Eli5
In: Biology
The actual clock times are arbitrary and don’t really matter. Your body has a circadian rhythm. Thats basically its standard cycle of operations. If you deviate from that cycle its doesn’t operate as well. If you maintain the change your body will eventually adjust its rhythm. But if you only occasionally stay up late and sleep late your rhythm will stay the same and the single night change will throw you off every time.
There are also some environmental factors. Unless you have really blocked all the windows in your room, it gets significantly brighter once the sun is up. People are also more active around you and the ambient noise level can rise. Car horns, loud cars, lawn mowers, etc.
As someone who is fairly certain they’re one of the extremely rare sighted people with non-24, I can assure you, there isn’t any instance of time frame that feels better or worse than any other assuming you’re sleeping when your body tells you to.
That sounds like a lot of sleep.
It’s never about “What does everyone else do”
It’s always about “what works for me. regardless of what others do or think.
Your biorhythm is determined by the sleep hormones and wakefulness hormones which are determined by the amount of blue light your skin and eyes absorb.
Basically during daytime your body makes you wakeful and when the sun is gone it will make you sleepy. If you sleep outside of your biorhythm during daytime you‘re fighting against your wakefulness hormones and sleep worse.
The Amish say that an hour of sleep before midnight is worth 2 hours of sleep after midnight.
Jokes aside, it’s probably because your circadian rhythm finds that time the most agreeable. Another persons may find the opposite to be true
It doesn’t for everyone. It depends on you. Your body is more suited to sleeping at certain times. For you, sleeping at 3-11am will feel bad cos your body wants to sleep earlier. You’re more of a ‘lark’. For someone else (me) they may like sleeping at 3-11am and feel better than waking up at 7am. They’re owls.
It’s biological. Some people are born as morning people and some as night people. And it’s a sliding scale.
This is useful evolutionarily as it means someone is always able to watch over the tribe. If everyone was the same and had to sleep 11-7 then that’s 8 hours no one is watching the tribe.
There’s a whole lot more that could be said but the circadian rhythm and so on isn’t really eli5. What I could add is that ‘Why we sleep’ by Matthew walker is a good book about this for further info.
This is subjective, rather than some universal biological reality.
I’d prefer the latter option.
It may be possible to work out and explain why you personally feel better with the former, but there won’t be some universal reason for it because it isn’t universally true.
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