joreth | If You Are Not A Morning Person You May Never Be

www.vox.com/2016/3/18/11255942/morning-people-evening-chronotypes-sleeping

I've been suffering from this since childhood. I say "suffering", although it's not a hardship at all when I'm just allowed to follow my own clock - the suffering is because the rest of the society won't let me. It typically starts up in the teen years, and most teens outgrow it as they age, but for some of us, it lasts pretty much for the rest of our lives.

I'm on the far end of the bell curve, with my internal clock being set to bedtime around 4 AM and waking around noon or 1 PM.

It has been an ongoing struggle just to get people to understand that it's not something I can fix or change, and I can only barely compensate for it and that comes with some extreme consequences. No amount of "just get on a schedule" fixes this problem. I've tried both therapies listed in this article, and like the subjects of the article, all it takes is one day off my therapy schedule and the whole thing resets.

So now I don't bother - I sleep and wake when I feel like it unless I have a gig the next day and then I just deal with the jet lag. It's one of the reasons why I do the work that I do instead of a regular 40-hour a week job, but it also means that I will never make a lot of money because I can't keep it up every day, so I only take a couple of gigs a month and fill in with lower-paid side work that has later hours.

"It turns out our internal clocks are influenced by genes and are incredibly difficult to change. If you're just not a morning person, it's likely you'll never be, at least until the effects of aging kick in.

And what's more, if we try to live out of sync with these clocks, our health likely suffers. The mismatch between internal time and real-world time has been linked to heart disease, obesity, and depression. This all amounts to a case — not an absolute case, but a compelling one nonetheless — that we should listen to our bodies and not the alarm clocks. "