I'm a natural night person. I sleep like a rock, 8 hours a night, as long as I don't fall asleep before about 3 AM. I go to sleep 3 AM-4 AM and wake up by noon at the latest. My mother said this was my pattern from early childhood on if I was left to my own devices.

Trying to work day jobs is what about killed me. Mornings are horrible and I'm a total zombie until noon. Drugs might bludgeon me to sleep and another dose in the middle of the night might give me 8 hours, but if it's before noon, I am not awake.

Shift work was fine for me. I had most of my long remissions when I was working evenings or nights. I was sick as hell when I had to function during the day before noon.

Honestly, sleep hygiene varies. I don't think it matters much if you sleep 11 PM-7 AM every single night. It matters that your sleep is deep and restful and with enough REM action.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed_sleep_phase_disorder

I love the insomnia advice - always go to sleep at the same time (and......if I am on-call?)

idiots

and twiddle your fingers in the dark until your body says it's time to sleep.

Then get up 2 hours later and go to work.

That means about every third night, you'll sleep because you're utterly exhausted.

Phooey. I always tried to get evening and night jobs. It's one reason I ended up doing stage lighting. I told people I went into nursing because I could do it at night in comfortable shoes. It wasn't far from the truth.

I am a night person also. I have always done best as a shift worker. My son is the same way. He is lucky to have a job where he can come in a bit later. When he can, he works at night and trades off hours. He clears this with his boss first. His boss only gets upset at people who come in late and leave early.

Thanks for the link. Will look into this when I get some time.

I constantly get people thinking I am a total weirdo because I never go to bed before 3:30-4am and sleep until noon. I was beginning to think I was the only one in the world, LOL!
I am like the one poster I am totally useless in mornings and feel like crap. I am most alert and feel my best after about 10pm.
My husband says I do it on purpose and that is BS I know my own body and that is the way my inner clock works.

It's a real thing. Drugs don't work. In fact, nothing much works on it.

Sleep specialists are still treating it like it's a disease. It might not be.

We're just the ones who have adapted to a 24 hour a day planet. We no longer have to be tied to farm work done from before dawn to sunset. We're the people who stay alert and keep things running after the farmers go to bed.

I told my husband about it and he said "That's dumb, you can change if you want your just being stubborn" grrrrrrrrr that really pisses me off. I know how I feel and I hate when someone else tells me how I feel or how I should feel.

Most people get in their teen years and outgrow it. For some of us, it's permanent and there isn't a damned thing we can do about it but suffer if we're stuck with day people.

I really don't care if he thinks I'm putting it on, which is nuts as we've been married 10 years and I have always been this way.
We are retired and don't have to work outside the home, so this presents no problem for me. I just do my thing and go to bed at my regular times 3-4am or later and sleep until I have had 7-8 hours and do just fine.
I will continue to ignore him

I live alone. My only problem is people who try to call me from doctors' offices before noon even though I've had them write "AFTERNOON CONTACT NUMBER ONLY" next to my info.

Day people are rigid, rigid, rigid.

My sleep habits are highly irregular. I never get more than about 3 hours max at a time before I wake up and turn over or something before I can get back to sleep.
Of course I usually get a nap in during the day. I can go to bed at 9 PM or 2 AM and still be up by 5 AM no matter what.

The last two weeks, the Freakonomics Podcast has been about sleep. Interesting stuff from health effects, racial/economic differences, economic effects of timezones (wages tend to be about 4% higher on the eastern edge of a timezone than the western edge, for instance, possibly correlated with the one hour sunset time differential), and, as mentioned above, the problems of night people in a day-people-work-scheduled world.

They're always interesting, but this one hit me in the pillow, since I'm trying to adjust my own habits

The following is rather original. Dr. Gominak went from a general neurological practice with lots of patients with daily headache and migraines. In the videos she talks about how her practice changed from listening to her patients and her hypotheses on how things turned out. In some of her earlier videos I had some hiccups on some of her hypotheses but those disappeared in more current videos.

I began following her advice as have a number of other people I know and have been seeing definite improvements - several that were quite unexpected. Whether she is right on everything is not the point, almost anyone can try it for themselves and decide if they improved enough to bother.


I found it very interesting after finding out about the problems with using e-readers that emit lots of blue light just before sleeping.

http://drgominak.com/videos.html

She has a better idea how things work on her latest video:
"How to fix your sleep" March 2015.

I liked watching her previous videos as they document her progress on figuring out how things work over a decade in her practice.