staying up late

I've always been an evening person more than a morning person. I often stay up until 1 or 2am, and in the absence of hard constraints it's rare that I'll get out of bed before 10am. I don't think that being a morning person is necessarily better than being an evening person, or that it's a goal worth adopting in its own right. But I do notice that the times in my life when I've felt like I was most on top of things, in a good rhythm, spending my time well, were also times when my routine was shifted earlier.

Evening time can be undistracted, wide open, free, in a way that's really compelling. There is at least the illusion of having as much time as I could possibly need, so it feels possible to get into a flow state if I'm working on something, or even just playing a game or browsing the internet. There is a real benefit to this, something special about this mental space of unlimited possibility.

Of course the availability of time is mostly an illusion, since any extra time is borrowed at a high interest rate from my future self. I often regret staying up late. The cost of disrupting my sleep schedule for that extra few hours of flow is a day or two of lost productivity and unpleasant grogginess. And my nighttime brain isn't always as smart as it thinks it is --- I may stay up for hours narrow-mindedly chasing a bug that would be immediately obvious to my better-rested self. Things that seemed so important to stay up working on are often revealed in the light of day to be irrelevant distractions from the bigger picture.

But in the moment, it feels like the 'me' that is staying up late is the real me, the unconstrained me, while the debt will be paid tomorrow by the me that has a job, has responsibilities. There's a bit of dissociation, a split personality, where the urge to stay up late is a reaction to my not feeling fully invested in the daytime me, the 'real-world' me, so making his life miserable is an acceptable cost in exchange for some immediate freedom.

This is probably not a healthy dynamic. It feels similar in a way to the dynamics that drive drug addiction and other compulsive behaviors. I'm willing to screw over my future self in exchange for some temporary satisfaction, because at some level I'm not identified with my future self. I don't trust him to have the same level of focus, of energy, of dedication, or maybe more fundamentally, the same goals. When I feel the urge to work on something at night, that inspiration feels precious --- when I experience it, there's a grab to it, like I need to follow it because it might not be there in the future.

Getting caught up in intellectual work is maybe the most justifiable reason to stay up late, even if it's not always or even usually a good idea. But often the thing that captures me late at night isn't an inspiring work project, it's just bored scrolling through Twitter. There's no high-minded story about how that is going to make my life better. It's pure rage against the dying of the light --- I'm just addicted to my current experience and can't trust that other, better experiences will come if I just let go. I don't want to stop, to go to sleep, even though I know that will ultimately be better for all the goals I care about.

The times I've found it easiest to go to bed early and wake up early have been when I've had traction on a larger project that I care about. In grad school, when work was going well, it was easy to plan out work in timescales of weeks or month, and optimizing on those timescales makes it clear that it's better to have a regular healthy sleep routine, that the progress I make in one night of staying up late isn't going to be worth the cost. It was easy to trust that my 'tomorrow' self would have plenty of interesting and important work to do.

Like most addiction, staying up late might be viewed more as a consequence (rather than a cause) of larger structural problems in my life and work. But even if the 'original sin' lies elsewhere, there is a damaging feedback loop, and interventions that break the feedback loop can be helpful.

One thing that's sometimes helped me is to set a reminder to always take melatonin at a given time, say 10pm. While it can be hard to tear myself away from whatever I'm doing, to prioritize sleep, it's pretty easy to chew a tasty grape-flavored pill while I continue to scroll, work, etc. Then, reliably, about an hour later I'll find myself getting sleepy, so that I naturally want to stop whatever I'm doing and go to bed.