The big mystery is where does my body find the streng to magically flip from tired all day to seeming infinite energy every evening?
Morning: fugue state. Feel as if I’ve been slingshotted into a separate plane of time where the hours of the day feel drawn by random.
Evening: alert, focused. Each minute feels precious. Backlog of ideas overflowing. Dread having to go to bed at a time that feels ‘normal’.
A term I learned just this year: chronotypes. Basically, the preferred timing of the wake-sleep cycle varies among humans. Easy to imagine how that might have been useful from an evolutionary perspective: always someone to keep watch while the rest sleeps.
Oh yes i am definitely one of them “keep the fire alive while telling stories about the night sky” types.
But what that really means is that somehow during the day my body already has the energy to be alert and focused. It just refuses to let me selfdrive unless i fill it up with caffeinoline first or till when actual cosmic phenomena are aligned to my subconscious.
slingshotted
The proper term is slingshat.
You borrow it from the next morning. A few years ago I went through a phase where I would get up at something like 4AM, voluntarily, and in the morning and early afternoon I was fully awake and alert like I usually am at night. It actually felt really good to be functional and productive when the sun was out, but the problem is I would tend to get sleepy and pass out at around 8pm when I wanted to keep doing things. My theory is that your body needs a balance of sleep, awake but not very active time, and active time, and it is all controlled by when you fall asleep which determines where your free time is to do the things you actually enjoy doing.
Like when I woke up early, I would usually start the day doing things that I would at night - playing video games and scrolling through memes primarily, and during that time I could also get housework done, my (at the time) university homework, and planning for the week. I realized that it was the same productive time but only shifted because of when I had the free time to so.
Eventually I returned to night life because the time limit on my free time imposed by when my obligations for the day start versus how much sleep I am willing to sacrifice and move my unproductive time to work hours is a trade off I am very willing to make.
I’m going to be sincere here. If you are regularly tired, lacking sleep, or have the “Leave me alone until I’ve had coffee” archetype; look for work at a different shift. Seriously. I was completely miserable at my java web dev job right out of college circa 2001. After a couple of years, I believed that I could not do my hobby as a job because I was completely miserable. Time passes with shitty dev jobs until 2003, I somehow got an apprenticeship doing machining. It was 2nd shift exclusively. It revolutionized me as a person. I’m 2nd shift, through and through. I guess that my point here is that if your eyes don’t naturally open really early, there are options and you should listen to your body.
I used to think I was a night owl, so I got an overnight shift. Was up most of the day at times. Eventually a doctor recommended I take provigil (which didn’t do much). Moved to a different job on second shift. Still miserable sleep. Learned enough that I got promoted into a 24/7 on-call role with lots of 5am start times for various projects and 9-5 meeting availability. Misery (which should not be a surprise).
I suspect my body isn’t on a 24-hour cycle. But good luck getting a doctor to take that seriously.
If you can, find a neurologist who specializes in sleep disorders. I know someone who described something similar after self-referring to a sleep doc and the doctor’s first words were, essentially, “you’re on an adjusted sleep cycle naturally, but we’re going to start tackling things in order of importance based on your symptoms and needs.” Was fantastic for them to get a doc who took it seriously, was sympathetic, but also realistic that biology might not mesh with what the world required of that person.
This is no joke, I’m a better person overall when my work day starts at 4pm and goes to midnight. Sure I miss out on stuff, but I exercise, eat better, get better sleep, focus on hobbies. It’s much nicer, when I can do it.
It’s backwards, the guy got angry about his work taking his time during the day, or maybe he did some overtime…
Then he hit something called “revenge bedtime procrastination” - which is when you take back time at night, because you feel like something or someone took too much of your time during the day.
If I go to bed when I’m not tired then I’ll end up getting even less sleep than if I’d stayed up.
getting old is kind of terrifying.
I’m only 32. but now I think of the 22 year old version of myself who was a degenerate who would stay up until 5 in the morning, sleep until past noon, and do it all over again for 1-2 weeks at a time.
I can’t even comprehend who that person is, they sound like an alien. but no, that was me.
I‘m 30 and still like this. Granted, COVID changed a lot on how I see things. Sadly COVID made me quit partying.
When in my 20s-30s I considered that if I didn’t see dawn, it was a lost day. In my 50’s I owned a restaurant-bar. A few times I did an all nighter. It literally took me a week to recover. It’s called aging.
every single time I got myself in that slump the only way to get out of it was to literally stay up for like 20 hours straight. I couldnt do it now, I’d pass out and nap
I used to do an all nighter at least once a month in my 20s with no ill effects unless I tried to do more than one a week. Tried it in my 30s, the recovery was rough.
oh man thats what i do now. but i work until midnight so i kind of have an excuse
It’s easy to lose an entire night to Terraria
The Civilization Series has entered the chat
yes but let us not forget what motivates us in the first place: that it is also possible to dedicate an entire night to terraria and win
Read at 1:35am with my alarm set for 5:45am 😅😭😭
What game are they playing? My best guess is Terraria.
But also, yeah, relatable.
edit: added full stop.
Or something like factorio. And that’s entirely unrelated to why I’m awake after midnight.
Hmmm, Factorio is fantasticio, but does not resemble a side scroller in my experience.
Maybe Steamworld Dig? Which I would highly recommend, btw.
edit: s/b/n/
My husband and I just rediscovered Civ after not playing any of them for a decade.
Even now, a decade later, we have been sitting there for the past 2 weeks being like “Just one more turn” @ 2 am.
Fair warning, TV Tropes link.
There’s a name for that: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/JustOneMoreLevel
My first thought was Terraria for sure, and it’s definitely a game that can keep you up.
That’s an excellent point.
I’m not even going to look at the clock right now. It’s not worth it.
Daytime me is cursing that decision right now. In at 1a. Up at 6a.
what you don’t know can’t hurt you
This is how I think about the past version of me who manages my Reminders app. That son of a bitch is constantly telling me what to do and I hate it. He’s overly ambitious and pretends we’re not lazy af.
pretends we’re not lazy af
I’ve gotten flak for posting this before, but:
Nice platitude, but I know for sure laziness exists because I do it sometimes.
Yeah, I agree overall in that I do far less work than I used to because I’ve got older and realized I only have to do as much as is required to keep my job. On the other hand, there’s the lazy where I don’t take care of a thing that is actually for me, like picking up a prescription when the weather sucks.
“Dude’s a sonofabitch… though they are living their best life.”
Trust you to bring such a granularly appropriate reaction gif. 'Preciate ya, ummthatguy.
I feel attacked.
This is going to sound weird. I had this epiphany about self love recently. I pictured myself as two different people and imagined what I would do for the other to show them I love them. It’s sort of changed my perspective on things, at least a little.
It’s not weird at all. My therapist had me imagine that part of me is an abandoned kitten, as a self-compassion exercise. It was extremely effective- compassion directed outwards is a lot easier for me, as it sounds like it is for you.
Isn’t that dude sitting too close to the monitor at home?
