed and do it.

2) Eat something early on in the day.

3) Reduce caffeine intake generally, and especially after ~noon.

4) Reduce your interaction with screens in the evening 4a) Use something like Redshift or Flux, for when that fails

5) Try to stick to a regular schedule. If you're always getting up at the same time, getting up gets easier.

Don't push yourself too hard, though. Some people are just wired such that it's not going to be easy, and fatigue does a lot of harm.

centdev• 13 years ago

I was in a similar situation. For me the best time to push code into production was late night (between 1-2am). And with kids, I was still getting up 6:30am. Even on the weekends when I try to stay away from computers, I usually couldn't go to sleep until 2am anyway. Over time I just became wired like this until I made it a point to go to sleep 15 mins earlier than the previous week whether I felt tired or not. Now I go to usually around 11:30pm and although I find myself waking up without an alarm clock at 5am, I still have an opportunity to get extra sleep if I need to.

Ask HN: How do you become a morning person?

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