Step 1) Exit Puberty
Step 2) Have a real socio-economic incentive to get up at 6am.
Step 3) Stop drinking caffeine after 4pm. Stop drinking booze after 8pm. (Stop drinking booze entirely, even)
Step 4) Gene Therapy
Step 5) Find out if you snore. If you’re snoring, you’re not going to get enough sleep during the night, which will make you groggy af in the early morning.
Step 6) At 6am, when your alarm clock goes off, it helps if you really, really, really need to pee.
Step 6. Got it just drink before bed but then still have to piss middle of the night and then refill bladder mid night.
Step 7: as soon as you get up, eat a meal. It helps set your internal alarm clock.
Sorry I literally cannot. It makes me feel sick if I eat less than 1-2 hours after waking up.
i feel like then I’d be going back to sleep
Yeah a nap right after a breakfast and coffee, but before the caffeine hits is my perfect unemployed morning.
🧠
Some people are just genetically nocturnal. I had one grandparent who was early to bed. Everyone else in my family is somewhere between 12 and 2 am. As we get older we seem to need less and less sleep though. By 70, my nan was averaging 4 hours. Up to bed at 1, up a 5am to teach her 6am colege classes.
My other grandma slept 3x 2 hour bouts thought the day my whole life. 2hr nap around lunch, another after dinner, then shed be up til 2am, and ‘go to bed’ just to be back up around 4am. I think that had somwthing to do with her living most her life off the grid and having a wood stove got heat her whole life.
Some people are just genetically nocturnal.
Sure. See Step (4).
Although, you tend to require (or, at least, feel inclined towards) less sleep as you age.
I think that had somwthing to do with her living most her life off the grid and having a wood stove got heat her whole life.
Better than needing to piss is waking up freezing cause your feet are out of the covers
I have a little theory for why that is. I think back when we were tribes, having a certain percentage of the population be comfortable staying awake during the night helped protect us from other animals during the night.
But then why are we not seeing people who genuinely like to go to bed at 8 pm and wake up at 3 am for the 2nd shift?
I genuinely like going to bed at like 11am to noon and getting up around 7pm to 9pm. Sadly there’s not a lot of career advancement in the jobs that hire for those hours, and I’ve got student loans to pay.
I see you’ve not met my partner’s father
Capitalism.
You’re missing one big step and that is consistently keep this routine. For best results you have to keep it going through the weekends as well.
In my experience, you can fudge the weekends by an hour or so and you’ll be fine. But yes, if you’re sleeping till noon on Saturday and Sunday, your circadian rhythm will be fucked on Monday morning.
Explain 4 please. And with 5, if you do snore, then what? How do you solve it?
5 is a sleep apnea thing. i snore (very lightly unless i’m congested) but don’t have sleep apnea. snoring can be an indicator, but there’s not a 1:1 correlation
4 doesn’t seem to be a real thing because the only gene therapy for sleep that I could find were trials centered around GT for sleep apnea.
Listing gene therapy like you can just go to the doctor and request it is pretty disingenuous since insurance companies will make you jump through 10,000 hoops before even attempting something as expensive as gene therapy.
Get a dog. I’m now forced to get up early to take it out, otherwise it will pee on my bed.
(Do not actually get a pet if you cannot take care of them.)
Also, children will do this to you.
(DO NOT actually have children if you are just trying to wake up earlier.)
A tamagotchi will also do this.
(DO get a tamagotchi if you are trying to wake earlier)
Do they still make those?
You can apparently buy one for 37€ right now. They’re still in production and have sold nearly 90 million units over the years.
They made a hatsune miku tamagotchi.
Did the trick for me!
my kid has started waking up later…
that quiet time before everyone else wakes up 👍
Even better, try two puppies. Sleep will be your last problem now.
I am up at 5:15 every weekday, my dog stays in bed until I make her go outside and pee before I leave at 5:55. If left to her own devices she’ll want out around 9am. Mileage may vary
For those actually wanting to do it: you start with the morning, not with the bed time. Regardless of when you go to sleep, gotta force yourself up a the time you want to wake. By the time 10p rolls around, now you’re ready for sleep. But you’re gonna start off with a very sleepy day.
Wake up on time no matter what, no naps, and follow good bed time hygiene (caffeine, screens, temperature, etc). It will take some time but your body will adjust.
Plus it helps to meditate before sleeping as it’ll increase the sleepiness before hitting the bed
Exaxtly. I similarly feel that keeping a regular wakeup time is more effective than going to bed at a regular time.
Early to rise and early to bed makes a man healthy but socially dead.
“Early to bed and early to rise makes Jack’s wife go out with other guys” - The Warner Brothers
After decades of thinking I couldn’t do this it was rather easy in the end. I just started being more consistent with bedtime and not napping.
I also got into running, rock climbing, and being outdoors more often. Now I wake up before my alarm.
Work in a manual labor job so you’re tired enough that you actually WANT to go to bed at 10
I wish I got to wake up at 6 when I worked a manual labor job. It was more like 4:45
Unironically, touching grass is how you can do this.
Going camping for several days without screen time can help reset your circadian rhythm to normal.
I’m usually up way before sunrise because of work schedules. When I go camping, I stay up WAY later because I love to sit in the dark by a campfire. But clearly your results may vary.
Yeah, if you’ve got no reception and there’s nothing to do after dark, you tend to turn in early. Even if you want to read in the evening, I tend to do that in bed, which is a great way to wind down.
My wife has to be at work before 5 every day. We need to keep making our mortgage payment because paying off our shitty house is our best hope at maybe at least a partial retirement before I die. If the house is paid off, and I’m able to collect social security, maybe I’ll be able to be able to only work part time. I have no retirement funds
So we’re both up around 4 every day. And in bed between 8 & 9p. If you just get up early every day because you have to, at some point you’re too tired to stay up late. The answer is necessity and responsibility.
This just happened naturally to me as I got old…
100%. Getting up after 8 just feels like wasting the day now.
I honestly don’t even enjoy the thought of being in bed with the sun up these days. Plus I’m in a semi desert climate so the cool air in the morning is almost intoxicating.
Same, I can’t wait to get out of bed in the morning. No use laying there awake when I can have some quiet time for myself with a cup of coffee.
It’s a lot easier than people think, in my opinion.
Light is the main thing that sets your circadian rhythms. If you want to sleep at 10 PM, turn off the lights around that time. Fully dark. No phone. Maybe even blackout curtains. Better if it’s every single night, including weekends.
Listen to music or a podcast if you’re bored laying in the dark. But no light after the time you want to sleep.
You won’t fall asleep at 10 the first night. Or the second night. But it’ll slowly get earlier and earlier every night.
I’ve done this many times. When I worked early mornings, I easily adjusted to falling asleep at 8PM by shutting off all lights consistently every night around 7:45.
I’ve been sleeping at 9pm and waking up at 8am fairly consistently for several months now. Still waiting on that elusive 6am wake up time.
11 hours of sleep a night sounds like heaven
I often wonder if it’s worth being better rested at the expense of losing so many wakeful hours.
Yeah that’s why I barely get 6 hours a night
Yeah. I used to be a night owl and then became a meth addict (whoops) and didn’t sleep much at all for a while. When I got sober, reclaiming my sleep was the first thing I did. Proper sleep hygiene is all. Hide any clocks in your room. Go to bed at 10. Set an alarm for 6am for a few months. When you start waking up at 5:58, you can stop using the alarm. You can use the extra 2 minutes you’ve gained to wonder who the hell you are now.
does being a night owl make me more susceptible to becoming a meth addict?
Just keep going to bed later and later until you run the clock around.
Get a job with consistent hours that suit that kind of sleeping schedule.
Or do what I did, and find a job with hours they already fit your sleep habits. You can still stay up all night go to bed at 5 am every day, when your shift starts at 2! :D
Have kids
It was the fucking worst but I started waking up early every day and then I added running to it. After about 6 months I fully transformed into a morning person. The second I retire, I’m going back, I miss the night.
Batman?
At least I used to be.
I feel the same. I’m up early because I have to be. But I do not want to be.
Same. I’m finally good at it but I just don’t like the vibe of mornings and the people who love them.
Here’s the one trick that normies don’t want you to try : Skip one night of sleep and go to bed exhausted between 8pm and 10pm with the curtains open.
I then started having a shower in the morning before work and playing 2 hours of games.
I did this many, many times during my struggles with non-24 sleep disorder. I would repeatedly stay up all night in the hopes that I would be tired enough to go to sleep at a reasonable time the next day.
Typically, one of two things would happen: either I successfully go to sleep at a somewhat early hour and then sleep for a few hours before waking up in the middle of the night unable to sleep, or I would feel tired in the early evening but try to hold on until I get to a normal bedtime and by that point I was no longer tired and I’d stay up late again even after being awake well over 24 hours.
Ultimately, my solution was to work on my own projects for a year or so (not something most people can afford to do). I ignored all requirements around sleeping and just slept when my body told me to. I kept windows uncovered and gradually, the sunlight started waking me up at a proper morning hour. For the first time in my adult life, I have a normal sleeping schedule and confidence I can be at my job on time. YMMV, but getting natural sunlight at the same time each day is huge as a circadian rhythm reset.
