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Insomniacs, the Phantoms of the Internet
theodp writes "Ever since she was a toddler, freelance writer Lily Burana has been a Stay Up Late kind of girl. When her kindergarten teacher asked students 'What time do you go to bed?,' young Lily felt compelled to lie rather than rat out her own mother by saying, 'Oh, between midnight and 1 a.m.' She still suffers from insomnia, but has discovered that Facebook is the Promised Land for the awake and alone. She finds comfort in the company of others who, like her, live counter to the conventional rhythm of a sunny-day world."
Once forums, IRC channels, and other websites that are driven by user-created content reach a certain size, there is no longer a difference between "daytime" and "night time" because while Americans slumber, Europeans are waking up, and Australians are coming home from work. "Peak" time ceases to mean anything once you're factoring in physical location and have at least two "peak" times. You use the same forum as others, but probably know different mods, OPs, and key players.
It is important that the Internet hang-out be user-driven, because groups who select content to publish tend to originate in geographic proximity, and a single time zone becomes favored.
Facebook isn't a place where it's easy to intrude on a social network in a geographical location outside your own, so I don't understand why the author isn't using a broader term.
As I write this, I am at work at 11:30 PM. I got to work at 8:00 PM. When my coworkers come in in the morning, I'll be heading home to sleep.
I have been this way for as long as I have had conscious memory. My mother tells me that I have been this way since I was a newborn in the hospital.
Lots of treatments have been proposed with many studies being done, some with thousands of test subjects. Not one single treatment has ever been demonstrated to work in a statistically significant way.
Thus the best advice that the medical community can give us "Night Owls" is to find some way to accomodate it. That's why I took up computer programming in the first place. My degree is in Physics, but I'm afraid that teaching morning classes just doesn't work for me.
I have lots of friends who have DSPS as well. I met most of them by hanging out at Dennys at three in the morning.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
conventional rhythm of a sunny-day world
My problem goes a step further. I like to stay awake for 20 hours and then sleep for like 10. I spend the same amount of my life sleeping/awake as a normal person, just in longer chunks. Trouble is, left to my own devices, I effectively "stay up" 4 hours later each night untill I wrap back around. Before I had a job I could actually live like that. It was kind of a strange sensation brushing my teeth with my roommate at midnight; She was going to bed, i just got up.
Hikery.net - The best hiking site ever. Made by yours truly.
I'm rarely in before 10am, often closer to 11. But I've found that answering a few customer emails at 2am helps. The folks in Asia get an answer sooner, so they're happier. I've done it regularly and that my boss has asked when I actually sleep. It's enough that I don't get any grief when I zone out in the afternoon. I'm not sure how many bosses are like that, but there is at least one of 'em.
First I helped the client deal with some old emotional traumas. A few weeks later I supplied the Radial Appliance. He uses it every night - if he wakes up at 1am (sometimes the dog wakes him up), he'll move, re-attach the wires, and go right back to sleep.
That's a looong walk you took to arrive at peddling your placebo.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
I'm just posting this out of idle curiosity, so please indulge me.
As a 33 year old, I currently sleep between 3-5 hours in a day on average. Today I went to sleep around 5:10 AM, and woke up around 7:59 AM (one minute before the alarm, happens frequently). Though I am somewhat grumpy for the first 10-15 minutes, I quickly 'wake up' and feel refreshed and alert. This is normal for me. Back during college, I would often go 2 or 3 days without sleep, though it's more likely I'd take a nap somewhere between 9-11 am (depending on my schedule). I even work out and take martial arts classes to get regular exercise since my job is pretty sedentary.
Is there anyone else out there like this? Where sleep is this annoying intrusion into your schedule that you only allow when you're physically exhausted? Maybe you can help me figure out why people hear me describe my sleep cycle and say they're sorry, like this gift of another 1/6'th or more of my life to live is terrible compared to those people who voluntarily give up 1/3 of theirs.
Other random items; ... ... just curious to hear if there's anyone else out there like this.
- According to doctors way back when I was 6 or so, I'm 'Hyperactive' - though I guess today it'd be called ADD or ADHD or something
- Only time I feel sleepy/awkward/wrongish is sometime around sunrise and the next 2-3 hours, but it goes away. On cloudy or foggy days, I may not experience this at all. It appears I have to actually see the early morning sunlight to really be negatively affected by it.