I am a night owl, well I guess this isn’t a special case as most of the people I know who’s either a software engineer or in tech industry in general are night owls. I guess there’s something special at night that made me more productive during this time. Might be there’s no slack pings at night? no meeting scheduled? Who knows?
But being more active at night is already taking a toll on my body. Early 2021, I have been diagnosed with severe obstructive sleep apnea, it’s where my body is obstructed receiving oxygen during sleep, making me feel restless even though I had plenty of sleep, and with this, more sleeping problems occured.
Not just health reasons, having no fixed schedule of sleep messed up my entire system. I’ve been frequently travelling back and forth from my home province to Manila and I’ve been doing that with no sleep. Working with morning meetings is painful, and I was lethargic the entire day.
I knew I needed to change my lifestyle for the better, it might sound unfair but night owls need to adjust to early risers anyway.
All of these are not scientifically backed and everything I write here is based on personal experience, as the saying goes, mileage may vary.
1. I resigned at work
You might say that no I can’t do this first step, but yes this might be a special case for me. I was the former head of technology operations at Rappler. I assumed the work early on. I remember my early days at the news org where we were migrating from one platform to another. The meetings were messed up as we were aligning atleast four time zones just to meet.
It was the accumulation of stress over five years + the uncertainties of the pandemic, everything piled up. My circadian rhythm are all messed up. Sometimes I sleep the whole day, sometimes I don’t sleep, but what is constant is I sleep in random hours.
2. I tried fasting
Most of us gained weight during Pandemic okay? And I am not different. I gained too much weight that I feel like it’s one of the reasons why I have sleep apnea. Earlier this January 2023, I told myself that I need to lighten up and shed those fats.
I tried to research something about if fasting helps you become a morning person, but the closest research I can find is that it helps you sleep better, and it did.
Maybe because I’m already tired past 9pm? Or maybe my mind forces me to sleep so I won’t think about food? I don’t know, but one thing I know, I am now sleeping before 10pm.
3. I stopped playing that dumb video game too much
It’s been a year since I started playing Valorant, a tactical shooter game made by Riot, who’s the same publisher that made League of legends, another dumb video game that ate my college days. I’ve been tracking my game performance analytics every now and then to know if I’m improving, or what areas of the game I need to improve, but man, during the end of the fifth episode, I saw my game time and it’s around 1000 hours, (It’s funny how you can spend time on something and still be bad at it).
I knew I had to reduce my time playing this dumb video game (I don’t need to stop, I still enjoy the game and the competitive community around it). Now I have a personal rule that I should only play until 12am maximum, but as mentioned earlier, I don’t have a single energy left in me past 10pm.
4. I managed my doom scrolling
I was telling my friend last year that sometimes I don’t even know the app I am scrolling into. Instagram reels, youtube shorts, tiktok, they almost offer the same content and it’s easy to get lost in these apps. You thought you were just consuming 3 minute videos, but it always piles up to hours.
But you know it’s hard to stop, but atleast I tried to manage it and be mindful of my screen time.
Final Words
These might not be anything special or a straightforward hack, but you know sometimes it’s the little things that cause massive impact in our lifestyle, we always need to be mindful of what’s harming us and be concious of the things we want to change with ourselves.