why is it so much easier to stay up late than it is to wake up early?
In: Biology
While we define our day to be 24 hours (to sync with Sun), our body cycles are not perfectly synchronized with those 24 hours. Some have slightly longer cycles (for example: 25 hours) and others have slightly shorter cycles (for example: 23 hours). This leads to a person having an easier time staying awake longer or waking up earlier in the day.
Some are morning person, sone are night person. You may be a night person. I know lots of people who cannot stay up late but can wake up bery early.
The end of the day for most of us is our only real free time. At 10PM, I’m at home. I’m not running errands, I’m not worrying about work/school, etc. It’s easy to stay up late because you’re prolonging that sense of freedom and lack of obligation. As for, why it’s not as easy to wake up early. Well, because you stayed up late.
Depends of your age a lot too. I’m much more at ease getting up early than staying up late, really.
There seems to be some biological explanation as to why some people are night owls – our ancestors had to make shifts during the night for safety, for example. But sometimes it’s just habitual.
I’ve changed sleep schedule a few times in my life and I’m as much of a morning person as a night person, provided that I stick with the schedule for long enough (the first few days are the hardest). By moving my late night productive hours to the morning I’ve lost nothing and vice versa. I suspect that many are like me but just never got the opportunity to change their schedule to see how well they adapt.
Well, our body has an internal clock, and this clock is calibrated partially based on the light we visualize in our day to say life. As it turns out, blue light, such as that is seen from TVs, computers, and phones, is emitted. This blue light can delay the release of your body’s sleep harmone, melatonin. There are other factors, but this is a common suspect.
For many people, especially in this day and age, it is almost unavoidable to get around blue light due to our connection with lights. Once your body gets physically exhausted, and you finally got sleep, it kinda puts a marker on that part of the 24 hour cycle, prompting you to wake 7-10 hours later from that point of rest.
Now, if you normally sleep at 10pm, but you decided to binge video games or something, and you went to bed at 12am, your sleep cycle would be kinda wonky, and you may end up waking up and sleeping multiple times through the next day as your body tries to figure out how to re-pace it’s clock.
Overall, it’s easier to delay your timer than it is to speed it up.
You forgot to add “when you are young” to the end of that question? I’m nearing 70 and the old peepers get damn heavy by 10 pm but pop open before 5 am.
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On object in motion needs less energy to keep going than an object that’s at rest and needs to build it first up. I’m not too familiar with Newton’s laws of motions but if you look into that it works the same with people
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