Haha you should have seen the treehouse my friends and I built when we were in about fifth grade. It was probably 15 feet off the ground and put together with as much carpentry skill as a group of 11 year old boys had, using boards and plywood scavenged from our garages or vacant lots. Fun times. Pre internet era, nobody had a phone and video games meant pac man at the arcade if you had money to play, or maybe Pong on a TV set.
yeah I built one of these out of pallets when I was 10 and it had to be torn down when a neighbor kid stepped on a rusty nail. Fortunately they didn't sue my family. I understood the concept of a hammer and nails, but that was the limit of my knowledge.
I’ve built an underground hideout using discarded washing machine panels for wall support when I was about 11 or 12 years old or so. Safety was a word I’d never heard of back then...
Google Reader, Google Wave, any of whatever chat/video/voice offerings they're planning on killing off in the next year or so. I don't even remember what they're called.
On the one hand I see where they are coming from. On the other I sure do enjoy the genius of production of those old animations, particularly Fantasia. On the one hand I understand the criticism that Spielberg torpedoed indie cinema, on the other hand Empire of the Sun was a masterpiece. Two things can exist, in their own right, meriting praise, yet opposed and unresolved.
Half my childhood I grew up in poor conditions. The stress of everything just drenches you. People traumatizing each other, young and old, in their stress and grief. The poor dull each other. Dulled minds are handed down. Poverty is not just economic fact, it is a state of mind.
How were your sleep patterns? I'm frankly amazed we don't consider that stress and sleep are two sides of the same physiological coin - the autonomic nervous system. Sleep is quite simply the recovery from stress and the damage caused.
I think that's an over simplification of sleep. I'm citing the large amount of scientific discussion on the nature of sleep and what happens as the source of my doubt.
Rest and recovery is by definition the parasympathetic nervous system and the work on the glymphatic system is showing the often studied views of sleep don't account for the common cause of garbage removal.
My sleep patterns back then were unregulated so I would regularly stay up late into the night, like every kid wants to, doing anything I wanted. Now my sleep 2/3AM to 10/11AM lol.
Yes. I remember in my high school there was some essay to describe the childhood. The writing was meant to be nostalgic and what not with happy memories. My writing was filled with stress, pain and anxiety. School shoes wearing out, how will I get new school shoes? Growing up, damn, how will I get new clothes?
Yes. I began working illegally at fifteen, I was lucky my boss didn’t bother to look at the age I wrote down on my application. I was able to buy clothes and food. At sixteen I got a second job and still went to high school. I was homeless and lived with my boyfriend, I did as much homework as I could and pulled C’s that year. My mother and her boyfriend bought a house and then decided they had enough room for me to live with them. My father was missing and presumed dead. I worked and spent my free time at the library and the gym. Being home meant subjecting myself to verbal abuse. I saved my money and moved to Silicon Valley right after my 21st birthday. I became a bioengineer and now I’m a stay at home mother and married a programmer. You can escape. Work, save, study and stay away from family members. Join a gym, use ear plugs. Live in your car/van in a nice town if you must. Do not stay around others in a poverty mindset. Get a cup of coffee in a cafe in a wealthy part of town, observe how they interact and emulate them. Go to free meet ups to be around people in a higher social class. You’re going to be working harder than anyone else around you for a while, that’s ok. Follow advice from early retirement blogs, take any shortcuts you can to success, don’t waste time getting a degree. Don’t do anything risky with your health or money. You can take risks in a few years. You can make it out. If there is anyone reading this in a terrible situation I can offer more advice.
Switched parents to the one that wasn't doing drugs and had good work and no mental health issues. The kids I remember from that time probably didn't see an escape route in their own lives. A lot of their parents were shits. Some of them were straight chaotic evil. Some, if you put their minds into their children's bodies, they could fit right in and assume their children's roles. Children raising children is a sure way to harm brain development. Also, beating them. Saw a bit of that. Makes me sad to think where those kids might be now.
The typical answers are: education, military, sports, entertainment. You either need to work hard in education or go join the military and survive or be naturally gifted in sports/music.
Almost all of the people I have seen called 'gifted' in music are ordinary people that were given the chance to develop in music, both through their parents, and through things like council-funded music/orchestral programs, etc.
All the people I know who have been successful in music worked their asses off at it. It takes a special kind of personality to practice by yourself for hours and hours in search for perfection while still having he ability to connect with other people emotionally.
Yes, similar to the other responses I found work wherever possible and moved away as soon as I was able to afford it. Having a safe place to then study and focus on school while working made a huge difference, as did eating properly and getting somewhat reasonable amounts of sleep. Its amazing how much other people can notice your mood drop when you haven’t slept or eaten properly and it just becomes another thing they can single you out over...
It’s also important not to be singled out as having money available, but I found this to be the case only around other people in poverty with a poverty mindset. It’s best for others in this environment to consider you out-group. If they consider you in-group they will sabotage and belittle your attempts to escape. It’s a delicate balance of seeming different but also poor. If other poor people find out you’ve been saving money they’ll try to take it. They have an odd view of what “having money” is. My mother is almost sixty and thinks if she has five hundred dollars then she has “a lot of money”.
Try taking lowest dose melatonin like 5 hours before your bedtime, in addition to minimizing brightness and color temp of light sources. Don't worry if you wake up in the night for a while; read a paper book.
> Don't worry if you wake up in the night for a while
This is very good advice. I'm sure it varies from person to person, but anecdotally it seems to be completely natural to have a mid-sleep period of wakefulness (for a bathroom trip if nothing else).
If you start worrying that it will lower the overall quality of your sleep, it definitely will. But if you just go with it, lie still, at most read a book, you will get sleepy again in short order and continue your rest. In fact, personally I (paradoxically) seem to feel more rested on the nights that I had a more noticeable/awake mid-sleep hiatus (and without spending extra time asleep).
YMMV, of course; the point is not to let a completely benign occurrence turn into tossing and turning and watching the clock because you're anxious about getting enough sleep.
Set at least 2 alarms and get up. It's going to be rough for a short period, but you will adjust. There is really no trick. If you are so tired that you think you can't function (you can) do some jumping jacks and take a cold shower [1].
I started working at 6:30 this morning, and it's amazing. I watched the sun come up outside the window and I've had almost 3 solid hours of concentration time before the interruptions start.
[1] This all assumes you do not have some medical condition.
So for me, sleep and wake up times don't matter much. But for most people, if you want to optimize for one, don't worry about when you go to bed, worry about when you get up. Your body will naturally get tired at the right time each day based on your activity that day, as long as you avoid blue light and mental stimulation at night.
To get your body set to a wake up time, use an alarm clock for a while. As long as you're good about your nighttime light and stimulation habits, you'll find that after a month or two you don't need the alarm anymore.
If you're already using an alarm, then clean up your nighttime habits and see if that helps.
Note: This is all my opinion on reading a lot about this. I'm not a doctor and this stuff only applies to people with otherwise normal health. If you have a sleep disorder, all bets are off.
I just picked your post at somewhat random to contribute to this discussion, but it seemed like a relevant spot. Also not an advertisement, just an observation.
I've been adjusting my sleep patterns over the last week or two so that I'm getting up earlier (~5am). I started out just using the iOS Alarm Clock, but through the first week or two, it was pretty hit-and-miss. Some mornings I would get up at 5, some mornings I would apparently hit snooze a bunch of times in my groggy fog and not end up getting up until 7. This was happening on a somewhat subconscious level... I wasn't consciously hitting snooze, it was just that by time an alarm actually woke me up enough to realize what time it was, it was closer to 7.
A couple of years ago I had played with Pillow[1], and started trying it out again this week. The feature where it wakes you within a half hour of your set alarm, when it detects that you're in a lighter phase of sleep... It really seems to be helping. I've nailed the 5am wake up all week and have woken up feeling quite refreshed. And like you suggest, my body is adapting and is now starting to make me feel sleepy earlier and I'm just naturally wanting to go bed.
One other thing I've noticed is that I start to feel a bit of a chill around the time I should be going to bed. It's a nice reminder if I actually pay attention to it. No clue if that has a real physiological basis or not, or if it's just some cue my body gives me.
Good on you for coming over the wake up early dark side...
To steal a common survival phrase - 2 is one, 1 is none. I set multiple alarms anytime I have to get up for something like a flight. Otherwise, I wake up between 6 and 7 naturally. If you're still struggling with feeling refreshed, the fix for that is working out in the morning.
Not very scientific, but Jocko Willink is a huge proponent of getting up early because that discipline sets the tone for the entire day of getting stuff done. I tend agree, but YMMV.
Funny enough, a re-listen of Extreme Ownership is partially the reason that I started getting up early; the discipline feels good, and I'll probably start to add a light workout to it too.
The real reason is more practical though. Working on a side project, and with a partner and animals, it's been hard to get things done in the evenings. She doesn't get up with me when I get up early, so I've got a couple of undisturbed hours to grind on the project. Plus, it feels really damned good to have a feeling of accomplishment every morning before heading to the office; no matter how many useless meetings and stupid shit happens, I've already move the needle on something!
That's great! I don't know if Jocko is for everyone, but for me he's super motivating. I think we all are sometimes guilty of looking for complicated answers to motivation, discipline, and generally things that are hard (I know I am), but more often than not the answer is a simple 'get after it'.
Not OP but my tip is to take a weekend or some other time without obligations and stay up 1-4 hours later each night until you have rotated around to the correct schedule.
The other way is to develop a sleep debt until you can sleep at your desired time, and set an alarm to prevent yourself from oversleeping and falling back in to your normal routine. This will also lose you time out of your normal schedule, and is pretty terrible-feeling to boot, but it doesn't require quite as long.
Sleep physicians or sleep therapists are good about setting this kind of stuff up, if you have reasonable and inexpensive access to medical help.
Pick up an eighth of some top shelf indica, start loading bowls around 8-9pm, and keep loading it until you are asleep. Source: last night. Disclaimer: legalized in CA.
This might sound obvious and you might have tried a lot of these already, but for me what works in similar situation is that if it crosses 4, I skip sleep that day. And having a strict wake-up time works. Of course as the parent comment suggests, the night light played an important role. I have three different lights near my bed, each less intense. Also having dinner early, cold showers before sleep and no exercises at least two hours before.
Decide at what time you would like to wake up. So if you're trying to go to bed at 10, and get 8 hours of sleep, then set your alarm to 6 or 6.30AM (depends on how long it takes you to fall asleep). It's gonna suck for the first few days but eventually you'll be so tired that you'll start going to bed earlier, eventually reaching your goal. There might be more subtle methods, but this is what I do.
This only works if you can actually wake up with a low amount of sleep. I put one of those alarms on my phone where you have to solve maths problems to turn it off. All I've managed to do so far is train myself to do maths in my sleep...
I did the same thing. It got to the point where I had to set it to about 5 snoozes of 3 hard math problems then a final 5 problem set.
It worked for a few months, but eventually I began just hard powering down the phone and falling back asleep for hours.
Needless to say, I have never been successful at any job or school where I wasn't able to work afternoons or nights. I don't even bother applying for jobs that do a typical 9-5.
It has kind of set my life on a strange course.
And it's now almost 7am, I haven't slept, and I will probably end up staying up all day...
Surely this is primarily a question of willpower. Before you go to bed, commit to this action: when the alarm goes off, I will immediately get up. It quickly becomes habit.
When sleep schedule is completely broken, 20mn sport just after wake up in the morning is a good way to fix it. Normally, 10 days of regular schedule with sport in the morning is enough. You can stop sport after if you do not like it.
reacweb may not be a native English speaker (they live in France). I'd assume "sport" translates to "exercise". Like running or biking.
Sport has plenty of (somewhat archaic) meanings. "Sporting goods" stores often carry running shoes, bicycles, and weights, all of which are "sport" even if you're doing it by yourself.
