Missy Can't Fall Asleep At a Proper Time asks: Hello! I am interested in your thoughts. I am a night owl but my job is 9-5 in a morning bird's world. Do you think I should try to "fix" my sleep schedule so I can wake up nice and early in the mornings and Get Some Stuff Done™ without feeling grumbly at 9am at my job? Or should I just embrace my hectic, extra grumbly mornings, where I am waking up only 35 min before I have to go to work, because I Did My Stuff™ the night before, as is only natural for me, and I therefore didn't fall asleep til 1 am...? Help! TIA!
Good Paul says:
The most important question here, Missy, is why do you want to fix your sleep schedule? Because everything depends on you and what will make you happy.
You put “fix” in quotations marks, because you already know that your sleep schedule isn’t broken necessarily. There is no inherent virtue to waking up early and no inherent vice to staying up late. You don’t even need eight hours. Not if you’re happy on less. With one stipulation that I’ll come back to, if you are happy with going to bed at 1am then there’s nothing to fix.
But you aren’t happy or you wouldn’t be asking for advice about it. So are you asking for my permission to stay up late or are you asking for my encouragement to get up early? Because I can give you both.
My stipulation from earlier is that you aren’t the only person in the world, and your choices do affect others. Since you don’t mention any roommates, partners or children, I’m assuming that your sleep schedule isn’t dictated by anyone else in your home, but you mention that you’re grumbly in the morning at your job. It’s not fair to be grouchy or rude to your co-workers because you didn’t sleep enough last night.
But you may be able to keep your early morning bad mood to yourself, in which case you are only hurting yourself with your grumbly mornings. And that brings us back to the real issue. Your late nights and early mornings are absolutely not a problem if that’s the way you like it. You don’t have to feel guilty about staying up late just because of the numbers on the clock. But it isn’t the way you like it. You’re grumbly in the mornings and asking for advice about whether you should change, and that tells me that you feel like there is something that needs changing.
For that reason, I do think you should go to sleep and wake up a little earlier. Not so that you can Get Some Stuff Done™ in the mornings, but because you deserve a peaceful and happy morning instead of a grumbly one, and your routine as you are describing it doesn’t give you that.
Bad Paul says:
The vital thing to remember, Missy, is that time is imaginary.
That means that “early” and “late” are relative. Your mistake isn’t that you’re going to bed too late; it’s that you’re going to bed too early.
If you just power through, you can turn that 1am into 3 or 4am pretty easily. And once you’re up until 5am it is only a matter of persistence to stay awake until 9am and face your day. Yes, you’ll have a day or two of tiredness at work. But it’ll be late night tiredness, not early morning tiredness. In other words: the good kind, not the bad kind.
Just stick to it and you can feel like your 9-5 job is meeting that late night sweet spot you crave, and your 7:00 bed time will make you feel so owlish you’ll be snacking on mice.
The only real problem is practical. How will you make it through that first 9-5 shift after being awake all night? It’s going to be tough. I recommend aiming for a Monday to start your new life schedule. Stay up to at least 3am on Friday night, then to at least 6am on Saturday night. But try for later. Then on Sunday night (or “Monday morning” to the early bird chumps) noon should be an achievable goal just on willpower, and caffeine will take you the rest of the way.
I don’t advise driving home that night.
But that will be the worst of it! You’ll gain a day! Everyone else will be dragging themselves through Tuesday morning and afternoon and you’ll still be living your best Monday night life until 6 or 7pm.
Enjoy it!