Staying up late

I'm writing this at 3am. For most, this would be the point at which they are fast asleep or mentally quite dead. Yet, for me, this is the point of the day at which I am most awake. I will say my recent adoption of watching NBA basketball has probably also contributed to this habit—he says as there is the Nuggets-Pelicans game on a second monitor.

But I've always felt this way.

At work, even after a full night of sleep, I'm sluggish until the afternoon, and then once I hit 2pm, my mind is on. This is so much the case that I've made it a habit to stay later to get an extra hour of deep work from 4-6pm.

Something about the late evening and the pure quiet in the world, the absolute silence of no passing cars, no emails or texts, just myself, pleases my mind.

The activities I do aren't really that different from during the daytime. I read, I write, I watch a TV show, maybe talk to some friends, or play a video game. Yet something is so very different about the middle of the night. It is just peaceful.

I'm known for talking to people into the wee hours. I have this habit of drawing people into a conversation until they notice it's 4am and they are falling asleep at my words. One of my friends called me a 'serial yapper'—to those who don't know, 'yapper' is slang for someone who can talk a lot. Another friend commented that it was so easy to talk to me and that they were often sucked into a 'Grant time hole' for the many hours we spoke.

I think, in part, this is because of my upbringing; my mother is a very good conversationalist, and it is something I have picked up from her and continued to hone as I have gotten older. To be engaged in a conversation, to ask questions, to tell great stories, to be able to engage a group of people, to communicate your thoughts and ideas clearly.

But also, I just really enjoy talking to people. This leads me into long, roaming conversations about everything and anything. The result of which is I can trap people in conversations for far longer than they ever expect. This arguably gets worse when I am drinking as I lose my inhibitions against continuing to talk far past midnight.

This is even further enhanced by my love of talking to people one-on-one—many of my friends can attest to times when they have been left alone with me, to suddenly being five hours later and we are still talking. This is because my mind has kept running; far beyond when most people want to sleep. Often when people are flagging at say 1am after a long night out, I am still ready and willing to go. For my brain, the night has barely begun.

In that sense, I am the archetype of a night owl.

For anyone not aware, 'night owl' is what is known as a chronotype. Which is basically a persons natural inclination to their most alert period of the day and relates to your circadian rhythm. There are technically 4 chronotypes but functionally they are split into night owl and early bird.

A night owl is someone who prefers to be active late at night, and, resultantly, wakes up late in the morning. It's a rather remarkable phenomenon based upon a variety of factors such as genetics, age, and environment.

The genetic component is a result of your circadian rhythm, which is an internal clock that controls the sleep/wake cycle. It typically runs in line with the day/night cycle. But for some, the cycle runs later. Some unfortunate people have what is known as Delayed Sleep Phase Disorder (DSPD)—which means their internal clock permanently runs behind.

The result of which is rather disastrous as they frequently have sleep deprivation and suffer from other sleep issues such as insomnia.

There is a whole bunch of theories behind variance in sleep patterns. My favourite to share with most is about how segmented sleep was actually quite common. Segmented sleep, also known as polyphasic sleep, is a practice of sleeping over multiple periods which are known as cores or naps. This is in contrast to monophasic sleep, i.e., 8 hours in one core.

The most common form of polyphasic sleep is biphasic—typically sleeping in two 4-hour cores with a couple of hours of wakefulness in the middle. I have in the past experimented with this, but the reality is it's quite hard to find something to do for those two hours as you are meant to avoid screens (something that is almost impossible to do in modern society; my Kindle is technically a screen!).

There was a six-month period where I slept like this, and I would use the 2 hours to go to the gym at around 2am. But the habit is rather antisocial, and you need to rigorously stick to your timings to make it work.

Biphasic sleep can also refer to one big core of 6 hours and then a nap in the afternoon—a common practice in the Mediterranean, but it is rather difficult to convince your boss to let you take a nap in the middle of the day.

Polyphasic sleep then further breaks down into triphasic (three cores totalling 5 hours of sleep), which I attempted but found impossible to adapt to. And then even wackier schedules that propose a mix of highly shortened core sleeps and naps or nap-only schedules like the Uberman—which is 6 naps of 20 minutes spread across the whole day. The claim is that Leonardo da Vinci slept like this; I have tried it, and I can confidently recommend that you never try it.

But the point of that little detour was to say that a monophasic 8-hour core sleep is theorised to not actually be our 'natural' sleep schedule. There is strong evidence that pre-17th century sleep would be split into two; you would have a first sleep phase two hours after dusk, be awake for an hour, and then a second sleep. The advent of street lights and socialising at night-time killed the practice.

Even more so, there is strong evidence that the different chronotypes (night owl vs early bird) are explained by evolution. Studies on the Hadza people of Tanzania (who are hunter-gatherers) suggest that on a nightly basis, in a group of 33 people, there was roughly 8 people awake at any point in 24 hours. This helps support a 'sentinel' theory of sleep developed in 1966 by Frederick Snyder that suggests we needed people to be awake at all times of the day for the safety of the group. Therefore we have evolved to have different chronotypes to ensure there was always someone on watch.

Anyways, I thankfully do not have DSPD; rather, I just love being awake late when I can—such as during the holidays or the weekend. And when required by work or life, I can function on a 'normal' sleep schedule. But I do really wish I could always sleep on this delayed schedule!