Posts tagged circadian rhythm
Adventures in Freelancing, part two
As I wrote the other day, I am now trying my hand at freelancing, with the goal of surviving without a “real job” and becoming financially- and location-independent. One curious aspect that I’ve already noticed in the first few days is how quickly my sleep pattern adjusted to a more “natural” one - natural for me, that is.
The first thing I did in my newfound freedom was to delete all of the alarms on my phone. With the ability to go to sleep when I’m tired and sleep until I’m not, my circadian rhythm, no doubt relieved at no longer being artificially regulated, put me in a cycle of going to bed at dawn and waking up in the afternoon.
That hasn’t surprised me. As I’ve written before, I’m naturally a nightowl, and I do my best work long after the sun has set. What has surprised me is that it seems I suddenly need less sleep than before. Granted, this is just the beginning of the experiment, so I’ll need a few weeks of consistent data to see if this really is the case, but so far, it seems that not only am I not lethargic in the afternoon (my morning) as I used to be when forced to get up in the actual morning, but after a certain minimum point, the amount of sleep I get is irrelevant - and that minimum threshold has dropped. Case in point: last night, I finished working around 5 am, and fell asleep sometime before 6. When the cat woke me to feed her at 9, I felt far more rested than I should after that little sleep. Of course, I knew that wouldn’t be enough, so I went back to bed and woke up on my own just shy of noon, completely rested. I mean, look at me - I’m writing a coherent blog post on six hours of sleep, when normally, I required seven to eight hours for my brain to possess any kind of creative energy.
I’m kind of obsessed by this topic. Perhaps in the future I’ll start a separate blog* documenting my 9 pm to 5 am workdays. At the moment, though, I have actual work to do, and I’m finally more than awake enough to do it.
*I would call it “Nightworkers”. No ambiguity there…
Age of Reason: Intelligence: The Evolution of Night Owls
Night owls are smarter than other people, and now we may know why. The modern world contains many features our slow-to-evolve brains still find unfamiliar—cars, TVs, hot dogs on a stick. But the world has always thrown new stuff at us, and brighter humans may adapt more ably.
Satoshi Kanazawa, a psychologist at The London School of Economics and Political Science, argues that, while we have specialized mental modules for navigation, social interaction, and other age-old tasks, general intelligence is its own module handling only evolutionarily novel circumstances. And he has data showing that people with higher IQs are more likely to have values and preferences that just didn’t make sense for our ancestors to embrace. One of those is staying up late.
I don’t know about you guys, but I’m feeling very vindicated right now.
“ But preferring to work at night might go beyond a need to escape distractions. Some people are hard-wired to perform better as it gets later, said Michael Thorpy, director of the Sleep-Wake Disorder Center at the Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx. “Our circadian timing of sleep is affected by genetics, and people all differ,” he said. Mr. Thorpy said many people experience surges of alertness two to three hours before they fall asleep — ideal for powering through some unfinished business. “If it fits in with their lifestyle, it can work very well,” he said. “A large part of their waking day is when things are quieting down.”
Fraternity of the Wired Works in the Wee Hours - NYTimes.com
Every cell in my body right now is screaming, “YES, YES, THAT’S ME!!!” as I’m reading this article. I hope this is a first step in a much-needed alternative to the 9-5, which, quite frankly, just doesn’t fit with some of our bodies (namely, mine).
I want to start something like this in Krakow. Any takers?
“ Despite his best efforts, Cliff, 28, could not get to sleep until about 7 a.m. It had been this way since he was a teenager. He was a healthy and successful young scientist — except that he didn’t arrive at the lab until 5 p.m., just as his co-workers were preparing to leave. Although he got his work done by pulling all-nighters, he became isolated from the group. Sleeping pills didn’t work. Nighttime alcohol bouts got him to sleep sooner, but only by two to three hours — a bummer on many levels. Significantly, Cliff was not depressed.”
Sleeping (or Not) by the Wrong Clock - Opinionator Blog - NYTimes.com
I am really irked by the fact that this article implies that anyone with a sleep pattern outside of the “normal” one has something wrong with them, and that this should be fixed immediately, using medication or light therapy or burning at the stake if need be, because anything is better than sleeping at odd hours.
Just because the majority of society runs in a certain timeframe such as, say, 9 am to 5 pm (which even varies country to country in Europe, as many people in Poland, for example, work 8 to 4), doesn’t mean that one cannot find a way to work on a completely different schedule and be just as productive and significantly, not depressed.
Sure, before the widespread prevalence of artificial light and 24-hour Chinese take-out, when farm animals needed milking or feeding at a certain time, it made sense that all individuals conformed to a certain sleep schedule. But today, there are so many occupations one can pursue that allow for a more natural approach to sleep - namely, following one’s natural clock.
The article, however, does make one very relevant point:
“People sleep best when the internal clock is in sync with the workday rest/activity cycle. When there is a mismatch, the likely results are insomnia, depressed mood and daytime fatigue.”
The mismatch in this case was a second example: a man, George, whose natural circadian clock dictated that he fall asleep at 1:30 am, but his job required him to be up by 7. He was found to be (not surprisingly) mildly depressed.
But why couldn’t George, instead of signing up for experimental light therapy, talk to his employer about devising a schedule more in tune with his circadian clock? Why couldn’t the New York Times, in addition to running this article, run a piece advocating more workplace scheduling flexibility?
Perhaps this just hits a personal nerve, more than anything. I wrote about my own whacked-out sleep schedule over a year ago, and since that time my theory has only been confirmed. Were I in a position to be self-employed (which is really the only option for non-standard sleepers), I would be working from about 2 in the afternoon until 2 in the morning, with a break for a couple of hours midway. Worst of all, I know I would get twice as much done, with a much higher standard of quality, than I do at present. If employers allowed this kind of individual schedule setting, the increase in productivity - and thus the economic impact - would be mind-blowing.
Bottom line: There is no “wrong” or “right” clock - each person works according to their individual circadian rhythm, which most people figure out by the time they’re young adults. In the past century, the workplace has radically altered to accommodate personal variance in so many aspects - why can’t schedules based on natural sleep patterns be next?
Wikipedia: Shift work sleep disorder
I think this explains by alternating bouts of insomnia with near-constant daytime sleepiness.
I am a nocturnal person. My natural sleep pattern dictates me going to bed between 2 and 4 in the morning, and waking up in the late morning/early afternoon. This is how I function when I have no obligations requiring me to be awake at certain hours. Contrary to popular belief, this does not make me a lazy person, as I normally sleep no more than 7-8 hours per night, and usually closer to 6.5. It just means that biologically, my circadian cycle is shifted a good 4 hours later than the average person.
When I was a student or worked on a schedule I set myself, this was not a problem. However, now that work requires me to be there 10-6 every day, it’s led to a pattern of shift work sleep: on the weekends I revert back to my natural sleep cycle. On the weekdays, I undergo a continuing struggle to fall asleep by 1 and get up by 8, usually failing miserably on both fronts. This leaves me brain-dead for the first few hours of each workday, as I wait for the caffeine to kick in and for my mind to overcome its morning sluggishness.
In the end, I’m frustrated, unproductive, and exhausted, and I really don’t know how much longer I can continue this cycle. It’s not healthy, if the constant caffeine-induced stomachaches are any indication, and it’s a waste of my productivity. The only good side-effect is during my peak productive hours, usually between 10 pm and midnight, are spent on working on my own projects, often late into the night.
I know the best solution is self-employment. Until that happens, I need some suggestions that don’t involve the destruction of my liver.
Anyone else have this problem?
timezone shuffle
My current job is wonderfully flexible about scheduling. Granted, my boss occasionally gripes a bit if I show up anytime after noon (which happens fairly often), but in general if I work most of my eight hours per day while other people are around, it doesn’t really matter whether I come in at 9 am or at noon.
Lately, though, I’ve been operating in timezones a good hemisphere over from where I live. Take the last two nights, when I went to bed at 6 and 7 am, respectively. Today I slept right through daylight, which ends around four in the afternoon in the winter here, and grudgingly awakened at half past four to darkness and an angry, hungry cat.
And then there’s right now. It’s three in the morning, and I’m going through Dreamweaver tutorials on YouTube (for anyone interested, these are pretty good), photoshopping a logo, and catching up on Daily Show episodes from the previous week.
The paradox is that I’m extremely productive in these wee hours, and pretty much useless in the mornings. Were I to have a job that allowed me to keep these kinds of hours, it would be eerie how much I could accomplish. At the moment, I’m using this time to work on my own projects, and spending half of every workday just trying to wake my brain up. Of course, this leaves me tired as fuck and more prone to irritability and sloppiness, but as soon as night would come for me to sleep off some of these lost hours, I suddenly awaken and repeat the process.
So far the only solution I’ve found is downing half a bottle of wine and hoping to get drowsy enough to sleep, but then the next morning is spent in battle with my alarm clock. Plus it’s not the cheapest remedy, and hardly a cure.
Now it’s 3:24 am. And there’s so much I still want to do.
