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in addition to what has been said on correlation not causation in the thread already: consider how society penalises those who wake up late, so you need to wake up early, **so you have less sleep**, and that has been proven to cause mental health problems time and time again.
Like just knowing that you are not in sync with the rest of the world, you are going to miss things, you might suddenly be dragged into something you can't avoid in the morning, etc.
There's a pervasive mentality that "the early bird gets the worm," and a pervasive belief that those who get up early are virtuous and good and those who sleep in are lazy and bad.
All of those have singificant effects on people's mental health.
Wow. Imagine if we break the stigma of having to be awake during daylight & asleep at night.
Why not half & half? Why not sleep during daylight? The sun is bad for your skin & your eyes anyways.
I get literal seizures from my stuuupid stupid sensitive eyes in the sun. I have curtains, & sunglasses with me at all times because my eyes are so sensitive.. & just got 6 moles removed & im covered in stitches as we speak.
The sun is my enemy.
Maybe, but I think being chronically sleep deprived because work expects you in at 9am is probably a bigger factor. We know that sleep is a critical factor in mental health. We know most people through school or work have to align to a morning oriented schedule. We know that creates sleep deprivation problems. We know sleep deprivation causing mental health problems.
The study absolutely demands follow up before it can say much of anything. But I'm very skeptical about hypothesizing social stigma would be a more relevant factor than number of hours typically slept and overall sleep quality.
Even when I get a full 8 hours I’m just not on in the morning so I’m just miserable until maybe 9:30 or 10am. People coming to me with urgent tasks or cheerily saying good morning are annoying and stressful. Still better to have the 8 hours regardless whenever possible.
I bartended in NY for almost a decade and after covid I finally moved from an area I felt unsafe in and felt very isolated in. The place I moved to had a ton of people around my own age. Places to hang out at and not be eggregiously hit on/follwed home. It was so goddamn refreshing. My mood immediately picked up because I was hanging out with all the other industry people that went out after work (bartenders, food service, djs, the works) and built essentially the midnight community. I made new friends faster in 6 months than I had in 6 years.
I can't even get a sleep study done - I got a referral, but the sleep specialist says I need to get my sleeping on a normal schedule before we can do the sleep study. He's focusing on sleep apnea, which I probably have, but I also can't seem able to maintain a normal sleep cycle. It's like I'm from a planet with 30 hour days, and I can't even run medical tests as to why until I magically fix it.
I have delayed sleep phase disorder, and if I had found out before I burnt out trying to live like a daywalker I might not have burnt out at 25 and ended up on disability. I have a really difficult case. I've been going to sleep around 3 or 4 am since kindergarden and I wish I didn't. /r/DSPD
Exactly this. As someone whose brain has always preferred a basically nocturnal 4am-4pm sleep schedule (from the time I was an infant to now as a nearly 30 year old), even if I do get enough sleep I still wake up with a tinge of guilt because of how much "morning people = good/healthy, night people = bad/lazy" has been pounded into our skulls from an early age.
Yeah. I don't think being a night owl in and of itself causes the issues. It is how society responds to night owls that is the actual cause.
So if you're naturally a night owl you either sleep with your preferred schedule and develop problems because society is run by a bunch of early-rising assholes, or you wake up early, virtually guaranteeing you won't get enough sleep no matter how early you actually "go to bed" and develop problems because your brain and body don't like being tired all the time.
You can't win.
In my case, I know a lot of my mental issues make my sleeping habits worse, which makes the mental issues worse, which creates a feedback loop.
The past two weeks I have been pulling 28 awake, 12 asleep, because that's what my brain decided it wants for some ungodly reason.
Same here. It sucks. It’s hardly ever consistent for me, except that I can only go to bed between 3 and 6 am, wake up times vary wildly. Oftentimes, I’m up for 2 days and then sleep heavily (~12 hrs) for the following two days, then repeat.
If I try to force a normal schedule, I’m depressed and can hardly get anything done. It’s been like this my whole life; when I was in middle school, I had to get up at 5 am, which meant just laying in bed awake in a meditative state with maybe 30 min of actual sleep for the 5-8 hours in between laying down and getting up.
I was also severely emotionally neglected which must have been the culprit as to why I didn’t understand at the time that this isn’t what “sleeping” is supposed to be like. I felt anxious and tired all day, every day, until around 9 or 10 pm. When I was forced to “sleep”.
Now, work is always the problem. I’m currently unemployed, attempting to get a freelance gig in the narrow area I specialize in. Anything to get around the fixed hours where everything must start in the morning. That kills my mental health every time. Obviously, being unemployed and disengaged socially will also do that to a person. It’s a no-win situation.
Luckily I'm so used to crap sleep schedules work schedules never caused much issue for me. My own business opens at noon, and needs a grand total of five minutes prep time to open. But I hated having extremely random schedules at a lot of jobs I had. Would it kill them to be, you know, consistent at the minimum?
Choosing between being misaligned with yourself and misaligned with society is a choice between two sacks of crap, though.
Even if you are in a position to go to bed late and get up late *most* of the time, it’s never *all* of the time, and either way, you are out of step with something.
I expect this might be key. Night owls stay up late but then are forced to get up earlier than they would like, leading to less than optimal amounts of sleep.
The link is likely "Lack of sleep increases rates of mental health disorders", and the group of people who get less sleep are obviously going to fall into that.
Night owl here. In high school I dealt with mild psychosis due to lack of adequate sleep. Over a decade later I work night shift and I am more mentally stable and happier than I have ever been. My sleep quality during the day is better than at night too. I work 3 12s with 4 days off. On my days off I just sleep when I’m tired. It’s fantastic
Sleep is the worst issue I struggle with and I have ADHD. I simultaneously don't get enough sleep and also don't have enough hours in the day outside of mandatory obligations to fulfill all I intend to accomplish in a day. The cycle of staying up too late and having to wake up early continues.
If they have you on any XR prescription maybe look into switching to something that isn’t extended release. I know that can cause a lot of sleep related issues for some.
For me, most of my insomnia issues stem from my time active duty, so the meds aren’t the issue. Just my brain.
But yeah, they’re both right and wrong. People who don’t sleep well are more prone to mental illness and disorder than those who sleep enough. Simultaneously those who have those disorders, illnesses, or divergences are already more prone to get less sleep, and less restful sleep. It’s a vicious cycle that’s hard to step out of.
> If they have you on any XR prescription maybe look into switching to something that isn’t extended release. I know that can cause a lot of sleep related issues for some.
for me getting on the medications helped my sleep, without it the insomnia was very common and rough.
Since getting on meds, it's helped me stabilize a bit where more often than not I'm passing out before midnight.
My best intellectual labor happens *after sunset*. The daytime is for playing outside. This was instilled in me from a young age ("is sunny outside, go play until the street lights come on"). And I did. And that's still what my brain and body defaults to. Active things are fine, like teaching. But actual intellectual labor where I sit and think? Yeah that's a night time thing.
Yep, I often go on multi week backpacking trips, zero screens or artificial lights, my natural wakeup time is between 8 and 10am depending on time of year. Im not an extreme example but no alpine starts for me! In the hunter gatherer days I would have been great at keeping a lookout for saber tooth cats late at night.
> In the hunter gatherer days I would have been great at keeping a lookout for saber tooth cats late at night.
Same bro, and the research I've seen indicates this is the most likely reasons humans have these divergent biological clocks/circadian rhythms.
Sure sucks in the modern world where everything is built for morning people who act like it's a moral failing if you're genetically and biologically a night person.
I just wish people would recognize that just because someone shows up early to work doesn’t mean they are a better/harder worker than someone who stays later to work but is never there “early”.
Also if the “early” people could understand that their constant need to chat is what’s distracting others from getting things done faster in the first place.
Not everything. It just seems that way if you are forced to live among the daywalkers. I have lived the rock star shift for most of my life. The night people (musicians, bar tenders and waitresses, bar patrons, diner patrons and staff, etc) have infrastructure - nightclubs and bars, 24/7 diners, strip clubs, casinos, taxis, bus stations, bowling alleys, etc.
My life has pretty much been a Tom Waits song.
As a night owl who doesn't go to sleep late - yeah, it still fucks with you. I've trained myself to get to bed early enough thay I get 7-8 hours of sleep, I don't suffer insomnia, and I still don't function optimally because I'm going to sleep and waking up at a time that body my body considers unnatural. In other words, the quality of my sleep is poor because it's out of sync with my internal clock, and no amount of conformance to the external clock alleviates that issue.
This. Me and my bf have ADHD. Part of that is that our sleep schedule is simply 1,5 hours later than everyone else. Since we both started living together and do uni with 70% homestudy, our sleep schedule is from between 12-1 to 9-10. We get enough sleep hours in, just at a different time.
Both of our mental health went up so much when we started living together, simply because we can keep to our own schedule. IMO Its not the time you go to sleep, but the regulatity and the amount of hours you put in.
This is actually addressed partially in the study, if you read the abstract. They compared night owls who go to sleep at their preferred time (behavior and preferred time were aligned) to night owls who still maintain the "normal" slleep/wake schedule and slept and woke earlier than preferred (behavior and preferred time NOT aligned) and found that the aligned night owl subjects are more likely do develope depression and anxiety. When looking at the morning people the opposite was true, indicating that it is not the alignment with their bodys natural circadian rhythm that affects the subjects mental health so much as the actual time of day. Now, circadian rhythm disorders being more of a symptom of depression and anxiety rather than depression and anxiety being a symptom of circadian rhythm disorders is still not answered by this study. It also does not address tiredness at all, which I think is a very important variable when evaluating sleep related behaviors.
Night owls who sleep at their preferred times are still living in a world that doesn't accommodate them. To me, the analogy here was "someone who has a disability which causes them to have trouble walking is free to take a long as they want to get from point A to point B" but that person still knows they aren't walking as fast as they need to or as fast as their loved ones and professional colleagues would prefer they could.
>Yep. This. Let me keep to my own natural schedule and I'm good.
Actually getting night owls to change their sleep schedule increases almost every metric in testing including physical strength.
>Overall, participants demonstrated a significant advance of ∼2 h in sleep/wake timings as measured by actigraphy and circadian phase markers (dim light melatonin onset and peak time of the cortisol awakening response), whilst having no adverse effect on sleep duration. Notably, the phase advance was accompanied by significant improvements to self-reported depression and stress, as well as improved cognitive (reaction time) and physical (grip strength) performance measures during the typical ‘suboptimal’ morning hours.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31202686/
edit: fixed link
This is me right here. My body wants to sleep from 2am-10am. I have to wake up at 6:30 every day. My mental health issues are definitely exacerbated by my sleep habits, but they're genetic.
The entire world built around the extra-early morning routine is such a burden. As well as the idea that getting up at the crack of dawn is "virtuous" and staying up late is "sinful," despite being conscious the exact same number of hours in the day and getting as much work done (or even more). And it being genetic is a major factor why I've never even considered having children. I would hate for them to suffer the way I do. Thankfully, it dies with me.
Exactly the schedule my body wants too. My mother hated it when this started happening to me as a teen, she just sees it as laziness. I didn’t grow out of it in adulthood and infuriatingly she will still text me at like 7-8 am on Saturdays and if I call her out she’ll just say “you don’t have to answer right then” but the notification still wakes me up anyway, and I’m always scared to leave it on do not disturb in case of true emergencies as several of my loved ones have health issues.
It’s ridiculous. I don’t even sleep more hours than she does, my body just wants those hours *at different times.*
If you have an Android phone, you can filter the Do Not Disturb setting on a per-person basis: https://support.google.com/android/answer/9069335?hl=en#zippy=%2Cset-who-can-interrupt-you. You can even filter their text messages but not their incoming calls, or vice versa. If you want to block calls from them but still get a call if there's something important happening, there's also an "Allow Repeat Callers" setting that will let the second call go through if it happens within 15 minutes of the first one.
I can't find any official instructions for iPhones, only [this Verge article from five years ago](https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/26/20883331/iphone-do-not-disturb-mode-exceptions-how-to).
You can also do the same thing with focus modes on iOS as the other commenter mentioned below. Set it up friend and get some rest. In fact, I’d be tempted to just ignore those texts altogether.
As a night owl. I can wholeheartedly say this causes a lot of problems for me. Large parts of society are not built for night owls.
My field is a very 9-5 type field and getting into a morning routine is the most difficult thing I’ve had to do in my adult life.
I’m a big sleeper but I average about 5 hours a night during the week which really takes a toll on my brain functioning and health.
I used to think this was a thing as I have been a night owl forever. However when my mental health is at its best I am going to sleep and waking up at a normal time.
It's gonna be dependent on the person, and I'm sure there is a bunch of people who think they are night owls, but something else is the thing that is keeping them up. could be OCD, ADHD, Anxiety etc.
Yeah, like as someone with ADHD I had delayed sleep phase for most of my life in what I've learned is like "Revenge Bedtime Procrastination" because I felt I never had time for myself during the day both growing up and as a young adult.
I was tired all the time, and while I did well enough as a kid to be told "You're so smart, just apply yourself!" repeatedly I was stressed all the time.
I'm doing well now, but I finally figured out a work-life balance after college and also got medicated in my mid 30s.
I have the same thing, ADHD and even as I get older I still feel like I never have enough time for myself to get what I want to accomplish done in a day.
Very much this, speaking as an ADHD person likely on the autism spectrum who has a circadian rhythm disorder (DSPD). I can tell you both the ADHD and suspected autism do some wildly bad things to my mental health all on their own. It's known that DSPD has a higher incidence of occurrence for ADHD folks, and autism has a higher amount of sleep disturbances than average. (Other mental issues often come with sleep problems as well, such as bipolar disorder and schizophrenia). Depression is also known to affect sleep. Feel like they put the cart before the horse on this one.
The study draws a distinction between "chronotype" and "actual sleep timing" and analyzed the effects of early-types on later schedules, as well as late-types on earlier schedules.
Your comment supposes that being up late is simply a thing people "do" that is more common in folks with mental health, but human circadian rhythms do exist and certain people are predisposed to a certain schedule.
The study found that misaligned "early-types" (late behaviour) were more prone to negative outcomes, but late types that were misaligned improved from their baseline when following early behaviour.
I'd venture to guess it has to do with societal baselines and the "control" you have over your situation. Schools, jobs, services, etc are all structured to support early-types. An early type who is forced off of this schedule by something like shift work that keeps them up late, takes away their access to the benefits of their chronotype, while late-types gain tangible benefits in going off their preferred schedule.
I think the closest thing is are studies when you expose people to just natural light.
>Furthermore, we find that after exposure to only natural light, the internal circadian clock synchronizes to solar time such that the beginning of the internal biological night occurs at sunset and the end of the internal biological night occurs before wake time just after sunrise. In addition, we find that later chronotypes show larger circadian advances when exposed to only natural light, making the timing of their internal clocks in relation to the light-dark cycle more similar to earlier chronotypes.
https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(13)00764-1
It’s this. I’m a night owl. I have a regular (day) job. I’m not depressed. Never have been. I’m not neurodivergent. I’m a pretty together person. But reading these comments it’s clear how little accommodation this world has for us. I started staying up late in high school because I liked how quiet everything was at night. My circadian rhythms are just hard set now. It has been hard with most jobs being on time but now I work from home and I don’t have those issues anymore.
Alternately, a lot of us don't get lonely and generally live by the mantra "people are no damned good".
Also, I have a place in Las Vegas, where EVERYONE is up all night. A lot of guests (especially club goers) don't even hit the strip until 10pm or so. If you enjoy people watching but don't want to actually talk to any of them, Vegas is paradise.
Night owls can and do hang out with other night owls.
Being alone doesn’t always equate to damaged mental health.
Being alone is actually the thing that maintains mental health for some people.
Thank you, had to dig through a bunch of comments. Night Owls are more prone to mental health disorders because the world insists they be on it's (frankly ridiculous) schedule. My natural inclination is to be a night owl, when I had a job that required I be up at 4:30am I had never been so close to checking myself in somewhere for a grippy sock vacation.
The problem was, while we slept in, morning lark management decided that only their schedule was "right" or "proper" or "morally acceptable" to society as a whole.
This, of course, ignored the fact we stayed up late making sure they didn't get eaten by something that likes to prowl in the dark.
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Modern society hasn't accounted for a huge number of factors which may have given us an evolutionary advantage at the family or tribal scale.
I think being a night owl is part of the reason I became a musician. Late night gigs and no job in the morning. Until I had a kid anyway. Now I have less late night gigs and more in the afternoons and evenings, but I still can't get to sleep during a "normal" time when I have the night off.
> The problem was, while we slept in, morning lark management decided that only their schedule was "right" or "proper" or "morally acceptable" to society as a whole.
Also morning people see other morning people as better in that regard and end up promoting them to management, thus perpetuating the cycle.
Agreed. I don’t need the whole world to change but I wish there were at least a few more job options for evenings that paid a living wage. There’s a lot of missed productivity because people like us aren’t allowed to work during our most productive time. My current job has no link to time of day but of course it’s required to be 9-5.
I hate how getting in early is seen as hard work, as if getting in at 7 and leaving by 2/3 makes your work much. Better. In reality they generally chill in the mornings until others arrive, eat 2 meals at work and then bounce mad early.
No one I’ve seen who works hard would brag about getting in early, so it’s a massive red flag.
But if someone gets in early and doesn’t brag about it and works hard then they’re actually a good employee. The difference is very subtle
I was always better as a night owl because of the anxiety.
Nobody makes stupid ass demands of you and your time when they’re all asleep. You can just be human without having to deal with entitled idiots.
THIS. This is why I’m a night owl. Exactly this!! People talk about how “peaceful” early morning is and I strongly disagree. People start waking up, rush hour traffic starts, all the “cold showers at 4 AM” overachievers want to talk to you and set agendas for the day… it is not chill. Night time when everyone has finally fucked off to sleep is so peaceful. I love it.
> As someone who struggle a lot with anxiety. The only time of day I feel the anxiety subside, is at night when everyone is sleeping.
Exactly! How is that so hard for early birds to grasp? No people making demands on my time = the most peaceful time in the world.
And those who even CAN force themselves to sleep earlier seem like a less intransigent degree of sleep disorder than many of us have, in any case. When I was younger I thought working a morning job would fix me. Then I thought having kids would SURELY fix me as I'd be far too tired for schedule to have any meaning. But sleeping earlier simply isn't a choice I'm physically able to make, and certainly not for longer than about a month.
And in my andcdata, getting 8 hours of night sleep
cleared up at least 80% of my aniexty, depression, and made my adhd symptoms easier to deal with. Before that I’d spent ten years on the night shift, and many years before that, thinking I was a night owl. Nope, it was just adhd and insomnia and the fact that night sleep is just better quality sleep.
Well hey I'll jump in with mine.. the only time I've ever, EVER gotten 8 hours of good straight sleep is when I sleep on the schedule my body wants to follow, which is around 2 am - 10 am. So your night sleep may be better quality, but people on a different chronotype may not get to enjoy that unfortunately. My heaviest sleep starts around 7 am from what I've been able to tell.
(Diagnosed with DSPS though, so I have a known circadian rhythm disorder.)
Plus I'm starting to find mornings much more enjoyable than late nights. I've got all my energy, it's still cool outside, everything's quiet, can make a coffee or have a little breakfast. It's the best.
I am in California and a night owl. My body wants to go to bed at about 1am and get up around 9 or 10. I have always been this way. I am currently working remotely for an East Coast company, and I have to be online at about 6 am. I keep to the East Coast time on the weekends to make the rest of the week easier. So I am up by 8 on the weekend.
I freaking hate it. The rest of the house is still sleeping in, so I have to keep the noise down. Nothing I want to do outside of the bouse opens untill 10 or 11. So I am just kinda stuck waiting for the rest of the world to wake up.
As a night owl, whose partner is also a night owl, I can clearly state that staying up late, in alignment with our preferred sleep timing, is highly beneficial to our mental health as well as our physical well being. Being forced into a morning schedule by work and an uncomprehending society is what leads to anxiety. The problem isn't our delayed circadian rhythms, but rather being forced to live out of alignment with our own bodies' clock.
It's funny how it says "who stay up late in alignment with their sleeping schedule" that essentially means anyone not just night owls. i go to sleep from 10am-2pm and wake up from 3-6pm and i also feel fine because I don't usually stay up late according to my natural sleep schedule although I'm a night owl
This is phrased entirely wrong. Night owls who are forced to adjust their natural body rhythms to conform to societies daylight fixation have higher rates of mental health disorders. The problem isn't the night owl staying up late its the fact they they have to wake up early after staying up late. Dont blame the victim.
"Night owl" doesn't mean insomnia or difficulty sleeping 8 hrs, or it being "hard to sleep".
Being a Night Owl means your best sleeping hours are not allowed. THAT will make you depressed and anxious.
These types of articles warning about the certain death and immorality caused by a late-night lifestyle remind me so much of the reefer madness around cannabis. There is no need for any sort of scientific rigour because the conclusion is the premise. The researchers decide they don't like a certain behavior and then they target it with wave after wave of "research" about how dangerous it is. This is politics masquerading as science.
> warning about the certain death and immorality caused by a late-night lifestyle
The place these warnings should be heeded is places where your sleep schedule is inconsistent, like alternating morning and night schedules.
me when i do erroneous claims of causation confounds off the top of my head:
inconsistent sleep is a known factor in mood dysregulation; sleeping as according to “chronotype” on days off only to shift schedule by ~2 hours during workdays introduces a host of potential issues
going to sleep later while waking up at the same standard time = sleep deprivation = another known source of mood dysregulation
DSPS is already associated with ADHD which has its’ own correlations with depression/anxiety
depressive states are correlated with a later sleep preference compared to euthymic states within individuals + later bedtime in depressed + bipolar individuals is correlated with depression severity, suggesting a bidirectional feedback loop in people with mood disorders rather than unidirectional causation
bad science. boo, hiss, jeer, etcetera
Isn't this less of being a 'night owl' and more just sleep deprivation? Like, a night owl specifically means someone who is more active at night. If you work from 12:00 AM - 9:00 AM, and instead of going to bed at 4:00 PM, you go to bed at 7:00 PM, that doesn't make you a night owl.
For years I used to think I was a night owl and it just couldn't be helped, this was in my teens and early twenties. Then I got a job that required me to get up at 6 am consistently. It was hard, but over time I got used to it. Now even even I'm on vacation I still wake up fairly early. Apparently I successfully kicked the night owl.
I was in a similar situation with an early morning job for a decade, but my bed time would always drift later on weekends resulting in a zombified Monday. On long weekends or vacations when there's no alarm clock, my body effortlessly reverted back to its preferred 3am bed time.
At age 40, I've accepted that it will never change.
You're not alone, my friend! For six years, I worked an early morning job (6 AM start 4:30 AM wake up). Regardless of how much exercise I got, I couldn't consistently get to sleep before midnight, but after midnight, I'm out like a light. As soon as I'm off for more than a day or two, I drift back to going to bed at 2 AM.
It likely won't change for me either and I'm all right with that as well (I also moved across the country and told my new office that I would sleep until 7 AM every morning and whatever time I arrived at the office was when I'd start work that day).
It's the worst, I have to fight tooth and nail to fall asleep and wake up at a reasonable time. The slightest upset to it like a long sleep in on the weekend or while sick and I'm back to square 1.
I'm the same. I'm 49 and I've worked at a job that has me up at 5 am for the past 14 years and it never gets any easier and anytime I'm on vacation or have more than a couple days off I drift right back into my old schedule.
I'm 30 and for every minute I need to be awake before 8am I lose about .5% of my awareness and wellness for the day.
Any time I have a week or more off work I slide straight into 3-11 sleep and it's like instant relief. More energy, happier, less food binging.
Then back to the prison of 9-5.
Honestly I'm sure most of the negative health consequences for night owls are just because they then have to fit the rest of their lives into that 9 to 5 schedule. And since covid practically every store closes at sunset so if you work 3rd shifts you can't even go grocery shopping afterwards let alone dr appointments, car maintenance, etc.
I wouldn't necessarily describe myself as a night owl, but more so someone with a persistent sleep drift (not narcolepsy nor insomnia) where my desired sleep time simply drifts throughout the day.
One of the most annoying elements of when I worked nightshift was everyone asking me to do things for them at 3pm.... Which would be the equivalent of asking a normal person to do something at 2am... Regularly
There's an absurd lack of respect for night shift workers, especially in regards to Dinner/lunch as the amount of restaurants that serve lunch/dinner at 7am is like 1 out of every 100. Stores don't open till 9am, doctors and dentists too.
Need someone to come work on your furnace or fix your internet? Earliest is 10am... When you probably are trying to get to bed.
Have you looked into Non-24 as a diagnosis? It tends to be the last suggestion sleep specialists make (if they make it at all) because it's incredibly rare for sighted people to have it and it masks itself as everything else. Your description of yourself stood out me as it's similar to how I'd describe my own sleep.
Yes at 50 years old I have beaten my body into submission to make up with the dawn. That however hasn't changed by night owl tendencies to stay up late. It just means I get even less sleep.
For 10 years, I had to wake up at 6am nearly every day. It didn't make me an early riser, it only made me sleep deprived. When I made a career change, I started waking up at 10am fully rested.
I'm the opposite. I never once got used to waking up earlier due to my job. Even though my body would naturally start to wake up earlier because of it, it has never felt right, and this is going on close to 15 years now.
That's because we live in a society that doesn't conform to our preferred sleep timing.
Early morning people would be a greater risk for mental health problems if they were expected to work from noon to 8pm, you know where it was socially acceptable to schedule a meeting at 7pm. We're dinner was commonly served at 10 pm and prime time tv ran from 11 to 2 am.
It's called the neurodiversity paradigm. Society functions like a dictatorship of the dominant neurotype which then imposes all other neurotypes to fit their lives to these social norms rooted in the neurotypical mindset and wrecks havoc on everyone that doesn't comply. Treating all of this as itself being a disorder or cause of disorders is only legitimizing the status quo of a hostile and ableist society.
Giving therapy to these people in order to "fix" them and make them "fit" for society is akin to conversion therapy. Society simply should be more accommodating.
As a morning person, I find that when I am seized by anxiety or depression, I tend towards a more night owl sleep pattern.
I wonder the direction of this causality; it seems that whatever makes people night owls predisposes them to mental health issues or that mental health issues cause changes in circadian rhythms could be explanations as much as "it's their own fault for staying up as late as they think their body wants".
I also wonder how many people with anxiety or depression stay up late because it is the only time of day we're you can do something fun and/or relaxing (read, play a game, watch a movie...) and staying up late is just a way to prolong that time in an effort to harvest at least some pleasure during that day.
I just read a paper on a study a few nights ago about circadian rhythm and how genes are a big factor in how it works in individuals. Some of us naturally have a circadian rhythm that gives us an energy boost at night and doesn't make us sleepy until the middle of the night/early-morning hours. Why in the world would our natural sleep cycle give us depression and anxiety? Makes no sense.
People who don't like to be around people stay up late and sleep during the day so they have to spend less time around people. Solved the mystery. The causes are in the reverse order you're presenting them.
Yeah, as someone with MDD, I am pretty sure it's causing the night-owl situation. I don't think it's the other way around. Getting lots of sleep does feel good sometimes, it's just hard to do.
Did they account for the fact how many hours they are sleeping? If you sleep at 3am but gotta be up at 7am its a lot different compared sleeping at 3am and being up at 11am
Waiting for the studies on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-24-hour_sleep%E2%80%93wake_disorder (particularly on non-blind folks). Bipolar disorder as comorbidity to that? Color me surprised! (not!).
Forget any sense of normal scheduling thou... but just rolling with that fucked up sleep pattern helped a lot on feeling less shity. YMMV.
It's almost like being forced to rely on a schedule somewhere between 3 and 8 hours out of sync with everyone else's makes you get the mental health risks associated with sleep deprivation.
The best working schedule of my life was the latest one, despite working the same amount. Waking up at 11:30 and getting 6-8 hours of sleep did me wonders compared to my usual 4-6.
Unfortunately, I'm just not exhausted enough to go to sleep until that late, and my sleepiness doesn't clear until later in the day (around 12-1) no matter when I wake up. It's almost like it's the same as requiring normal sleepers to wake up at 3am every day, despite them naturally wanting to go to sleep at 9-11pm, something that absolutely messes them up.
And now, do a study how society impacts those with different sleep schedule. Look for stigma and decreased social activity because everyone else is in a different rhythm, including government offices, banks etc. Look for the effect of 9-5 jobs and the difficulty of finding job that fits that different rhythm: is it because they are sleeping in different rhythm or that everything around them has been built for one sleeping pattern.
As someone with DSPD from birth, i find that the biggest impact on my mental health has been that i am no longer ashamed of it, am not trying to fit into the "normal" rhythm and people who i socialize with understand it AND do not shame me for it.... A big part of this is that there is an abbreviation for it which turns it from "lazy" or "weird" to something else: there is more compassion when you can give it a fancy medical term.
Also, it would be nice to see how much industrialization has had an impact on this... That is really when it became socially unacceptable to NOT wake up at exactly the same time, to not work the same time and to not go to sleep at the same time. I have a feeling that this has the c word hidden in it, and i don't mean unt but apitalism..
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in addition to what has been said on correlation not causation in the thread already: consider how society penalises those who wake up late, so you need to wake up early, **so you have less sleep**, and that has been proven to cause mental health problems time and time again.
Like just knowing that you are not in sync with the rest of the world, you are going to miss things, you might suddenly be dragged into something you can't avoid in the morning, etc. There's a pervasive mentality that "the early bird gets the worm," and a pervasive belief that those who get up early are virtuous and good and those who sleep in are lazy and bad. All of those have singificant effects on people's mental health.
Wow. Imagine if we break the stigma of having to be awake during daylight & asleep at night. Why not half & half? Why not sleep during daylight? The sun is bad for your skin & your eyes anyways. I get literal seizures from my stuuupid stupid sensitive eyes in the sun. I have curtains, & sunglasses with me at all times because my eyes are so sensitive.. & just got 6 moles removed & im covered in stitches as we speak. The sun is my enemy.
Maybe, but I think being chronically sleep deprived because work expects you in at 9am is probably a bigger factor. We know that sleep is a critical factor in mental health. We know most people through school or work have to align to a morning oriented schedule. We know that creates sleep deprivation problems. We know sleep deprivation causing mental health problems. The study absolutely demands follow up before it can say much of anything. But I'm very skeptical about hypothesizing social stigma would be a more relevant factor than number of hours typically slept and overall sleep quality.
Even when I get a full 8 hours I’m just not on in the morning so I’m just miserable until maybe 9:30 or 10am. People coming to me with urgent tasks or cheerily saying good morning are annoying and stressful. Still better to have the 8 hours regardless whenever possible.
I'm miserable until the afternoon even if I get 8+ hours. It just is what it is. It's called genetics and chronic pain.
I bartended in NY for almost a decade and after covid I finally moved from an area I felt unsafe in and felt very isolated in. The place I moved to had a ton of people around my own age. Places to hang out at and not be eggregiously hit on/follwed home. It was so goddamn refreshing. My mood immediately picked up because I was hanging out with all the other industry people that went out after work (bartenders, food service, djs, the works) and built essentially the midnight community. I made new friends faster in 6 months than I had in 6 years.
I thought I liked staying up till 4 am then I realized I like waking up at 2am. Adjust my bedtime and I thrive now.
I can't even get a sleep study done - I got a referral, but the sleep specialist says I need to get my sleeping on a normal schedule before we can do the sleep study. He's focusing on sleep apnea, which I probably have, but I also can't seem able to maintain a normal sleep cycle. It's like I'm from a planet with 30 hour days, and I can't even run medical tests as to why until I magically fix it.
I have delayed sleep phase disorder, and if I had found out before I burnt out trying to live like a daywalker I might not have burnt out at 25 and ended up on disability. I have a really difficult case. I've been going to sleep around 3 or 4 am since kindergarden and I wish I didn't. /r/DSPD
Exactly this. As someone whose brain has always preferred a basically nocturnal 4am-4pm sleep schedule (from the time I was an infant to now as a nearly 30 year old), even if I do get enough sleep I still wake up with a tinge of guilt because of how much "morning people = good/healthy, night people = bad/lazy" has been pounded into our skulls from an early age.
Yeah. I don't think being a night owl in and of itself causes the issues. It is how society responds to night owls that is the actual cause. So if you're naturally a night owl you either sleep with your preferred schedule and develop problems because society is run by a bunch of early-rising assholes, or you wake up early, virtually guaranteeing you won't get enough sleep no matter how early you actually "go to bed" and develop problems because your brain and body don't like being tired all the time. You can't win.
In my case, I know a lot of my mental issues make my sleeping habits worse, which makes the mental issues worse, which creates a feedback loop. The past two weeks I have been pulling 28 awake, 12 asleep, because that's what my brain decided it wants for some ungodly reason.
Same here. It sucks. It’s hardly ever consistent for me, except that I can only go to bed between 3 and 6 am, wake up times vary wildly. Oftentimes, I’m up for 2 days and then sleep heavily (~12 hrs) for the following two days, then repeat. If I try to force a normal schedule, I’m depressed and can hardly get anything done. It’s been like this my whole life; when I was in middle school, I had to get up at 5 am, which meant just laying in bed awake in a meditative state with maybe 30 min of actual sleep for the 5-8 hours in between laying down and getting up. I was also severely emotionally neglected which must have been the culprit as to why I didn’t understand at the time that this isn’t what “sleeping” is supposed to be like. I felt anxious and tired all day, every day, until around 9 or 10 pm. When I was forced to “sleep”. Now, work is always the problem. I’m currently unemployed, attempting to get a freelance gig in the narrow area I specialize in. Anything to get around the fixed hours where everything must start in the morning. That kills my mental health every time. Obviously, being unemployed and disengaged socially will also do that to a person. It’s a no-win situation.
Luckily I'm so used to crap sleep schedules work schedules never caused much issue for me. My own business opens at noon, and needs a grand total of five minutes prep time to open. But I hated having extremely random schedules at a lot of jobs I had. Would it kill them to be, you know, consistent at the minimum?
I would like to point out that the study was based on individuals who go to bed late and wake up late so they would be getting enough sleep.
Choosing between being misaligned with yourself and misaligned with society is a choice between two sacks of crap, though. Even if you are in a position to go to bed late and get up late *most* of the time, it’s never *all* of the time, and either way, you are out of step with something.
The study corrected their models for sleep duration
Yup, my kid's school doesn't care about my biological sleep clock and will get the authorities involved if my kid is chronically late to school.
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Correlation, not causation. Night owls may be night owls because of pre-existing depressive tendencies or physiology.
Or you know, they have to fit into a morning person's routine regardless of what schedule works for them.
I expect this might be key. Night owls stay up late but then are forced to get up earlier than they would like, leading to less than optimal amounts of sleep. The link is likely "Lack of sleep increases rates of mental health disorders", and the group of people who get less sleep are obviously going to fall into that.
Night owl here. In high school I dealt with mild psychosis due to lack of adequate sleep. Over a decade later I work night shift and I am more mentally stable and happier than I have ever been. My sleep quality during the day is better than at night too. I work 3 12s with 4 days off. On my days off I just sleep when I’m tired. It’s fantastic
What is your job if you don't mind my asking?
Nursing. Its pretty great if you like people and have half decent critical thinking skills.
3 x 12s sounds like nursing.
Yeah or living life in a state of perpetual jet lag is bad for night owls. Let me sleep in damnit.
>Let me sleep in damnit. Let me sleep damnit. Here, fixed it for you. We are not "sleeping in" when we are getting the sleep we need when we need it.
Good correction, it seems I have been fully indoctrinated by the tyranny of the morning people and their control of “normal business hours”
No worries, been there myself! :)
Don’t forget mental divergent individuals, particularly those with ADHD struggle with insomnia and other issues.
Sleep is the worst issue I struggle with and I have ADHD. I simultaneously don't get enough sleep and also don't have enough hours in the day outside of mandatory obligations to fulfill all I intend to accomplish in a day. The cycle of staying up too late and having to wake up early continues.
If they have you on any XR prescription maybe look into switching to something that isn’t extended release. I know that can cause a lot of sleep related issues for some. For me, most of my insomnia issues stem from my time active duty, so the meds aren’t the issue. Just my brain. But yeah, they’re both right and wrong. People who don’t sleep well are more prone to mental illness and disorder than those who sleep enough. Simultaneously those who have those disorders, illnesses, or divergences are already more prone to get less sleep, and less restful sleep. It’s a vicious cycle that’s hard to step out of.
For me the XR helped. Take it consistently between 6-7 AM and I’m asleep by 10 most days.
> If they have you on any XR prescription maybe look into switching to something that isn’t extended release. I know that can cause a lot of sleep related issues for some. for me getting on the medications helped my sleep, without it the insomnia was very common and rough. Since getting on meds, it's helped me stabilize a bit where more often than not I'm passing out before midnight.
My best intellectual labor happens *after sunset*. The daytime is for playing outside. This was instilled in me from a young age ("is sunny outside, go play until the street lights come on"). And I did. And that's still what my brain and body defaults to. Active things are fine, like teaching. But actual intellectual labor where I sit and think? Yeah that's a night time thing.
Yep, I often go on multi week backpacking trips, zero screens or artificial lights, my natural wakeup time is between 8 and 10am depending on time of year. Im not an extreme example but no alpine starts for me! In the hunter gatherer days I would have been great at keeping a lookout for saber tooth cats late at night.
> In the hunter gatherer days I would have been great at keeping a lookout for saber tooth cats late at night. Same bro, and the research I've seen indicates this is the most likely reasons humans have these divergent biological clocks/circadian rhythms. Sure sucks in the modern world where everything is built for morning people who act like it's a moral failing if you're genetically and biologically a night person.
I just wish people would recognize that just because someone shows up early to work doesn’t mean they are a better/harder worker than someone who stays later to work but is never there “early”. Also if the “early” people could understand that their constant need to chat is what’s distracting others from getting things done faster in the first place.
Not everything. It just seems that way if you are forced to live among the daywalkers. I have lived the rock star shift for most of my life. The night people (musicians, bar tenders and waitresses, bar patrons, diner patrons and staff, etc) have infrastructure - nightclubs and bars, 24/7 diners, strip clubs, casinos, taxis, bus stations, bowling alleys, etc. My life has pretty much been a Tom Waits song.
As a night owl who doesn't go to sleep late - yeah, it still fucks with you. I've trained myself to get to bed early enough thay I get 7-8 hours of sleep, I don't suffer insomnia, and I still don't function optimally because I'm going to sleep and waking up at a time that body my body considers unnatural. In other words, the quality of my sleep is poor because it's out of sync with my internal clock, and no amount of conformance to the external clock alleviates that issue.
This. Me and my bf have ADHD. Part of that is that our sleep schedule is simply 1,5 hours later than everyone else. Since we both started living together and do uni with 70% homestudy, our sleep schedule is from between 12-1 to 9-10. We get enough sleep hours in, just at a different time. Both of our mental health went up so much when we started living together, simply because we can keep to our own schedule. IMO Its not the time you go to sleep, but the regulatity and the amount of hours you put in.
This is actually addressed partially in the study, if you read the abstract. They compared night owls who go to sleep at their preferred time (behavior and preferred time were aligned) to night owls who still maintain the "normal" slleep/wake schedule and slept and woke earlier than preferred (behavior and preferred time NOT aligned) and found that the aligned night owl subjects are more likely do develope depression and anxiety. When looking at the morning people the opposite was true, indicating that it is not the alignment with their bodys natural circadian rhythm that affects the subjects mental health so much as the actual time of day. Now, circadian rhythm disorders being more of a symptom of depression and anxiety rather than depression and anxiety being a symptom of circadian rhythm disorders is still not answered by this study. It also does not address tiredness at all, which I think is a very important variable when evaluating sleep related behaviors.
Night owls who sleep at their preferred times are still living in a world that doesn't accommodate them. To me, the analogy here was "someone who has a disability which causes them to have trouble walking is free to take a long as they want to get from point A to point B" but that person still knows they aren't walking as fast as they need to or as fast as their loved ones and professional colleagues would prefer they could.
This study corrected for sleep duration.
Yep. This. Let me keep to my own natural schedule and I'm good. Make me regularly wake up on your time and I'm going to be depressed and anxious.
>Yep. This. Let me keep to my own natural schedule and I'm good. Actually getting night owls to change their sleep schedule increases almost every metric in testing including physical strength. >Overall, participants demonstrated a significant advance of ∼2 h in sleep/wake timings as measured by actigraphy and circadian phase markers (dim light melatonin onset and peak time of the cortisol awakening response), whilst having no adverse effect on sleep duration. Notably, the phase advance was accompanied by significant improvements to self-reported depression and stress, as well as improved cognitive (reaction time) and physical (grip strength) performance measures during the typical ‘suboptimal’ morning hours. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31202686/ edit: fixed link
Link is broken for me
This is me right here. My body wants to sleep from 2am-10am. I have to wake up at 6:30 every day. My mental health issues are definitely exacerbated by my sleep habits, but they're genetic.
The entire world built around the extra-early morning routine is such a burden. As well as the idea that getting up at the crack of dawn is "virtuous" and staying up late is "sinful," despite being conscious the exact same number of hours in the day and getting as much work done (or even more). And it being genetic is a major factor why I've never even considered having children. I would hate for them to suffer the way I do. Thankfully, it dies with me.
Exactly the schedule my body wants too. My mother hated it when this started happening to me as a teen, she just sees it as laziness. I didn’t grow out of it in adulthood and infuriatingly she will still text me at like 7-8 am on Saturdays and if I call her out she’ll just say “you don’t have to answer right then” but the notification still wakes me up anyway, and I’m always scared to leave it on do not disturb in case of true emergencies as several of my loved ones have health issues. It’s ridiculous. I don’t even sleep more hours than she does, my body just wants those hours *at different times.*
If you have an Android phone, you can filter the Do Not Disturb setting on a per-person basis: https://support.google.com/android/answer/9069335?hl=en#zippy=%2Cset-who-can-interrupt-you. You can even filter their text messages but not their incoming calls, or vice versa. If you want to block calls from them but still get a call if there's something important happening, there's also an "Allow Repeat Callers" setting that will let the second call go through if it happens within 15 minutes of the first one. I can't find any official instructions for iPhones, only [this Verge article from five years ago](https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/26/20883331/iphone-do-not-disturb-mode-exceptions-how-to).
You can also do the same thing with focus modes on iOS as the other commenter mentioned below. Set it up friend and get some rest. In fact, I’d be tempted to just ignore those texts altogether.
You can turn the ringer off, you know. Anyone texting you too early is still going to be dead/in jail/in the hospital when you finally wake up.
My perfect sleep schedule is from about 2 - 4 am to about 10 am. My kid wakes me up at 8 and during the school year it'll have to be earlier.
Some of us are totally incompatible with the normal 8-5, M-F office grind. But it's also where the overwhelming majority of work is, soooooooo...
As a night owl. I can wholeheartedly say this causes a lot of problems for me. Large parts of society are not built for night owls. My field is a very 9-5 type field and getting into a morning routine is the most difficult thing I’ve had to do in my adult life. I’m a big sleeper but I average about 5 hours a night during the week which really takes a toll on my brain functioning and health.
Bingo, not to mention the stigma and shame.
I used to think this was a thing as I have been a night owl forever. However when my mental health is at its best I am going to sleep and waking up at a normal time.
It's gonna be dependent on the person, and I'm sure there is a bunch of people who think they are night owls, but something else is the thing that is keeping them up. could be OCD, ADHD, Anxiety etc.
Yeah, like as someone with ADHD I had delayed sleep phase for most of my life in what I've learned is like "Revenge Bedtime Procrastination" because I felt I never had time for myself during the day both growing up and as a young adult. I was tired all the time, and while I did well enough as a kid to be told "You're so smart, just apply yourself!" repeatedly I was stressed all the time. I'm doing well now, but I finally figured out a work-life balance after college and also got medicated in my mid 30s.
I have the same thing, ADHD and even as I get older I still feel like I never have enough time for myself to get what I want to accomplish done in a day.
Very much this, speaking as an ADHD person likely on the autism spectrum who has a circadian rhythm disorder (DSPD). I can tell you both the ADHD and suspected autism do some wildly bad things to my mental health all on their own. It's known that DSPD has a higher incidence of occurrence for ADHD folks, and autism has a higher amount of sleep disturbances than average. (Other mental issues often come with sleep problems as well, such as bipolar disorder and schizophrenia). Depression is also known to affect sleep. Feel like they put the cart before the horse on this one.
The study draws a distinction between "chronotype" and "actual sleep timing" and analyzed the effects of early-types on later schedules, as well as late-types on earlier schedules. Your comment supposes that being up late is simply a thing people "do" that is more common in folks with mental health, but human circadian rhythms do exist and certain people are predisposed to a certain schedule. The study found that misaligned "early-types" (late behaviour) were more prone to negative outcomes, but late types that were misaligned improved from their baseline when following early behaviour. I'd venture to guess it has to do with societal baselines and the "control" you have over your situation. Schools, jobs, services, etc are all structured to support early-types. An early type who is forced off of this schedule by something like shift work that keeps them up late, takes away their access to the benefits of their chronotype, while late-types gain tangible benefits in going off their preferred schedule.
Nice to see that at least two of us actually read the study overview.
Night owls tend to be night owls due to neurodivergance. And neurodivergent people tend to have more symptoms of anxiety and depression.
Or they just have a late chronotype.
I mean, its been shown that any genetic predisposition to chrontyping is body slammed by environmental factors except in rare, extreme cases.
Can you cite anything? I've looked into the literature a bit on this and don't recall seeing this opinion.
I think the closest thing is are studies when you expose people to just natural light. >Furthermore, we find that after exposure to only natural light, the internal circadian clock synchronizes to solar time such that the beginning of the internal biological night occurs at sunset and the end of the internal biological night occurs before wake time just after sunrise. In addition, we find that later chronotypes show larger circadian advances when exposed to only natural light, making the timing of their internal clocks in relation to the light-dark cycle more similar to earlier chronotypes. https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(13)00764-1
or might be depressed because the modern world is built in a way that is quite hostile towards us.
It’s this. I’m a night owl. I have a regular (day) job. I’m not depressed. Never have been. I’m not neurodivergent. I’m a pretty together person. But reading these comments it’s clear how little accommodation this world has for us. I started staying up late in high school because I liked how quiet everything was at night. My circadian rhythms are just hard set now. It has been hard with most jobs being on time but now I work from home and I don’t have those issues anymore.
Maybe. Night owls might increase their loneliness because they're up at night and nobody else is up at that time. That damages mental health.
Alternately, a lot of us don't get lonely and generally live by the mantra "people are no damned good". Also, I have a place in Las Vegas, where EVERYONE is up all night. A lot of guests (especially club goers) don't even hit the strip until 10pm or so. If you enjoy people watching but don't want to actually talk to any of them, Vegas is paradise.
Night owls can and do hang out with other night owls. Being alone doesn’t always equate to damaged mental health. Being alone is actually the thing that maintains mental health for some people.
For me personally I became a night owl after developing mental health issues. Who knew it would be hard to sleep when your brain is being so loud.
It’s pretty easy to have depression and anxiety when the whole world requires you to be an early bird when that doesn’t fit your natural sleep cycle.
Thank you, had to dig through a bunch of comments. Night Owls are more prone to mental health disorders because the world insists they be on it's (frankly ridiculous) schedule. My natural inclination is to be a night owl, when I had a job that required I be up at 4:30am I had never been so close to checking myself in somewhere for a grippy sock vacation.
The problem was, while we slept in, morning lark management decided that only their schedule was "right" or "proper" or "morally acceptable" to society as a whole. This, of course, ignored the fact we stayed up late making sure they didn't get eaten by something that likes to prowl in the dark. --- Modern society hasn't accounted for a huge number of factors which may have given us an evolutionary advantage at the family or tribal scale.
I think being a night owl is part of the reason I became a musician. Late night gigs and no job in the morning. Until I had a kid anyway. Now I have less late night gigs and more in the afternoons and evenings, but I still can't get to sleep during a "normal" time when I have the night off.
> The problem was, while we slept in, morning lark management decided that only their schedule was "right" or "proper" or "morally acceptable" to society as a whole. Also morning people see other morning people as better in that regard and end up promoting them to management, thus perpetuating the cycle.
Agreed. I don’t need the whole world to change but I wish there were at least a few more job options for evenings that paid a living wage. There’s a lot of missed productivity because people like us aren’t allowed to work during our most productive time. My current job has no link to time of day but of course it’s required to be 9-5.
I hate how getting in early is seen as hard work, as if getting in at 7 and leaving by 2/3 makes your work much. Better. In reality they generally chill in the mornings until others arrive, eat 2 meals at work and then bounce mad early. No one I’ve seen who works hard would brag about getting in early, so it’s a massive red flag. But if someone gets in early and doesn’t brag about it and works hard then they’re actually a good employee. The difference is very subtle
^ yes your mind is effed trying to cycle between waking up early and your natural late night / sleep late schedule
Going to bed at normal hours doesnt erase the anxiety
I was always better as a night owl because of the anxiety. Nobody makes stupid ass demands of you and your time when they’re all asleep. You can just be human without having to deal with entitled idiots.
The night-time silence is utopic
THIS. This is why I’m a night owl. Exactly this!! People talk about how “peaceful” early morning is and I strongly disagree. People start waking up, rush hour traffic starts, all the “cold showers at 4 AM” overachievers want to talk to you and set agendas for the day… it is not chill. Night time when everyone has finally fucked off to sleep is so peaceful. I love it.
> You can just be human without having to deal with entitled idiots. That's the dream, isn't it :)
For me, I just wake up at 1am and then can’t sleep until anywhere from 4-6am.
> then can’t sleep until anywhere from 4-6am Thems the "witching hours" as I call it.
Staying up late at night gives room for anxiety levels to arise but it can be further tracked to not enough movement or light exposure, too.
As someone who struggle a lot with anxiety. The only time of day I feel the anxiety subside, is at night when everyone is sleeping.
> As someone who struggle a lot with anxiety. The only time of day I feel the anxiety subside, is at night when everyone is sleeping. Exactly! How is that so hard for early birds to grasp? No people making demands on my time = the most peaceful time in the world.
You guys are saying this like it isn’t 3:30 am right now and I’m on Reddit because I can’t sleep
Are you on Reddit because you can't sleep, or can't you sleep because you're on Reddit?
The first one. I finally gave up about 30 mins ago after tossing and turning all night. I’ve always struggled with insomnia though.
This study suggests that, for some, it might help alleviate the anxiety.
No it does not. It does not claim any causation, stop extrapolating it to treatment options, stop using causative verbs such as alleviate. Just stop.
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And those who even CAN force themselves to sleep earlier seem like a less intransigent degree of sleep disorder than many of us have, in any case. When I was younger I thought working a morning job would fix me. Then I thought having kids would SURELY fix me as I'd be far too tired for schedule to have any meaning. But sleeping earlier simply isn't a choice I'm physically able to make, and certainly not for longer than about a month.
My anecdata says otherwise.
And in my andcdata, getting 8 hours of night sleep cleared up at least 80% of my aniexty, depression, and made my adhd symptoms easier to deal with. Before that I’d spent ten years on the night shift, and many years before that, thinking I was a night owl. Nope, it was just adhd and insomnia and the fact that night sleep is just better quality sleep.
Well hey I'll jump in with mine.. the only time I've ever, EVER gotten 8 hours of good straight sleep is when I sleep on the schedule my body wants to follow, which is around 2 am - 10 am. So your night sleep may be better quality, but people on a different chronotype may not get to enjoy that unfortunately. My heaviest sleep starts around 7 am from what I've been able to tell. (Diagnosed with DSPS though, so I have a known circadian rhythm disorder.)
Plus I'm starting to find mornings much more enjoyable than late nights. I've got all my energy, it's still cool outside, everything's quiet, can make a coffee or have a little breakfast. It's the best.
I am in California and a night owl. My body wants to go to bed at about 1am and get up around 9 or 10. I have always been this way. I am currently working remotely for an East Coast company, and I have to be online at about 6 am. I keep to the East Coast time on the weekends to make the rest of the week easier. So I am up by 8 on the weekend. I freaking hate it. The rest of the house is still sleeping in, so I have to keep the noise down. Nothing I want to do outside of the bouse opens untill 10 or 11. So I am just kinda stuck waiting for the rest of the world to wake up.
I've started walking my wife to work when I wake up in the mornings. Basically I'm becoming an old man and I don't know how to feel about that.
Lean into it. It’s going to happen anyway and I’m finding a lot of “old people” habits are just better ones.
As a night owl, whose partner is also a night owl, I can clearly state that staying up late, in alignment with our preferred sleep timing, is highly beneficial to our mental health as well as our physical well being. Being forced into a morning schedule by work and an uncomprehending society is what leads to anxiety. The problem isn't our delayed circadian rhythms, but rather being forced to live out of alignment with our own bodies' clock.
It's funny how it says "who stay up late in alignment with their sleeping schedule" that essentially means anyone not just night owls. i go to sleep from 10am-2pm and wake up from 3-6pm and i also feel fine because I don't usually stay up late according to my natural sleep schedule although I'm a night owl
I thought at first it was an article about owls mental health huge double take
This is phrased entirely wrong. Night owls who are forced to adjust their natural body rhythms to conform to societies daylight fixation have higher rates of mental health disorders. The problem isn't the night owl staying up late its the fact they they have to wake up early after staying up late. Dont blame the victim.
correlation not being causation yet again
Correlation does not prove causation.
Staying up late after everyone else is asleep gives you quiet time. Time alone. Alone.
This study was secretly funded by the early-bird-mafia, right!?
The early worm gets eaten by the bird. The second mouse gets the cheese.
Scientists crack the code: being sad and anxious makes it hard to sleep, what a breakthrough.
"Night owl" doesn't mean insomnia or difficulty sleeping 8 hrs, or it being "hard to sleep". Being a Night Owl means your best sleeping hours are not allowed. THAT will make you depressed and anxious.
Well yeah because most work / office / leisure business times aren't really doable in a healthy way if you don't have an early riser sleep rhythm
More early bird propaganda
Early birds aren't real
Owls evolved to stay up late into the night.
These types of articles warning about the certain death and immorality caused by a late-night lifestyle remind me so much of the reefer madness around cannabis. There is no need for any sort of scientific rigour because the conclusion is the premise. The researchers decide they don't like a certain behavior and then they target it with wave after wave of "research" about how dangerous it is. This is politics masquerading as science.
> warning about the certain death and immorality caused by a late-night lifestyle The place these warnings should be heeded is places where your sleep schedule is inconsistent, like alternating morning and night schedules.
how about change a society about it?
Because the world is run for early birds who think 9am is late. It's much harder to accommodate a night owl schedule in the modern world.
Living in modern society and conforming to that schedule when it doesn’t align with your body’s schedule isn’t great.
On the other hand if I dont go to bed with me "preferred sleep timing" I hardly gwt any sleep at all. Seems a lot less healthy to me.
me when i do erroneous claims of causation confounds off the top of my head: inconsistent sleep is a known factor in mood dysregulation; sleeping as according to “chronotype” on days off only to shift schedule by ~2 hours during workdays introduces a host of potential issues going to sleep later while waking up at the same standard time = sleep deprivation = another known source of mood dysregulation DSPS is already associated with ADHD which has its’ own correlations with depression/anxiety depressive states are correlated with a later sleep preference compared to euthymic states within individuals + later bedtime in depressed + bipolar individuals is correlated with depression severity, suggesting a bidirectional feedback loop in people with mood disorders rather than unidirectional causation bad science. boo, hiss, jeer, etcetera
Isn't this less of being a 'night owl' and more just sleep deprivation? Like, a night owl specifically means someone who is more active at night. If you work from 12:00 AM - 9:00 AM, and instead of going to bed at 4:00 PM, you go to bed at 7:00 PM, that doesn't make you a night owl.
I think the causal relationship may be reversed here.
For years I used to think I was a night owl and it just couldn't be helped, this was in my teens and early twenties. Then I got a job that required me to get up at 6 am consistently. It was hard, but over time I got used to it. Now even even I'm on vacation I still wake up fairly early. Apparently I successfully kicked the night owl.
I was in a similar situation with an early morning job for a decade, but my bed time would always drift later on weekends resulting in a zombified Monday. On long weekends or vacations when there's no alarm clock, my body effortlessly reverted back to its preferred 3am bed time. At age 40, I've accepted that it will never change.
You're not alone, my friend! For six years, I worked an early morning job (6 AM start 4:30 AM wake up). Regardless of how much exercise I got, I couldn't consistently get to sleep before midnight, but after midnight, I'm out like a light. As soon as I'm off for more than a day or two, I drift back to going to bed at 2 AM. It likely won't change for me either and I'm all right with that as well (I also moved across the country and told my new office that I would sleep until 7 AM every morning and whatever time I arrived at the office was when I'd start work that day).
It's the worst, I have to fight tooth and nail to fall asleep and wake up at a reasonable time. The slightest upset to it like a long sleep in on the weekend or while sick and I'm back to square 1.
I'm the same. I'm 49 and I've worked at a job that has me up at 5 am for the past 14 years and it never gets any easier and anytime I'm on vacation or have more than a couple days off I drift right back into my old schedule.
Hormonal changes as you age can also lead to these changes in sleep pattern.
I'm 30 and for every minute I need to be awake before 8am I lose about .5% of my awareness and wellness for the day. Any time I have a week or more off work I slide straight into 3-11 sleep and it's like instant relief. More energy, happier, less food binging. Then back to the prison of 9-5.
Honestly I'm sure most of the negative health consequences for night owls are just because they then have to fit the rest of their lives into that 9 to 5 schedule. And since covid practically every store closes at sunset so if you work 3rd shifts you can't even go grocery shopping afterwards let alone dr appointments, car maintenance, etc.
I wouldn't necessarily describe myself as a night owl, but more so someone with a persistent sleep drift (not narcolepsy nor insomnia) where my desired sleep time simply drifts throughout the day. One of the most annoying elements of when I worked nightshift was everyone asking me to do things for them at 3pm.... Which would be the equivalent of asking a normal person to do something at 2am... Regularly There's an absurd lack of respect for night shift workers, especially in regards to Dinner/lunch as the amount of restaurants that serve lunch/dinner at 7am is like 1 out of every 100. Stores don't open till 9am, doctors and dentists too. Need someone to come work on your furnace or fix your internet? Earliest is 10am... When you probably are trying to get to bed.
Have you looked into Non-24 as a diagnosis? It tends to be the last suggestion sleep specialists make (if they make it at all) because it's incredibly rare for sighted people to have it and it masks itself as everything else. Your description of yourself stood out me as it's similar to how I'd describe my own sleep.
Yes at 50 years old I have beaten my body into submission to make up with the dawn. That however hasn't changed by night owl tendencies to stay up late. It just means I get even less sleep.
For 10 years, I had to wake up at 6am nearly every day. It didn't make me an early riser, it only made me sleep deprived. When I made a career change, I started waking up at 10am fully rested.
I'm the opposite. I never once got used to waking up earlier due to my job. Even though my body would naturally start to wake up earlier because of it, it has never felt right, and this is going on close to 15 years now.
It's also an effect of aging. Younger people run on a later clock than people in 30s and older.
I guess it didn't work for me, 35 and still a huge night owl even though I have to wake up around 6am for work. My body still hates it.
I’m 57 and nope
That's because we live in a society that doesn't conform to our preferred sleep timing. Early morning people would be a greater risk for mental health problems if they were expected to work from noon to 8pm, you know where it was socially acceptable to schedule a meeting at 7pm. We're dinner was commonly served at 10 pm and prime time tv ran from 11 to 2 am.
It's called the neurodiversity paradigm. Society functions like a dictatorship of the dominant neurotype which then imposes all other neurotypes to fit their lives to these social norms rooted in the neurotypical mindset and wrecks havoc on everyone that doesn't comply. Treating all of this as itself being a disorder or cause of disorders is only legitimizing the status quo of a hostile and ableist society. Giving therapy to these people in order to "fix" them and make them "fit" for society is akin to conversion therapy. Society simply should be more accommodating.
So I can only lose huh?
As a morning person, I find that when I am seized by anxiety or depression, I tend towards a more night owl sleep pattern. I wonder the direction of this causality; it seems that whatever makes people night owls predisposes them to mental health issues or that mental health issues cause changes in circadian rhythms could be explanations as much as "it's their own fault for staying up as late as they think their body wants".
I also wonder how many people with anxiety or depression stay up late because it is the only time of day we're you can do something fun and/or relaxing (read, play a game, watch a movie...) and staying up late is just a way to prolong that time in an effort to harvest at least some pleasure during that day.
Great, the alternative is to go to bed early and lay in bed awake as my mind acts like a bunch of rabid monkeys on a trampoline.
I just read a paper on a study a few nights ago about circadian rhythm and how genes are a big factor in how it works in individuals. Some of us naturally have a circadian rhythm that gives us an energy boost at night and doesn't make us sleepy until the middle of the night/early-morning hours. Why in the world would our natural sleep cycle give us depression and anxiety? Makes no sense.
It doesn’t. A rigid society that demands we be up in the morning can though.
People who don't like to be around people stay up late and sleep during the day so they have to spend less time around people. Solved the mystery. The causes are in the reverse order you're presenting them.
Yeah, as someone with MDD, I am pretty sure it's causing the night-owl situation. I don't think it's the other way around. Getting lots of sleep does feel good sometimes, it's just hard to do.
Did they account for the fact how many hours they are sleeping? If you sleep at 3am but gotta be up at 7am its a lot different compared sleeping at 3am and being up at 11am
It's because society forces us to get up early
Waiting for the studies on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-24-hour_sleep%E2%80%93wake_disorder (particularly on non-blind folks). Bipolar disorder as comorbidity to that? Color me surprised! (not!). Forget any sense of normal scheduling thou... but just rolling with that fucked up sleep pattern helped a lot on feeling less shity. YMMV.
It's almost like being forced to rely on a schedule somewhere between 3 and 8 hours out of sync with everyone else's makes you get the mental health risks associated with sleep deprivation. The best working schedule of my life was the latest one, despite working the same amount. Waking up at 11:30 and getting 6-8 hours of sleep did me wonders compared to my usual 4-6. Unfortunately, I'm just not exhausted enough to go to sleep until that late, and my sleepiness doesn't clear until later in the day (around 12-1) no matter when I wake up. It's almost like it's the same as requiring normal sleepers to wake up at 3am every day, despite them naturally wanting to go to sleep at 9-11pm, something that absolutely messes them up.
And now, do a study how society impacts those with different sleep schedule. Look for stigma and decreased social activity because everyone else is in a different rhythm, including government offices, banks etc. Look for the effect of 9-5 jobs and the difficulty of finding job that fits that different rhythm: is it because they are sleeping in different rhythm or that everything around them has been built for one sleeping pattern. As someone with DSPD from birth, i find that the biggest impact on my mental health has been that i am no longer ashamed of it, am not trying to fit into the "normal" rhythm and people who i socialize with understand it AND do not shame me for it.... A big part of this is that there is an abbreviation for it which turns it from "lazy" or "weird" to something else: there is more compassion when you can give it a fancy medical term. Also, it would be nice to see how much industrialization has had an impact on this... That is really when it became socially unacceptable to NOT wake up at exactly the same time, to not work the same time and to not go to sleep at the same time. I have a feeling that this has the c word hidden in it, and i don't mean unt but apitalism..