Is early to bed and early to rise healthier for you?

[Jester]

....
It's terrible and really hard to break the cycle. But even when I do by fighting drowsiness all day, I go right back to it again the next day! It's like my body wants an upside down cycle here. It's really weird.

The only thing that I succesfully use to fight this, is to schedule appointments. My housekeeper comes.... my assistant ... So I have to be up, groomed, dressed, alert, looking and smelling good before they walk in....

OK - for starters, tomorrow morning 5am up and drive to the hiking trail....

I'll update tomorrow.

PS Doing this for you Winston!!!! (not that you asked...)

FAIL.

Freeway was closed! No trail access... and insufficient motivation to get up and find an alternative.

Assistant thing is working great however. Also big breakfast, very light lunch. Took a nap today but it was maybe 20 minutes sitting on couch after lunch, avoided bedroom / bed (which can result in 4 hours of deep afternoon sleep and being off schedule)....

Results so far:
having human company (or a planned appointment to get ready for) keeps me stimulated

Next plan:
Work in AM, exercise at noon, followed by errands. Get good and tired. Plus sunlight for that Circadian reflex. Hopefully sleep well that night.

[ph_visitor]

I agree with you globetrotter, but what is the logical/scientific reason why "early to bed and early to rise" is healthier for you and more in balance with everything?

First, I am not this globetrotter person you keep referring to.

Second, mammals have been doing it for 65 million years. So if you decide that you know everything and know better, and decide that the past 60 years of late night TV suddenly abrogates 65M years of evolution and that you can stay up all night and not get sick, well - Nature doesn't care.

[Winston]

Yesterday I got up really early before sunrise and ate breakfast and went for a walk outside. It certainly feels healthier when you do that. It feels like some kind of "spiritual experience" in fact, as though there is some type of "awakening" effect on your body when you rise with the sun.

I even saw birds outside scoping about on the grass before dawn to snatch up worms, which reminded me of the saying, "The early bird gets the worm." lol

The thing is though, all the other people I saw outside who got up that early were old retired people and elderly folks.

So it got me wondering: Why is it that old people prefer to sleep early and get up early, while young people prefer to stay up late and get up late? Is there a reason for that?

[Jester]

Yesterday I got up really early before sunrise and ate breakfast and went for a walk outside. It certainly feels healthier when you do that. It feels like some kind of "spiritual experience" in fact, as though there is some type of "awakening" effect on your body when you rise with the sun.

I even saw birds outside scoping about on the grass before dawn to snatch up worms, which reminded me of the saying, "The early bird gets the worm." lol

Inspiring. Thanks. Please post again every time you do this. I need the push.

The thing is though, all the other people I saw outside who got up that early were old retired people and elderly folks.

So it got me wondering: Why is it that old people prefer to sleep early and get up early, while young people prefer to stay up late and get up late? Is there a reason for that?

I notice this too. Maybe it's because they know life is short, and they want to savor each day - while they can.

[Winston]

Have you noticed that freethinkers and nonconformists and deep thinkers tend to be night owls? Why is that? Is it because they can think more clearly at night? I also noticed that morning people tend to be more optimistic and exercise more, whereas night owls are more pessimistic. Why is that?



This video answers the questions: What is the chronotype? Is there a relationship between circadian preference and personality? Am I a morning person or an evening person?

Circadian preference is also called chronotype. Most research indicates there are two chronotypes: morningness and eveningness.

The word “circadian” is refers to the near 24-hour physiological rhythm that has been observed at every system level in nearly all plants and animals.

It’s controlled by internal factors like the self-sustaining oscillator mechanism as well as external factors like temperature, physical activity, social relationships, light, and food consumption.

If an individual has morningness, they get up easily in the morning, they are more alert in the morning as compared to the evening, and they tend to have a preference for morning activities. Sometimes morning people are referred to as larks.

If somebody has eveningness, they tend to be more alert in the evening, they are able to sleep late into the morning, and they prefer afternoon and evening activities. Sometimes evening people are referred to as owls.

[Outcast9428]

I've never understood people who say they feel clearer getting up in the morning lol. My body despises being awake in the morning. It takes many hours for me to fully wake up. My energy levels generally peak between 10:00-2:00. I find it extremely difficult to sleep before 3:00 in the morning even if I woke up early the night before. I regularly go to sleep around 5:00 in the morning and wake up at around 1:00-2:00 in the afternoon. I typically start work in the mid-late afternoon and get off work late in the evening. I know for an absolute fact that I am extremely oriented towards the evening. My dad is an evening person, my brother is an evening person, and my grandfather was an evening person too. My mother and sister on the other hand seem to be the middle type. Even when I was a kid though, I was an evening person. I hated going to bed early and especially waking up early.

Often times morning people ask me "what is there to do at night?" I have often thought the same of the morning though. I don't associate mornings with any pleasant activities and struggle to think of what really constitutes a "morning activity" besides work and school. The evening, on the other hand, seems to be both the most fun and the most peaceful time of the day. In the true evening is generally when friends hang out with one another, generally sex happens more often in the evenings. But also, the evening is when you can go on the internet, read a book, or watch a movie/TV show. The evening is both the most exciting time to be awake and the most peaceful time because you can either be at a loud party or you could be sitting in your room, in silence, just thinking about things. My impression of morning people, to be honest, is that they tend to be kind of dull, their lives seem more likely to revolve around work or school and they don't have a lot of ideas for entertainment or value entertainment as much. Nonconformists are definitely way more likely to be evening people, and pretty much every person I really relate to in life has been an evening person.

As far as whether its healthier to be a morning person. Yeah, I agree with the researcher, its probably because society caters, to an extreme extent, to morning people. I'm not suggesting society should instead cater to evening people. But given that morning people are apparently only 30% of the population, why does it feel like all schedules and time slots in society revolve around and are designed for them? Most people consider getting up before 8:00 to be unpleasant. So why does the typical working schedule mandate this? It seems that 10:00-6:00 works for most people's circadian rhythms much better. For me personally, that wouldn't be enough, getting up any time before 10:00 is extremely unpleasant for me but every extra hour helps lol. But the workplace is just the tip of the ice berg. The school schedules are just downright ludicrous. There's more of an argument to be made for what schedules pertaining to adults should look like, but with adolescents, there's no excuse for catering to the morning types because very few teenagers are morning people. Yet high school is the time of life you have to wake up the earliest? High school often starting around 7:30, forcing teenagers to wake up at 6:00 or even earlier. Wtf kind of sense does that make? That kind of schedule doesn't just cater to morning people, it caters to extreme morning people. And I do think its kind of unnatural to wake up and it still be night time outside. Especially in the adolescent age group, extreme morning people who like waking up at 6:00 or earlier barely exist.

Why do morning people do better in school despite evening people having higher intelligence? Well there you go. Evening people all despise high school. Having to wake up extremely early can feel like torture for an evening person. I cannot tell you how many times I had to miss class/school because I just couldn't wake up.