I consider myself a night owl and if I ever get to bed before midnight I consider this early. I still have to wake up between 0730 and 0800 (because life/obligations) and that is why I am like a zombie half the day.
But no matter how tired I might be through the day, at night something happens and I feel full of energy.
Between moving out of my parents' house and moving in with my wife, I had some years to do experiments on this, and there's one consistent result: whenever I'm not forced to wake up at specific time (say, by threat of getting fired, or just because I asked someone to keep calling me to make sure I got up), my sleeping pattern always settles around going to bed ~04:00 and waking up ~11:00. Whenever the external pressure stops, I automatically revert to that mode in two or three days.
It would all be fine, except this sleep mode is thoroughly incompatible with normal people and the society at large :/.
Luckily my partner is also a night owl and if she weren't forced to wake up early for work would go to sleep around 2-3am. So, when we're on holiday, we're in sync.
In my opinion, most people who say they are night owls are just light sensitive.
If we didn't have so much light in our environment at night we would be bored to sleep. On top of this, there is also a physiological effect from light. It suppresses melatonin and makes you feel newly awake to be in anything above the intensity of candlelight.
Of course there are social elements to staying up late and partying. But unless you are a party animal (and it's great if you are, the world needs more happy socialization) it's hard to believe that this causes you to stay up late every night.
I don't know. If anything, maybe not total light, but some kind of inside/outside delta?
I am light sensitive. I tolerate only two states: very dark and very bright. The average underlit indoors people keep during the day, when there's not that much sunlight coming in, but enough for them to keep the lights off - those shut me down very quickly.
I normally thought of it in terms of not enough light, but I just realized it's not exactly it. There are cases when, during the day, the total of sunlight + artificial light in the room is squarely in the underlit, sleep-inducing zone, but only few hours later, once it's dark outside, the same amount of artificial light is enough for my mind to consider the room bright enough.
Still, the "second tank" effect doesn't feel light-related. It's fast-acting - one moment I'm tired out of my mind, the next one I realize someone just plugged me up to a fresh battery - and the change occurs without any obvious prompt like changing locations or light levels.
As for social element, I'm not a party animal. But I am someone who suffers from something like 報復性熬夜 - "revenge bedtime procrastination". The late-night ours, after everyone around me is asleep and couldn't possibly bother me anymore, are the only time I feel I can finally unwind, relax, and recover. I've had this for a long time, but I'm fairly certain it's a downstream effect - that is, my difficulty getting up and extra energy kicking it after dark were something I've had for much, much longer.
That person is clearly not a night owl lol. Waking up at 7 doesn't make you feel any more tired at 11 when you're a night owl, because that's just when you're the most awake. All you end up doing is creating an ever growing sleep debt until you're on vacation and just sleep for its whole duration.
If I had FU money I'd fully embrace that.
What's the point of getting up early, rushing around, only to leave the house and get immediately stuck in traffic? What a giant waste of time.
