And I was wondering - just how early can humans get out of bed in the morning without getting up "too early"?
Nowadays, it isn't so much about "when to wake up" as it is about "how much quality sleep should you get". There are ways to influence your circadian clock, and even combat effects like the jet lag, and while solar light can have a pretty important effect on the regulation of our sleep, you can still lead a healthy sleep life even with those kinds of shifts (I also work in both morning/afternoon/night shifts).
For example, is it unhealthy to go to sleep at 7 PM and start your day at 3 AM?
For some reason I have the feeling that 4 AM is the limit, but I am not sure about that.
Why would 4am be the limit? The only reason as to why we should worry about it is because of exposure to light, which considering due the technology era which we live in, makes matters a bit more complicated (and has negative and positive consequences). The reason for going to bed and waking up at "normal" times is simply because our clocks are "designed" that way: our ancestors evolved as daily creatures that slept when there was a lack of light, which favored our lack of nocturnal traits. If we were all bats, we probably would think that sleep throughout the day to be the most natural.
That said, factors like the seasons can influence your circadian clock, which is why you should push your sleep pattern around 15 minutes forward or backwards depending on the start of exposure to natural light. I can't link it at the moment, but there are studies that show the differences between natural light and artificial light as signals that tell your body that is time to wake up (in short, when you want to wake up, let the sun light fill the room, artificial lightning is not effective at all). If you search around, there's also reports of specific hours in which you "should" be waking up (just like melatonin production peaks at specific hours), but even then, sleep quality and quantity tend to be more important if waking up early would imply sleeping only a couple of hours the majority of the week.
The reason I am wondering this is because even though I am a major night-owl, I do also really like to be up very early in the mornings when I actually get to bed reasonably early, and I was wondering how early it is reasonable to get up.
Find a sleep pattern your comfortable with, and stick to it: that's the true recipe for healthy sleep: consistency
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