I very rarely sleep past 5:30 but I feel the opposite way, particularly during the winter. There is something about getting up a couple of hours before sunrise that is very conducive to getting through a morning routine with the entire world running as a background process. I find myself standing in the kitchen with a half finished cup of coffee, listening to the BBC and been totally unable to recall anything that I had done for the previous 30 minutes.
I'm a 5:30 riser and have been for most of my life. I'm energetic in the morning, but I often find that I can't even remember if I locked the door on the way out because I was on auto-pilot. (I've actually only ever forgotten to lock it once.) I couldn't tell you anything I did in the morning unless it was out of the ordinary, like playing a video game before work.
But once the auto-pilot stuff is done, I'm wide awake and fully productive.
Exactly, good to hear I'm not the only one. Fortunately nobody locks doors where we live or I'd been retracing my steps every day.
Do you ever crash around 4PM? I find that there are many days where I absolutely need a strong cup of coffee right around then, just to get me through to about 6PM when I perk back up again.
I suffer from this. I can rise around 6am, but around 2 or 3pm I crash hard. Staying the full day at work becomes a serious chore.
I suspect this is because I haven't settled into a proper routine of doing this for more than a week straight.
Unfortunately, when I've attempted this, I get incredibly unproductive in the afternoons, then I just feel like crashing when I get home, so in general my quality of life goes significantly down.
Actually, I'm quite interested in reading this as I write it, because I've never explicitly anlayzed it before.
I find I'm typically happiest and most productive when I go to sleep and wake up as I wish. Normally for me this is sleep around 23h or 24h and waking up around 9h-ish. Of course, having to work an 8-hour day in the middle of my 14-15 waking hours only leaves me with 6-7 hours for commuting, cooking, eating, working on side projects, working out and spending time with my fiancee. Unfortunately, I often while away the hours working on side projects to the neglect of the rest of the things I care about. :\ When I do this, I often stay up well past midnight, so I get less sleep. My schedule winds up being something like: sleep from 2am to 7:30am, prep + commute + work + commute until about 6pm, eat and veg with fiancee until about 8pm, then work on side projects until 2am.
That stuff is particularly bad for me, so I'm off it totally. I definitely feel more energetic over the course of the day than I did drinking as much caffeine as I could. Or anything in-between.
