for me at least, 8 hours any other time of the day is less bad than the constant awful grind of 9-5
you’re always commuting right when everyone else is commuting, you have to be up early every morning (and it always FEELS early – if you’re naturally waking up at noon but have work at 1 that doesn’t feel as much like a boot stamping on your face forever), many things are only open during those hours so there’s always a time crunch if you have errands
and it just feels worse. you feel like a depressed office worker in a movie. by 5pm the day’s already over, the sun is setting in winter. and the most insufferable of all, imo: once it’s evening, you start feeling dread for tomorrow. so it’s like you’re never truly off work because you know you have to go to bed early to be up early to go right back.
somehow these standard hours are the most offensive possible to personal autonomy and mood.
i’m extremely lucky to have a WFH at the moment where i can make my own hours; when i work approx 9-5 like that, i just feel so trapped. i don’t want to go to the store before work because i just woke up and can’t be bothered, i can’t go after because traffic is a nightmare and i’m exhausted by then. it just sucks. there’s no mystery or magic to it. working food service until 2am felt cool, it felt cool getting paid to stay up late and make pizza and have a ‘good reason’ to have a weird sleep schedule and be out super late. 9-5 makes me feel like jim from the office except less charismatic
Logically speaking regardless what hours are picked as the “popular” hours, they will feel like shit due to association.
Because almost everything operates on a 9-5 schedule, it makes a 9-5 schedule feel gross because you associate it with working hours.
It’s a feedback loop.
The main things I’ve found that make it 2ay worse though:
Caffeine. By a huge margin, becoming dependant on caffeine fucks up your schedule and makes you feel like you are perpetually in a funk. In the morning you are exhausted, during the day all you want us a nap, and at night it is hard to sleep. Repeat.
Not having a proper breakfast. It’s a meme but it’s fucking true. It’s easy to skip or half ass breakfast, but it leaves you feeling like shit all day long.
Phones in bed. It’s incredibly hard to resist. If I leave my phone on my office desk and go to bed unplugged, I sleep so much more. It’s just way too tempting to sit up and plug into those endless dopamine hits and not fall asleep til 1 in the morning.
Hydrating before bed. Waking up feeling like my mouth is full of sand and my body dried our isn’t Nirmal or healthy. When I started bringing a water bottle to bed to sip on, my sleep improved a tonne.
Early morning pass break. It’s super tempting to ignore your bladder abd stay in the warm cozy confines of your bed, I get it. But I found if I listened to my body and forced myself out of bed to go take that super early morning / late night piss, wgen I crawled back into bed I would sleep way harder and wake up feeling much less achey.
Breakfast is overrated I haven’t eaten breakfast for years and I never felt like shit because I skipped breakfast. Just eat healthy and get enough calories, doesn’t matter when you do it. It’s not like you have burned all your dinner calories when you wake up.
Breakfast is only necessary if you are young and growing or do heavy manual labor. But even for labor you can carb load during dinner the day before.
I think all about what one is used to. I used to eat large breafast and would feel horrible by lunch if I skipped it. But after skipping the breakfast most days for a couple months I’m barely hungry before lunch and haven’t noticed any difference in energy levels.
Most jobs don’t need these strict schedules, though. I get it in hospitals, factories, etc., but everyone else could easily switch to looser time slots.
For example, I’m technically on what’s called Gleitzeit (sliding time?), that means, there’s a core 6h window from 9 to 3, where I’m supposed to work, but where I put the other 2h is up to me. In terms of commuting, that model would help smoothing the traffic curve.
It sounds like you could be mouth breathing at night as well. Sleeping on your side helps with that.
Or getting a sleep study done.