I'm waiting for 8am, then feed + walk the dogs, then I'll go back to bed for 1h or a bit more (tops), and it'll still be early when I wake up again. Most of my colleagues will show up around 10 with bleary eyes while I've done most of the stuff I wanted to do already!
... So that gives me a lot of time for a good walk, or tinkering etc in the afternoon.
I used to be a 'night owl' really, going to bed at 2am; but I realized I was never really terribly efficient until about lunchtime the following day, while I was also wasting my time in the evening for no real reason. AND wasting the short winter day at my desk.
Nowadays, well, I got the whole day to myself!
If you have (young) kids, it's non existent either way.
Now I go to sleep at the same time my kids do, around 9PM. My social life is during noon. My lunch-time is 2.5 hours instead of the usual 40min. During that time I go to the gym, have lunch with my wife, do some shopping, go to the barber,...
I can recommend it. More sunlight, more movement, no evening binging, no hanging in the couch, no useless late-night phone scrolling, no tired mornings, better quality time with the family...
Another question, at some point in your life - do you even want an evening social life?
the calculus now is: "is this thing that ends super late worth being tired as shit the next day? i'm going to wake up at 0500 regardless."
a date night with my wife or close friends that goes deep into the night? sure!
a random night where folks just want to drink? unlikely, unless i _really_ want to hang with those people. (this means i dip early for work events now. this is okay, since most of the people i work with have kids and need to bail earlier to take care of them.)
that said, i "can" be more selective now because i spent many years doing the latter. i know how it goes, and i've drank enough to know that i'm not missing anything.
i used to be a super hardcore night owl (0200-0900). transforming into an early bird was very hard but extremely worth it. between this and giving up caffeine, my productivity shot up through the roof and my mood in the morning is much more stable.
also, waking up early is a great way to make friends with others that wake up early!
I'm much more excited about able to be able to go fishing at 4am in the summer, NOW we're talking ;-)
I'm a night owl that crashes around 2 AM, and honestly, I think it's why I can barely function on an average day. I try to make up for lost sleep on the weekends, but it doesn't quite work that way.
But what he's found in literature is pretty consistent, and biphasic sleep was once quite normal in a specific context: the siesta.
It's dying out in continental Europe alas -- a lost cultural touchstone -- and in the contemporary West, a siesta is short (literally a nap). But a traditional Spanish siesta is the best part of a sleep cycle -- a good couple of hours, with an hour's rest spread either side. More than enough that you could have four hours sleep overnight throughout the longer days and not be incompetent the next day.
My sleep is currently polyphasic, which is not a great time. But it has taught me that sleep in the absence of natural light (or the presence of consistent artificial light) does have a habit of going polyphasic.
I woke up at 4:15am after about five hours of sleep. I just cleaned a grill pan. I may go back to sleep again.
Sleep scientists seem pretty sure that polyphasic sleep is bad.
It wasn't bad. I did like waking up at 4:30 on the weekend, rolling over, and going back to sleep.
The article outlines multiple examples of references to first and second sleep periods in official court documents, and points to sleep studies of farmers in rural areas who still 'almost wake' not long after midnight.
As a pre industrial habit it makes sense - in colder areas fires don't last all night and rising after midnight to stoke fires, check animals, etc. fits right in with rural life.
The parent post means the study of the practice, not the practice itself.
It might make sense -- I think it probably does -- but that doesn't mean that it's not true, when you dig into it, that the major study here is Ekrich and all the articles about it, articles about Ekrich.
Making intuitive sense isn't really enough. It's difficult to study the habits of the long dead, but the parent poster is right to be skeptical of the nature of coverage.
But I'm not entirely sure; how much can you do awake if it's dark?
But then, it's rare for it to be truly dark, with moonlight and the like.
Oh no what will future generations do without doomscrolling.
...will bitrot away in 50 years.
In 1000, future historians will probably view our period as a curious dark age. (Where are all the books and the monuments??)
Bitrot isn't as much a concern any more - we have data formats worked out these days, with well defined specifications and open standards (PDF/A), so basically as long as computers keep operating on the fundamental principle of bits and bytes, our documents will always be able to be read, and for virtually all popular data storage formats there is open source software that can, should the need arise, be run in an emulator.
In fact, future historians should have it easier to understand our times, given that machines can actually sift through data at speed and you don't need humans to tediously take and scan brittle paper, and a lot of data is replicated so often across the planet that even a nuclear war should leave at least one copy alive in contrast to earlier times where wars, fires and natural disasters would routinely wipe out entire nations' memories. (Doesn't stop people from trying though, just look at the book burnings in Ukraine committed by Russia)
The dark era IMHO more concerns pre-MS Windows computing and everything related to gaming. The former because a lot of data there (hole punch cards...) literally rotted away, the latter because of decades worth of homegrown architectures, all kinds of DRM, a lack of obligations for publishers to submit DRM-free copies and copies of the server backend code to national libraries, and the current "trend" towards e-stores for games instead of physical media.
> Now, with our obsessive encyclopedic documentation, it's unlikely that future generations will forget our ways of life.
I’m not so sure. One, due to increasing reliance on bits for that documentation. But also two, because we already find it incredibly hard to truly imagine the ways of the world just a few generations back.
One drawback to it is that many sleep trackers don't handle it well. They'll treat a second sleep as a nap for example and then pester you that you're not getting enough sleep. The Galaxy G5 seems to capture all sleeps fairly well (but it loses pairing every few months and has to be reset from scratch), the Oura Ring sometimes catches 2nd or 3rd sleeps as naps and adds them to the total, the Xiaomi Mi7 Band often misses shorter sleeps or lists them as naps without adding them to the total. The Android app "Sleep as Android" is started and stopped manually so if you can remember to do that it works well.
Each person has a cycle where they go between waking and resting state. The trick is to go to bed when you're headed into resting state. And if you wake up and can't go back to sleep, get up and do something for X number of minutes until you go back into resting state.
For me the cycle is about 45-50 minutes.
This also means that if you wake up naturally before your alarm that means you're in the waking state, so it doesn't matter how sleepy you might feel, just get up and get on with your day. Going back to sleep will waste 45*2 minutes at least.
I've got some moderately interesting graphs from my fitness tracker, and I'm broadly aware that my sleep cycle is not the "usual" 90 minutes that the standard-issue human gets. But I've had a lot of trouble refining the data to a useful point, let alone building a routine around it.
Specifics don't matter after a while because you build new habits and do them without thinking.
But the thing our teacher told us was to stay up until you get more and more tired, until you feel your eyelids wanting to close, but power through it and measure the time between the most tired and the most alert after that.
In your experience, are you able to learn and be productive while adjusting to these sleep cycles? How long does it take you to adjust and feel well rested? Are there any risks to be wary of, and any tips to change my sleep routine effectively?
I got a ton done in those two hours. I remember looking for an e ink display to use with my computer so I could do it by candlelight, to no avail
in fact, cbt-i, the therapy I undertook last year and earlier this year, takes advantage of this to help patients mitigate their insomnia.[0]
the treatment protocol requires that you get out of bed and literally go anywhere else when you wake up at night. you can do almost anything you want during that time, even watch TV or play games! (i read hacker news or read "linux kernel development" by robert love; if you're on here, thanks!)
given this, it's not surprising that our ancestors divided their sleep into two halves. our circadian rhythms are naturally programmed to sleep when it's dark and stay awake when it's bright. i could imagine that their circadian rhythms were more "in tune" before electricity.
[0] "insomnia" isn't curable and can happen to everyone! it's more of a state of being than a condition or disease.
The problem is I have a family, and I couldn't make the schedule work out to where I get a good polyphasic sleep cycle in and still be a part of the family with the normal food-oriented together times.
Some more discussion then:
