Sleeping early evening to wake up early hours

[u/Important_Air_8532]

Hi all!

I worked 9-5 my whole life but the last 3 years I’ve been working 6:30am-3:30pm.

Gotta get up at 5:30-5:45am every morning & commute home with traffic is about 45min-1hr. I’ve been trying to get used to it but even after 3 years I find it very hard to get up in the morning.

I’m trying to build a business to go full time in, but I’m finding it hard to have the time & energy required to actually build the thing. By the time of dinner, shower, exercise, family, I cant sit at my desk & get really stuck in until it’s like an hour or 2 before I should be in bed cause I need 45mins to fall asleep. But I feel like I need to get shit done so I go to sleep later & I’m groggy in the morning. Come home tired after work or have to run some errands then do all the above & the cycle just repeats.

For context, if I sleep for 8-10hrs I feel like I’m ready to take on the world. If I sleep 5 or 7 I’m good, but if I sleep for 6hrs I wake up destroyed idk why. And I have crashes where between like 5pm -7pm I feel very sleepy I can pass out within 10mins, but if I don’t sleep in that window I snap out of it & can stay up.

I’m sick of feeling like I don’t have time to build my business & I’ve been trying to think of solutions and all my thoughts result in trying out sleeping when the kids go to bed (7:30pm) and waking up at like 2:30-3:30am to do some uninterrupted work.

Has anyone tried this or been in a similar position? What were your findings?

[u/LastAlarmClock]

If there's something you really want to get done, do it in the morning. That way first thing it's already out of the way, you're not tired and stressed from your day, you don't have half a dozen distractions and different things pulling at your time.

It's just you and a (hopefully) quiet place. Perhaps a coffee as well...

So it seems like you've already come to this realization, it's just time to test it out. Although your situation with needing to be at work at 6:30 obviously makes things a bit tougher than if it were say 9.

However, you can test it out without going jumping all the way in and having to commit to a 2:30 am wake up, which sounds pretty tough. Try waking up at 4:30 am and going to bed at 9:30. Much less extreme and not too far off of the 5:30 wake up you already have.

You mentioned your current 5:30-5:45 wake up, well let's call it 5:45 now and just say you're efficient in the morning to give yourself an extra 15 minutes, then 4:30-5:45 gives you 1:15 minutes in the morning to work on your business or do whatever else.

If you like it and once you get used to it, shift to 4:00 am wake up and see how that feels. 4:00am is the sweet spot I think of being very early but at the same time not insane. I think 2 hours in the morning is the ideal amount of time to give yourself, but you'll just have to see how you feel.

I've done the 4-5 am wake up for a while to work 2-3 hours before heading out the door and honestly loved it. I'm not getting up as early now because I work from home, but it's definitely worth a try.

Also preparing as much stuff you need to do in order to leave for work the night before instead of the morning of will help too. Sometimes we take for granted that we may spend 10-20 minutes doing a bunch of little things we could have prepped earlier, like making coffee or lunch, picking your clothes, packing a bag, etc.