I've noticed the night effect for a long time too, and while the lack of interruptions might have something to do with it, I don't think it nearly explains my 3x boost in productivity.
I think there's something biological going on as well. Around 1 or 2 am, I sometimes get a bang of energy and creativity that I never get during the day. It's the "second wind," the injection (possibly) of cortisol and other stress hormones that cause my body to go into stress-protection mode. I become hypervigilant, which causes fewer bugs. I think more quickly, writing code faster and coming up with amazing design ideas instantly.
If you think about this from an evolutionary perspective, it makes perfect sense-- in the animal world, when you become stressed (i.e., a tiger comes up behind you, or you get exhausted looking for food) the outcome is binary: either you die or you live. So the body does extraordinary things to keep you alive, like make you temporarily smarter and more focused.
Over hundreds of thousands of years, perhaps, the body has developed in such a way that the lack of sleep for some number of hours (for me, almost exactly sixteen or seventeen hours) triggers the release of stress hormones which sacrifice the body's current state for mental and physical agility.
When will someone figure out how to hack my brain to make it like that all the time, without the nasty side effects (sleep deprivation) the next day?
Sleep is cyclic; it comes in phases of varying depth. (http://www.helpguide.org/life/sleeping.htm) I find the difference between seven and a half hours of sleep and six hours isn't bad, but the difference between six hours of sleep and four hours of sleep is much more difficult to deal with. Looking at the diagram on the linked page, it's obvious why: sleep stages three and four are important and if you sleep less than six hours they get screwed up. More REM sleep gets messed up too, which is also important.
Day-to-day energy levels are cyclic too. Every day I want to take a nap at 3:00 in the afternoon. I'm also most energized from around 10:00 to 11:00 in the morning. It's a pattern.
A boost of energy at a certain time at night happens likely for the same reason it does during the day: levels of consciousness are cyclic.
As far as nighttime being more productive: there are fewer interruptions which means you can concentrate. It's easier when your cell phone/RSS/Twitter/blog/text/email isn't blowing up.
Interesting. So maybe people who call themselves "night owls" are maybe just hacking their body's cycle to their temporary advantage... Most of my family consider themselves night owls, but maybe we've just been habituated to staying up late and abusing this.
Still, I look forward to the alone time when I code at night too. I even structure my day around it a lot of the time.
Comments
I've noticed the night effect for a long time too, and while the lack of interruptions might have something to do with it, I don't think it nearly explains my 3x boost in productivity.
I think there's something biological going on as well. Around 1 or 2 am, I sometimes get a bang of energy and creativity that I never get during the day. It's the "second wind," the injection (possibly) of cortisol and other stress hormones that cause my body to go into stress-protection mode. I become hypervigilant, which causes fewer bugs. I think more quickly, writing code faster and coming up with amazing design ideas instantly.
If you think about this from an evolutionary perspective, it makes perfect sense-- in the animal world, when you become stressed (i.e., a tiger comes up behind you, or you get exhausted looking for food) the outcome is binary: either you die or you live. So the body does extraordinary things to keep you alive, like make you temporarily smarter and more focused.
Over hundreds of thousands of years, perhaps, the body has developed in such a way that the lack of sleep for some number of hours (for me, almost exactly sixteen or seventeen hours) triggers the release of stress hormones which sacrifice the body's current state for mental and physical agility.
When will someone figure out how to hack my brain to make it like that all the time, without the nasty side effects (sleep deprivation) the next day?
More info:
http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/502825
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cortisol
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norepinephrine
I should do more research on this.
Sleep is cyclic; it comes in phases of varying depth. (http://www.helpguide.org/life/sleeping.htm) I find the difference between seven and a half hours of sleep and six hours isn't bad, but the difference between six hours of sleep and four hours of sleep is much more difficult to deal with. Looking at the diagram on the linked page, it's obvious why: sleep stages three and four are important and if you sleep less than six hours they get screwed up. More REM sleep gets messed up too, which is also important.
Day-to-day energy levels are cyclic too. Every day I want to take a nap at 3:00 in the afternoon. I'm also most energized from around 10:00 to 11:00 in the morning. It's a pattern.
A boost of energy at a certain time at night happens likely for the same reason it does during the day: levels of consciousness are cyclic.
As far as nighttime being more productive: there are fewer interruptions which means you can concentrate. It's easier when your cell phone/RSS/Twitter/blog/text/email isn't blowing up.
Interesting. So maybe people who call themselves "night owls" are maybe just hacking their body's cycle to their temporary advantage... Most of my family consider themselves night owls, but maybe we've just been habituated to staying up late and abusing this.
Still, I look forward to the alone time when I code at night too. I even structure my day around it a lot of the time.