Resetting Your Clock For Two

March 2, 2015 5:13 PM

As a couple, we've both been night owls, but the combination of a bad winter, working from home, and a shared sabbatical has trashed our sleep cycle - Bed at four, up by noon. it feels like we're missing whole days and end up wide awake at 2am. How do you reset your clock to a more lark-like pattern when there's no external force driving you? We don't technically *have* to be awake at any particular hour, but the waking up at noon all the time is getting me down.

We do most of the recommended things for sleep hygiene allready -- no eating three hours before bed, dark bedroom with no screens, etc. it just feels like we're in freelancer anarchy where time has no meaning so why bother having a regulated sleep cycle. I do not like this feeling.

posted by anonymous to Health & Fitness (14 answers total)

Melatonin supplement. 30 minutes before bedtime. Back yourself up 15-30 minutes every few days until you get to your desired sleep time.
posted by deezil at 5:25 PM on March 2, 2015 [3 favorites]

You'll have more success treating the waking-up side of things; it'll be rough at first, but you'll adjust. Find a morning commitment that occurs at a specific time, like an exercise class or getting to the donut shop before they run out of the good ones. Or set an alarm that you have to get up and leave the room to turn off.

Having really nice coffee and breakfast foods on hand helps - they won't get you up by themselves, but they can be a welcome reward for getting up early.
posted by Metroid Baby at 5:29 PM on March 2, 2015 [6 favorites]

Have a dog! I haven't been able to sleep late in years...
posted by cecic at 5:46 PM on March 2, 2015 [8 favorites]

I am a night owl too and I find myself in a similar situation to yours where I want to reset my clock. I find that exercising vigorously to exhaustion every day helps me to fall asleep when I want to (early like at 10:30 instead of at 4 am). It also helps if I get into a routine of getting up at the same early time every day -- even on weekends.
posted by mbidi at 5:58 PM on March 2, 2015

Be aware that Daylight Savings Time begins next Sunday, March 8 at 2 a.m. Build that into your plan.
posted by Carol Anne at 6:04 PM on March 2, 2015 [1 favorite]

6AM yoga. Or running.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 6:13 PM on March 2, 2015 [1 favorite]

I did this after my Christmas/New Year break when I found myself on the same schedule you describe. I read a bunch of research about body clocks and then implemented a bunch of methods at once. It was successful, but I don't know which of the methods accounted for the success, or if it was a combination.

1. I fasted for most of a 24 hour period preceding 8 am on the first day I wanted my new schedule to start.
2. On that morning, I forced myself out of bed at 7:30am (easy because I was hungry!)
3. I immediately went outside for half an hour and stared at the sky to get lots of blue light in my eyeballs.
4. I ate breakfast and did my usual morning routine, and then spent most of the rest of that morning outside, including some exercise.
5. I spent the rest of the day indoors, and made sure to keep the lights low in the evening, and put a red filter on my (dim) screens.

I repeated that schedule (without the fasting) for three or four days, although even after that first day I felt like my body clock had totally reset.
posted by lollusc at 6:59 PM on March 2, 2015 [6 favorites]

You need to manipulate your sleep drive so it peaks when you want to go to sleep, which sounds like 7-8 hours before you want to get up.

Let's say you both want to get up at 7am. Your new bedtime would be 11pm.

Go to bed at four as usual, as this is when your current sleep drive dictates. Set the alarm 9am. When the alarm goes off, get out of bed. Stand at a window, look at daylight, have some coffee. Then stay awake until at least 9pm, but preferably 10-11pm. On 4-5 hours of sleep, you'll be tired, but it should be doable. No naps!

Set the next alarm for 7am. And get out of bed when it goes off. Expect to feel jet-lagged at first, but if you keep getting up at the same time no matter what, it should stick.
posted by zennie at 7:39 PM on March 2, 2015

I'd just go cold turkey and treat it like you would if you went on holiday and were trying to get over jet lag.

Set your alarm for 7am, go to bed when you're tired. Get up at 7am and stay awake till 11pm before going to bed again. No naps.

Like jet lag it'll be horrible for the first couple of days, but then you'll adjust to the new normal just fine.
posted by mr_silver at 12:59 AM on March 3, 2015 [2 favorites]

Plan a day when you're going to do something cool and exciting together. I don't know what inspires you, but I'm imagining a day in the city, trip to the museums, scheduling a day with friends who live over an hour away, etc. Work very rarely lights a fire under me in the mornings (only when there's a big day - deadline, special event, project going amazingly well, or other unusual thing) but when I've got a flight to catch, a vacation to go on, a friend to meet, etc, I'll wake up with the alarm and not want to hit snooze.

Don't fool yourself that you're going to suddenly shift from noon to 6am; start by getting up at 9, or maybe 8. Use fun things to inspire you the first couple of days - I'd actually start on a weekend, since you're doing this for overall lifestyle and health reasons, not for work/career/productivity.
posted by aimedwander at 5:11 AM on March 3, 2015

Instead of trying to move your bedtime backwards on the clock to an earlier time, you could try moving your bedtime forward on the clock so that it's a little later and a little later. This allows you to go to sleep when you're actually sleepy. The clock is round, so if you keep shifting bedtime later, from early morning to late morning, afternoon, early evening... it eventually ends up at whatever reasonable time you want bedtime to be forever and ever. See the third tip here.

A friend in college did this, after months of being thought irresponsible for staying up late and lazy for sleeping in, etc. He needed doctor's orders so that he could miss two weeks of class to sleep in the daytime and get the classwork done at night (as freelancers I guess this wouldn't be an issue for you). Afterward, his sleep was in a normal pattern that he was able to keep up with from then on.
posted by Bentobox Humperdinck at 7:14 AM on March 3, 2015

Mr. Elastic and I fell into this same pattern this past winter, and ugh, it really does make you feel gross. I'll relay our experience in case you are like me/us, people for whom the cold-turkey-waking-up-at-7-am, deprive-yourself-of-sleep advice would not likely work, despite our best hopes/intentions.

I'm happy to tell you we've come out safely on the other side (woke up at 7 am today!...though for a specific reason, and this is earlier than usual). We came out very slowly, over the course of weeks/months and didn't put much pressure on ourselves. We moved from sleeping until noonish to waking up by 10ish pretty quickly. We stayed at the 10 o'clock wake up for quite a while, feeling thankful for the extra 2 hours of normalness. From there we managed to slowly creep the wake up to 9:30 to 9:00 to 8:45ish to our new normal somewhere after 8 am. Maybe we'll keep getting earlier, but it's not something I strive for. 8 am is fine by me.

I'll also add that a few times since the reset, we've fallen into this weird zone where we'll stay up very late, despite being tired. Fortunately, our internal clocks wake us up at our new-usual early-ish time and we feel like crap the next day, which, so far, has been all we need to stop that nonsense. I've noticed that these crazy-eyed stay-up-all night moods are associated with stressful/shitty sort of moods and I think in the future they will serve as notices to us that we maybe need some self-care, reflection on what's happening for us internally.
posted by hannahelastic at 11:26 AM on March 3, 2015 [1 favorite]

Do you have a smartphone? The Sleep Cycle app has really helped me develop a better schedule, and is totally worth the dollar. It wakes you up when you're REMing rather than in deep sleep, so you feel fresher even if you've had a few hours less. Try waking up half an hour earlier each day. Bonus: the sleep graphs are fun to look at.
posted by redlines at 7:18 PM on March 3, 2015

I have to shift my sleep cycles around a lot for work. The quickest way to do it is to force yourself to stay awake for an extended period, like you might if you were traveling through time zones. So, you could wake up at noon, work from 2pm-2am, and then hang out until about 4pm the following day. Then you can sleep from like 4pm-6am and your cycle will be reset. Overall it's less painful than continually forcing yourself to wake up earlier. I actually don't mind doing this any more--I watch movies and generally indulge in being a couch potato. And you can drink as much coffee as you want because after being awake for 28 hours you will sleep regardless of how much caffeine you have consumed.
posted by ellebeejay at 8:27 PM on March 3, 2015