night – Cubicgarden.com…

Why is healthy only associated with morning people?

Someone doing yoga in the open air — Took me a long time to find a good picture, and when I saw it I thought about someone doing yoga in the evening. Although it could be someone doing yoga in the early morning – dammit!

So this bugs me… and I can’t be the only one?

When ever there is advice on being healthy, there is the typical advice of going to bed early and wake up early. Indicating the only way to be healthy is to be a morning person? (if you don’t subscribe to the notion of morning larks and night owls then this might sound like bull to you from the start)

I’m not the picture of health but I think its something which needs a rethink?

It’s clear some people are morning people, some are night people. Heck some are evening & afternoon people. Equating this with health feels like lazy nonsense.

I understand in the age before electricity, indoor lighting and 24hour access to a lot of things (including gyms, travel, etc), it made sense that maybe healthy people fitted the profile of someone who went to bed during darkness and got the most sunshine during the day. However maybe things are different now? Especially now Owls can work the hours which fit their natural circadian rhythm. Surely the effect of trying to fit into a world made for Larks has a negative effect and so the amount of people who are healthy Owls will increase over future generations? Just a thought?

Looking into the universe — Look what you are missing out on…larks!

Maybe if I read the scientific papers, I might be convinced one way or another. Although this or this doesn’t help my case. Although… there is this and this ha!

But I’m more thinking about the perception of larks as the image of health, pictures of people doing yoga during the sunrise, etc. My nonscientific advice follows this one, should an owl try to turn into a lark?.

Whether you’re a lark or an owl, you still likely need seven to eight hours of sleep.
• If you don’t get enough sleep, what time you go to bed or rise won’t matter-you’ll still experience the side-effects, from depression to a lack of concentration to problems with coordination.
• If you break your natural sleep cycle by forcing yourself to get up early, you’ll be tired, less attentive, and not nearly as productive throughout the day.

Something else to keep in mind: Not all “high-powered” people are early risers. Though we do hear stories about tycoons who don’t need more than four hours of sleep at night, these are the exception-not the rule.

Last year, scientists discovered that our skin cells may hold the clues to whether or not we are larks or owls. That’s right: you’re internal clock may be pre-programmed to be an early riser or late-nighter. So don’t mess with Mother Nature. Go to bed when you are tired, and get up when you are well-rested. Period.

This is consistent with everything I have read to date, also begging the question I answered at the start?

Of course I wrote this at night and published it at night.

Long live the night owls!

Working with my night owl self

Over the last 9 months I changed by work hours from 1000-1800 to 1100-1900. I use to get up out of bed at 0800, giving myself 2 hours to wake up, shower, have breakfast and get to work on the bike. Generally I would be a sleep about 0100 meaning 6.5-7 hours of sleep.

If you feel like you heard this stuff before, you most likely have, here and here and even here.

Now with the change in work time, I’m sleeping by 0200 and awake just after 1000. Meaning 8 hours of sleep.

I can’t tell you how much better I feel!

Some have asked what if I slept 8 hours but shifted your hours towards the morning?

They misunderstand what it means to be a night owl vs a morning lark. As explained in this business insider. There are big differences.

Staying awake well into the night and having to wake up early for work can be problematic for people who identify as night owls. As the AsapSCIENCE team points out, most societal activities occur between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m., putting night owls at risk of sleep deprivation.

Its not something you can not just simply switch. Even more importantly is the direct effect of the time.

At the very beginning of a workday, the difference between morning and night people can be obvious; morning people seem to be getting everything done, while night owls are slow to get going. But that difference may not last.

One hour after waking, early birds and night owls perform equally well in reaction time tests, AsapSCIENCE reports. Ten hours after waking, however, night owls perform significantly better than morning people in similar tests.

I mentioned to colleagues I was recording and editing podcasts at midnight without too much of a problem. Heck I’m writing this blog at midnight right now.I scheduling blogs, microblogs, emails and texts (before I switched back to Google Messages) has been a great way to going unnoticed. Not that I really need to but people always worry when there is a email sent at 0100.

Simple as this, 8 hours of sleep starting at 0130, for me is better quality sleep than going to bed earlier at 000 and waking up earlier at 0800. I have 5 years of sleep data which also points in the same direction.

I’m a night owl and theres little at this stage which is going to change. The pandemic has been good to me on this front.

My first LED diabolo in darkness test

Since the Firejam 2 weeks ago, I’ve been getting more into the diabolo with lights or even fire thing. Today I hit the garden to try out the LED kit on my old diabolo. The results are not bad, but it’s not quite what I was after. I’d like to see more blur with the diabolo moves really but I guess I can do this in post if I like.

Added some music and uploaded to youtube. Of course Youtube doesn’t like the music and theres a flickr version too incase youtube removes it from different regions.

I shot the whole thing on my Nikon D3200 using the standard kit lens, manual settings and gorillapod. Next time I’ll mess with the settings and try it during dusk, because then at least you can see what I’m up to and I can see what the heck I’m actually doing!

Fun times ahead!

Especially as I’m starting to crack the Vertex!

Werewolf night yesterday

Sheila vs Sheila, but are they both werewolves really?

So yesterday I setup the first Werewolf only night in London. It started badly, with me running late. I should have factored in 40mins from White City to Moorgate not 20mins. Plus work demands meant I was running late full stop. Turned up and the bar had set a-side a area, but it was right next to the main bar and it simply wouldn't have worked. However what had happened was a mixup on the bar's part. They had booked the wrong area. So after 15mins of drinks and talking, we moved to the private suite which held about 25 people. There was a large table which made things tricky, so our circle looked more like a squashed triangle. Anyway once a few of us had explained the rules and run through a few tatics, we were off into the 1st game.

I don't remember all the games (think we ended up playing up to 6?)but I certainly remember the one when I was a werewolf with Tiff and Frances. Sheila (australian sheila) pointed the finger at me early on because I had pointed the camera at the victim of the first night attack. I think it was a guess but she was right, so I came out as the seer. Then someone else did and after a while Sheila (aus) did too. But it started to work, I got off and started to pretend to check people every round. People started to believe after a while. And my thoughts about killing myself off to keep the werewolves winning, didn't need to happen. We won and I believe the other werewolves never got fingered once. It was certainly an adrenalin rush and couldn't help but stand up and put my arms up in the air at the end. Harry was gutted because he never believed me as the seer then slowly started to believe and so got taken in by my lies. Oh well thats the way it goes… Deception is such a great thing.

So without going into more detail about the games played, we had roughtly at one point 17 or 18 people enough for 3 werewolves, a seer and a healer. The smallest game was 14 people with 2 werewolves and a seer. Everyone enjoyed the night and would happily go to another one. So I'm going to speak to the venue about removing the table next time and maybe getting a large food order at the start of the game instead. Maybe it might also be worth spending money on getting all our drinks delivered to the room, so the breaks between won't be so long? As usual there's my pictures here and public pictures here.

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Another late night rant…

Ben pretty much sums up what I've been thinking and ranted about many times.

I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m a “night person”. Having been on vacation for two weeks now, I’ve been able to set my own sleeping rhythm (well, more on that in a moment). I settled into a pattern of going to bed around 4am and getting up around mid-day, although some nights I haven’t turned into until 7am.

Yes, getting up at mid-day sounds pretty lazy. But I get so much work done between about 10pm and 4am that it more than makes up for it. It’s been like my old hacker-days when I was at school — I would come home from school and just learn programming, build websites, that kind of thing. I learnt so much by working late at night.

My mind just focuses to another level and I loose track of time as I churn out code, designs, specs, blog posts and goodness knows what else.

When I’m at work, I often will stay at the office until 7pm. Around 4pm, after the meetings and telephone calls have died down I get into that buzz, which continues until home-time.

I'm actually quite lucky because in the past I've worked for a few Cinemas which requires working till 3am on Fridays and Saturdays. Then working for Tesco latenight till 6am on Thursdays and Fridays got me into the habit of changing my sleep patterns on a pence. So although I prefer to work through the night and am actually more productive at night. I can change to going back to 10-6pm with no problems. I think it can all be learned too. Sarah can never work out how i'm able to stay up really late through-out the weekend and then go to work the next day for 5 days. I'm also able to fall a sleep within 5mins of putting my head down – a skill which can be learned too.

But that aside, what happened to the 24 hour culture? Why do tech conferences start at 9am? and why on earth does the London tube shut down at 12:30am on a weekend? I remember one of the neat things about working over night was the odd but interesting things Channel4 use to put on. I could never work with headphones on all the time at night so having the radio or tv on in the background at low volume was ideal. Nowadays I can just put on some podcasts. Geez I would have been so much smarter if timeshifted media was around when I was stacking the shelfs in Tesco.

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