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tobbob | 3 years ago

I'm a night owl, always have been, always will be, but we live in an early bird world, and fitting in with that is worth a lot.

So at the moment I'm passionate about fixing my daily routine to finally get enough sleep, and get to work early, leave early, and hopefully have energy to do things in the evening.

I've changed all my clocks back one hour so that psychologically it's easier to stomach. I have a light set on a timer to turn on in the morning, and strict bed time.

I can work flexible hours, but somehow showing up at 9:30 I always felt like I was "late" and felt rushed, and then having to keep working until 17:30 felt hard too. Doing the exact same hours but arriving 6:30 to 7:00 means I now feel like I'm ahead of the game each day, and I get to leave early, and there's still daylight when I leave work which is a huge motivator.

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mckirk|3 years ago

Oh man, I can relate to that a lot... have you experimented with melatonin? A really low dose (0.3mg) of it at around 11-12pm helps me tremendously with keeping my rhythm somewhat in check. I still make liberal use of option to work whenever I want, but at least I'm not in "get up at 2pm" mode anymore.

But it seems you've found a pretty good way of managing your sleep already, arriving to work at 6:30 sounds like an alien world to me. How have you managed that? Just the strict bed time? Doesn't that mean you lie awake for an eternity?

tobbob|3 years ago

I've not tried anything like melatonin. I originally believed that if I normally go to bed at 1am, trying to sleep at 10pm would have me just lying awake, and the only way to change my sleep cycle was to force myself to get up early, so that I'd be tired earlier. That turned out not to be the case.

It was more a psychology thing. Before, I'd wake up absolutely exhausted, be tired at work all day, come home, fall asleep on the couch, make dinner. Then, I wouldn't want to go to bed because the idea of that being all my day was, was just too depressing. I wanted a few hours of actual life where I could just relax and watch TV.

They say the first step to beating alcoholism is admitting you're an alcoholic. Well, the first step to beating my problem was accepting I'm a wage slave. Yes, I sell a significant proportion of my waking life to a company in exchange for money. Until I can win the lottery that's the constraints of my life, so I could carry on as I was, or work within those constraints and make the best of things.

There is no better feeling than waking up needing the loo, and you still have four more hours before your alarm goes off instead of four more minutes. Getting to bed early is 90% of it.