Yeah that didn’t work for me. Just made it harder on my “fall asleep on the couch from 12am until 3am then wake up and goto bed until work at 5:30am” routine.
Exactly this worked for me. Just be consistent until it sticks. It can take months, easily. But it works in the end. 10:30 pm - 6:00 am is now baked into my mind and I usually just wake up naturally like 10 minutes before the alarm. I actually love it 😁
Historical I have always had trouble getting to sleep, and since becoming a parent I experience waves of easy and difficult nights. This has been the case for four years now. For a while here I was falling asleep in minutes every night and things were pretty good. But the past few weeks have been awful. I'll go to bed at 9:30 feeling ready to die, but most nights the last time I remember seeing on my clock was ~2am, and I'm getting up at either 4 or 6 for work.
I don't know what to do, but I'm still ready to die.
Of all those, I bet getting the dog was the biggest factor, lol. They need you when they need you. The threat of waking up to a puddle of pee is a motivator.
Currently up while my baby sleeps next to me. Some of us put the baby to bed and then lie in a dark silent room for two hours then wake up at 4am to feed the baby and are up 2 more hours.
It sounds fake, but it might genuinely be your genes. Scientifically the natural tendency to sleep at specific time is called your chronotype and it's semi-genetic (it also changes with age and possibly few other factors). Not only that, it also affects your alertness: morning people usually have the highest alertness just after waking up and it gradually declines throughout the day, while evening people usually wake up with very low mental functions, but then their alertness slowly rises and hits its' peak around 5-6PM.
So if you ever wondered how it's possible that you always wake up feeling like shit, while others talk about how they're so full of energy in the morning. That's how. They're literally built different.
Could you point me in the direction of some source/further reading? I would love to have something substantive to share next time I get shamed for my lifelong struggle to become a morning person.
it requires doing it over and over again and accepting that it's gonna make you feel kinda shitty. I'm at my best by 11am. When I used to work overnight til 5am, 11am was when I woke up. When I worked bars 5-close, 11am. Now that I work a 9-5, I'm physically there at 9, but I'm useless til 11am. When I fall asleep has changed as my schedule did, for each of those schedules I was in bed at 6am, 4am and midnight respectively. But when the machinery came online has never changed: 11am.
Eh, everyone's a little different, and for some it may well be impossible.
Real answer is conditioning, with most of the suggestions being means to get that rolling. The unwritten part is while you're conditioning youself, you're probably gonna be miserable for a while, unless you're one of us folks with a genetic legacy of farmers and soldiers.
I know this is WhitePeopleTwitter, and not a direct ask; but the easiest way is to tackle it from the wake-up time, rather than forcing yourself to try and fall asleep at 10pm.
Pick a day with few responsibilities, (e.g. Saturday ) that way you won’t be too negatively impacted if you don’t get enough sleep. Set MULTIPLE alarms to 6am to force you out of bed; proceed with your day as normal, minimise screen time and bright lights after 9pm, and go to bed at 10pm.
Make sure you keep waking up at 6 am and don’t nap/go back to sleep; brute force your body to adapt. It should work as quickly as in 72hrs.
Honestly, if you're working remotely, finding a job that has a better fitting schedule, is indeed a good idea. Moving there, though, might not work out as your body might drag you to the same sleeping patterns you had before.
Anyone actually reading this and having similar issue, it can get expensive but try talking with a doc to try and figure it out. Before my habits got better, i tried diet/exercise, diagnosed with sleep apnea (didn't feel better rested, but def worse if I don't use cpap), and finally got way easier to manage when I was diagnosed with depression and prescribed. Ymmv but thought I'd share my experience.
I don't understand everyone's problem with getting this sleep schedule. I, for one, clock exactly this. I go to bed at 10 AM and wake at 6 PM; just like it says!
Have you tried going to sleep at 10 and waking up at 6? It sounds obvious, but you'd be amazed at how many people never do the obvious thing. Like forgetting to plug in a computer and wondering why it doesn't come on when the power button is pressed.
Yes. Spent a month in a ward with a fixed regiment. Never got used to it, and my sleep cycles were all over the place. By the end of the month I was starving because I was missing so many meals, and it was overall torturous.
If you have the means, you might want to consider seeing a sleep specialist and having a sleep study done.
There's a lot of things that can cause irregular sleep cycles like that and a sleep specialist can see what your brain is doing while you're asleep. That helps you and your doctor figure out a treatment plan depending on what they see on the results.
Some of it is genetic but mostly it's conditioning, like in the Military.
EDIT: To clarify, veterans often (but not always) wake up before dawn consistently for decades after their service. I don't really recommend it as an option, but it's proof of concept.
Yeah, I got the conditioning during college. Work 32 hours a week while taking 15 credits, you won't have time for sleep. Work 7:30am-4pm MWF, go right to campus for some homework and dinner before class 6pm-9pm. Then go home and do homework/sleep. Tu/Tr have class from 10am-2pm and work 3pm-7pm and then work on homework, housework, gym. You won't have the energy to stay up late.
As others have said, it's simply a matter of discipline and getting used to it. But that doesn't necessarily mean you'll become a morning person. How you wake up and when you wake up are two different things. I'm a morning person in that I wake up easily, but I go to sleep at 1 and wake up at 9.
For a real medical answer, I was, at one point, put on GHB and a Stimulant under the theory that an issue that took 9 years to diagnose (epilepsy, did not present typically). Since I had issues with cataplexy, which is only rarely seen with other issues, this made sense. Turns out it can be a side effect of some psych meds, as I'm also bipolar.
GHB knocks you out in moments, and you'll wake up 4 hours later. Time for the second dose. 4 more hours. Like fucking clockwork. It was the only time in my life I was consistently on time anywhere I've ever worked. Wasted in a Walmart auto shop.
Then stimulants (amphetamine analogue) were supposed to keep a narcoleptic awake during the day.
I've tried both making puzzles for myself (like locking alarm off in a PC case) and math challenges. Both of those failed and were only inducing somnambulism in me.
OK, so what you want to do is stay awake for atleast 20 hours, sleep for like 5 hours then wake up, do this for a while then pick a time to go to bed, now you gotta drink some sleepy time tea, set a few alarms and fall asleep, you should sleep for about 8 hours, and wake up refreshed, now repeat this every night until you don't need the tea.
You gotta overload your circadian rhythm to reset it.
Every time I try this, I usually just end up passing out at like 4pm and then just crashing until noon the next day. It never works. Making up for sleep debt, is what I like to call it.
The only thing that helps is getting a job that requires me to wake up at 1am, but even then my body still doesn't want to get up before 12pm on the weekends.
It helps to establish a routine for going to bed. For example, set a nightly reminder on your phone 15-30 minutes before bedtime that it's time to wind things down. Don't have anything caffeinated after 5 pm or so.
Adjust the times at which you eat, and make sure those times are consistent. Sleeping habits will follow way more easily if you adjust eating times along with them.
If women marry a man that sleeps in then he is lazy and needs to be woken up or he's a bum. If a woman marries a man and she sleeps in he's a dickhead if he doesn't let her get her beauty sleep and he's lazy if he goes to bed early.