Allow me to back this up with an actual piece of research.
Here is an excerpt from the book "Why we sleep" (which BTW is written by a neuroscientist and psychology prof working at the Center for Human Sleep Science )
> An adult’s owlness or larkness, also known as their chronotype, is strongly determined by
genetics. If you are a night owl, it’s likely that one (or both) of your parents is a night owl.
Sadly, society treats night owls rather unfairly on two counts. First is the label of being lazy,
based on a night owl’s wont to wake up later in the day, due to the fact that they did not fall
asleep until the early-morning hours. Others (usually morning larks) will chastise night owls on
the erroneous assumption that such preferences are a choice, and if they were not so slovenly,
they could easily wake up early. However, night owls are not owls by choice. They are bound to
a delayed schedule by unavoidable DNA hardwiring. It is not their conscious fault, but rather
their genetic fate.
Second is the engrained, un-level playing field of society’s work scheduling, which is strongly biased toward early start times that punish owls and favor larks.
EDIT: This is just one argument against the generalization that humans are hard-wired to sleep early. The book is filled with countless research pieces and experiments; science seems to suggest otherwise. Highly recommended read!
I started seriously tracking my sleep a few months back, and two months ago I started to use "Sleep as Android", which has a neat feature that shows you a graph of the times you are asleep.
I'd likely be way more productive if I could just do that, and wouldn't have the sleep dep days that I do when I just power through it on zombie mode for a day or three until I can get back on the 24 hour schedule.
I find 5 mg of melatonin taken an hour before I got to bed combined with learning to use a sleep mask helped a lot. I still need to go to bed listening to something (that isn't too interesting to me) in order to derail my thoughts as well. Plus not eating late, and something in junk food (MSG/salt?) tends to keep me up all night almost in hot sweats. But with all that it has just become manageable so that I can hold down a job.
> The second unexpected—and more profound—result was that their reliably repeating cycles of
wake and sleep were not precisely twenty-four hours in length, but consistently and undeniably
longer than twenty-four hours. Richardson, in his twenties, developed a sleep-wake cycle of
between twenty-six and twenty-eight hours in length. That of Kleitman, in his forties, was a little
closer to, but still longer than, twenty-four hours. Therefore, when removed from the external
influence of daylight, the internally generated “day” of each man was not exactly twenty-four
hours, but a little more than that. Like an inaccurate wristwatch whose time runs long, with
each passing (real) day in the outside world, Kleitman and Richardson began to add time based
on their longer, internally generated chronometry.
I have similarly experienced non 24 on a roughly 26 hr cycle. I'm curious if you've had your vitamin D levels checked? Mine were abysmal, <13 ng/mL. I've been working on improving that with both a supplement and regular sun exposure. I'm not "fixed", but staying up feels much more like a conscious decision and less like it's out of my control.
I used to sleep like this for many years, though I shifted a little less than one hour per day, my full circle was around a month. What fixed it for me:
1) Getting out every day, even when I don't have to.
2) Using alarm for going to sleep, not for waking up.
3) I think this is the main one - I've got some social obligations, so I needed to be awake during the day.
I also think I'm non-24. Unfortunately its only considered a real disorder in the blind. Taking melatonin helps a bit -- I'm convinced my pineal gland is broken somehow.
Leftover customs from agricultural society, that have become subconscious moralistic norms. If you sleep the daylight hours away on the farm, you will get less productive work done. After ten generations of this, there will be unspoken and unconscious rules about what sort of sleep schedules are acceptable. These don't go away by themselves.
Farming isn't and never was, the only occupation in the world.
So, simple solution - Don't be a farmer. Be a night guard or something.
This is really like the kind of problem we have today. We only have some 5 most popular professions in the world, so people are rigged to cater to the customs of these 5 professions. Everyone else is just "lazy"!
Historically a much greater portion of the population was involved with agriculture (75% of the working population)[1] at a time when artificial light was both relatively poor quality and very expensive.
Given those constraints it makes sense that there was massive societal pressure to maximize the hours the sun did shine. Looking at the charts on that site also brought home how relatively recent the shift to non farm based employment really was (a couple generations). Even that probably fails to account for large behavioral changes: for example my great grandparents had a "garden" that was at least an order of magnitude larger than any suburban garden I've seen in the last decade. They weren't "farmers", just poor and the extra food they grew and canned was a huge help.
Here is an excerpt from the book "Why we sleep" (which BTW is written by a neuroscientist and psychology prof working at the Center for Human Sleep Science )
> An adult’s owlness or larkness, also known as their chronotype, is strongly determined by genetics. If you are a night owl, it’s likely that one (or both) of your parents is a night owl. Sadly, society treats night owls rather unfairly on two counts. First is the label of being lazy, based on a night owl’s wont to wake up later in the day, due to the fact that they did not fall asleep until the early-morning hours. Others (usually morning larks) will chastise night owls on the erroneous assumption that such preferences are a choice, and if they were not so slovenly, they could easily wake up early. However, night owls are not owls by choice. They are bound to a delayed schedule by unavoidable DNA hardwiring. It is not their conscious fault, but rather their genetic fate. Second is the engrained, un-level playing field of society’s work scheduling, which is strongly biased toward early start times that punish owls and favor larks.
EDIT: This is just one argument against the generalization that humans are hard-wired to sleep early. The book is filled with countless research pieces and experiments; science seems to suggest otherwise. Highly recommended read!