I woke up at 7pm today. Tomorrow I'll probably get up at 9pm. Around this time next week, I'll be waking up at 7am.
This is normal for me. I have a rare-ish circadian rhythm disorder known as #Non24. My sleep cycle doesn't track with the sun. It's not at all rare amongst people who are blind, but it's rare amongst sighted people.
I also suspect it's actually more common than believed & there are people out there reputed to be lazy, immature, or erratic when they just can't sleep normally.
@sysop408 I was just chatting with @OldUncleMike about this! He also has a Non24 circadian rhythm.
I have a delayed sleep syndrome that shifts my circadian cycle back so I normally go to sleep at 2-3am and wake up 9-10am.
But it’s mostly a 24-25 hour cycle that I can keep in check. I just have a hard time syncing with most folks during regular biz hours. I think non24 and delayed/skewed circadian cycles are definitely more common, but as you said, people just get called lazy or whatever…
@Oldandcranky YES. A lot of folks think they have insomnia, when it just a different circadian rhythm.
When I discovered the term "delayed sleep phase syndrome" everything clicked. I had been going through life as if I was permanently jet-lagged.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed_sleep_phase_disorder
Shifting to a freelance work-at-home lifestyle and allowing myself to sleep my body's natural rhythm was life changing. I was no longer mentally and physically exhausted all the time.
@eatthelove @Oldandcranky @sysop408 @OldUncleMike
DSPS/N24 person here. If anything disrupts my natural sleep pattern (3am to 11am/noon), especially trying to get up early to sync w/ diurnal folks' expectations, it sends my sleep cycle wildly out of control. My sleep cycle tends to creep forward a little on its own, and if I just let myself "free run" it can have me in completely N24 mode. But my body & mind seem happiest and healthiest when I'm sleeping in that 3am to 11am/noon sweet spot.
@eatthelove @Oldandcranky @sysop408 @OldUncleMike
I am also of the opinion that such non-diurnal sleep patterns are more common than most people think. I think having members of one's society with diverse sleep patterns is an evolutionary advantage to keep predators at bay and care for more vulnerable members (young, old, ill). The moralizing about sleep patterns seems like pure idiocy to me, and it sure causes misery for most of the DSPS/N24 people I've encountered.
100% agree. An friend once coined the term “free range sleep” allowing your body to sleep when it’s tired and not because of societal expectations. I have fully embraced it.
All that said, I understand my privilege that I can do that. I have a job that (mostly) let’s me make my own hours, as well as a husband that fully understand and supports my non-traditional sleep patterns. Not everyone had that luxury.
@Oldandcranky oh! Yikes! That’s sounds exhausting.
And I’m sure the advice you ALWAYS got was “just go to bed early!”
As if that was helpful at all. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
@eatthelove @madameximon @Oldandcranky @OldUncleMike @sysop408
Right.
I also have a husband who accepts my sleep patterns. Doesn't understand them, but accepts them.
I'm very lucky in that regard.
I had a friend who called her husband lazy and DIVORCED HIM, for Christ's sake, because of his sleep patterns. I tried to explain why he was not lazy, but she wouldn't believe me. I felt so sad for him.
@madameximon how did you figure out that you bounce between DSPS & #Non24 & how'd you figure out your ideal sleep times?
Have any tricks that help you figure out how to get back on track once you've started to free run?
I wear a Fitbit to track my sleep & HR. It helps with minor deviations, but once I go off course it's sometimes months of trying to find it again. Seeing my resting HR creep up & up is a giveaway that I'm off track. Fitbit body temp tracking hasn't been as helpful.
@sysop408 Since I don't want cancer to come back, I am protective about my sleep, but of course the diurnal world does not respect that. So, I have an assortment of herbal sleep aids that I cycle through to avoid dependence on any one.
Getting back on track during a free run is tough. Finding physical activities to wear myself out with is the only thing that consistently helps, though monitoring caffeine & sugar intake to maximize the crash can sometime be useful too.
@poppacalypse there’s also delayed sleep phase syndrome, which is known to be much more common and similar to #Non24, so also look into that.
When I was in college I was known as they guy who could fall asleep anywhere. My friends were amazed when I fell asleep at a rock concert.
I was also awake at any given time too. I spent my college years as a paradox of this guy who everyone saw asleep at unusual times, but also was someone who slept far less than anyone else because I just couldn’t sleep when I tried to.
I survived by sleeping 30-90 minutes here and there… cafes, library, benches, the subway train… everywhere. I slept so much on the train I developed a sixth sense for when to wake up and get off the train. I rarely missed my stop.
These days I have more control over my schedule so I get more sleep, but it’s still difficult to manage. If I ever had to work a normal job again it might be a problem.
@sysop408 so after this discussion, i stopped forcing myself to sleep and wake at certain times. just sort of let things happen naturally and here's what i found -
i seem to get sleepy at about 2AM-ish. So i go to bed, no alarms set, and will naturally wake at about 8 or 9AM. so far so good! i've been feeling a lot more rested and happier!
there are nights when i don't get sleepy by 2AM and i just let it be. i'll sleep eventually at 3 or 5AM and i don't be too hard on myself about it anymore.
@poppacalypse hey that’s great! I’ve always had like 10 alarms to wake me up and it’s just like your story once I’m able to find my natural sleep times. I just wake up naturally 7-8 hours afterwards. Unfortunately it’s hard to figure out when that natural time should be on any given day when it always creeps forward.
Even when I can’t find it, it’s easier for me to just go to bed 2 hours later every day because that’s like establishing a normal bedtime even if it’s not the ideal bedtime.
Trying to get up at the same time every day for me is like trying to get up 2 hours earlier every day. You can’t do it for long without consequences.
@sysop408 okay that's amazing. i'm someone who can't just nap. no such thing as a 20 or 30min shuteye. once i "nap" it's easily 4 hours gone. so i never nap, no matter how sleepy i am in the middle of the day.
i understand you don't have a "normal job", but how do you get things done?
@poppacalypse oh, short naps are not easy for me either. I mostly had to take naps in public or semi-public places where it was easier to wake up because there was so much stimulation around you.
Getting things done actually hasn't been too hard as long as I'm rested. Doing work as part of a team is hard if it's a long project because of all the meetings, but most of the time I'm a solo dev and nearly all of my clients have been with me a long time. The mutual familiarity helps a lot. They know how I work, most know about my sleep issues, and I know them so well they don't need to explain very much for me to know exactly what they need.
There's only a few days a month when I can't arrange to be awake for at least a couple of normal business hours so as long as people can plan a week ahead to schedule meetings, it's tolerable for me.
Having a life outside of work is where things get dicey because social schedules are more unpredictable and harder to juggle.
@sysop408 That is super interesting. My sleep has been problematic since I was a teen (I'm 59 now). I've often thought I would function better if every day had 28 or 30 hours. I mentioned this to a sleep specialist I saw last year. His response was basically "Yeah, there is such a condition, but it's super rare so it's not even worth investigating."
Clearly I need a new sleep doctor.
i thought 26 hours was normal?
@kirt my memory's fuzzy on this, but I do believe that a 26 hour circadian rhythm is considered within the normal range.
What's not normal for people like me is that there's no way to reset it with daylight cycles. In normal people, the sunlight causes your body clock to reset so you can sleep at night.
In people with Non24, that reset mechanism is diminished or entirely broken so we're wide awake at 2am because it feels like 10am to us.
Hmmm. #Non24
I've been diagnosed with Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome. Because I'm up all night and sleep during the day. My sleep isn't so much delayed as it is upside-down.
I say I'm #nocturnal.
I worked the day shift for my entire IT career; what a struggle to conform to "normal" people's schedules.
And I agree that there are more people out there who sleep at odd times and are labeled as lazy. 😡
Now I work third shift at a residential facility, and it's perfect for me. 😴 💤
@sysop408 I too have sighted non-24, clinically diagnosed after sharing my sleep actigraphy data from a Garmin watch which I wore for a few years prior to diagnosis.
Pre-diagnosis, I was struggling to entrain to the day/night cycle for all of my life, since literally as early as I can remember. It has affected my life in so many ways, the most recent being becoming unemployed directly due to my disability.
@TrinitronX I wonder if other people who have undiagnosed or late diagnosed Non24 have the same fascination with stories about people who can't sleep.
Even before I realized I had a bonafide sleep disorder, I had been fascinated with stories about sleep, or especially people who couldn't sleep. It's as if subconsciously, I recognized that was my own representation in front of me.
I remember watching the 2002 remake of the movie Insomnia and being completely riveted, not by the suspense or mystery, but by its depiction of #sleep deprivation.
@sysop408 I"m sure it's a common trend to have a more focused interest in topics that are relevant to one's personal lived experience.
The primacy of direct experience likely affects one's own reticular activating system to filter for things relevant to them.
In my case, I was focused on things that might help me get to sleep easier, with the (incorrect) assumption that I had standard "insomnia". Post-diagnosis, I know that I can sleep perfectly fine if only on a phase-shifting schedule.
@sysop408 Re: movies & media relating to sleep
I recently stumbled upon an excellent depiction of DSPD in an episode of a series called "Modern Love". Specifically: S2 E2 - "The Night Girl Finds a Day Boy".
The series is excellent for many reasons. Each episode is a short-form vignette. The vignettes show lots of diversity, and "S1 E3" includes an accurate depiction of bipolar disorder.
#NeuroDiversity #CircadianRhythmSleepDisorders #CRSD #DelayedSleepPhaseDisorder #DSPD #Non24 #bipolar
@sysop408 Oh wow this is actually an old thread!
Dunno if it's Fedi not showing me all the replies - but how has this not been posted here?:
@cowtan I've gone stretches of sleeping a normal 24, but like your son, it was very easy to knock me off.
Even when I managed, I had incredible daytime sleepiness. I did a lot of napping. It didn't matter how many hours I got at night, I could either be barely awake on a full night's sleep or wide awake on 3 hours.
I was a student and worked a traditional job when I was following a 24 cycle so napping wasn't easy. I slept anywhere I could... face down over my arms in a coffeeshop, on a strip of grass, in class, in my car, under my desk at work.
Now that I attempt to follow a 26 hours schedule, I rarely nap, but it's not always easy to know what the schedule is once you have to deviate from it for more than a couple of days because it's hard to know when you're perfectly on schedule. I can be 8 hours off, but by sleeping 2 hours later each day, it's still tenable. It'd be like a normal person training to sleep at 6pm or 6am daily, except I don't know what time my body thinks it is.
Totally the same. I remember some studies on this looking at whether teenagers are the same, and most people move forward to 24hr rhythms, but not everyone.
@ewen ah, so you also have a bedtime that moves a few hours later every day?
I believe the deal with teenagers is that they tend to have delayed sleep onset (i.e. they don't do mornings), but not non-24 and most will eventually normalize to a more daytime oriented wake schedule.
A lot of people with non-24 start off as having delayed sleep latency and progress to being full blown non-24 patterns. I'm not sure if this describes me as I already tended to wake up and go to sleep at all hours even as a teenager.
My pattern is hard to determine because I'm always switching time zones anyway. Which is how I worked out that if I just keep heading west by two hours every day then I feel like I'm in the right time zone!
I try to settle into a "normal" schedule at home but my body resists. Every so often I just do a full lap and lose a day sleeping, which resets things a little. My brain so rarely gets the rest it needs.
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