so i’ve only ever talked about this with a handful of people before so for some reason it’s making me nervous to put it out there EVEN THOUGH IT’S NOTHING REMOTELY BAD. but i’m hoping to connect with people who know what this is about and since whenever i talk about this, i always find people who say “SERIOUSLY, THIS IS A THING? ME TOO!” then maybe this might help someone.
for most of my life i’ve told people i “have chronic insomnia” or that i’m “not a morning person” (which is a euphemism, at best). i’ve described myself as a “night owl” since i was a very young child, but i’ve learned in the last year or so that i’m actually NOT an insomniac at all – i have chronic severe delayed sleep phase disorder.
insomnia is difficulty falling and/or staying asleep; i have no trouble whatsoever falling and staying asleep. but no matter what I do, i physically cannot fall asleep before 2-3AM. i’m actually happiest going to bed somewhere between 4 and 5AM. i actually have no trouble at all staying up until sunrise if left to my own devices. usually somewhere between 3 and 5AM, i start to get tired. if i try to sleep before then, i toss and turn for hours regardless of how tired i am, and going past 5AM is always pushing past my limits, but i have no trouble at all falling asleep within that time frame.
if this sounds like you, i want you to know something: you’re not like this due to laziness or a failure of willpower. i say this as someone who’s tried for the better part of two decades to change my circadian cycles and nothing has made even a minor difference. this is normal for people with dspd. we’re just wired this way.
according to what I’ve been reading, there’s a strong genetic correlation to specific genes and your sleep-phase type, and people with DSPS especially in the severe form like i have tend to have an abnormality in the way that their brains process daylight and evening light. for most people, daylight wakes them up and evening light suppresses alertness. that isn’t a thing for me and that’s why i’m writing this at midnight and trying to decide which tv show i’m gonna watch on netflix for the next few hours 🙂
also not helpful: self-induced sleep deprivation (tried that over and over – i just spend weeks at a time miserable and exhausted); sleep aids – i hadn’t realized that was a thing for most people with DSPS – they just make us groggy and dizzy but don’t actually make us sleep. We are perpetually misdiagnosed as having primary insomnia or some kind of psychiatric disorder. Excellent bedtime routines don’t help. Meditation, nightcaps, having no devices, caffeine boycotts – not a shred of difference.
the bad news is that it’s permanent and incurable. both personal experience and the collective body of current medical evidence points to the fact that it’s VERY hard to even make a dent in your natural sleep phase cycles and the best you can ever hope for is a small dent (e.g., if i work very hard at it for the rest of my life – cause y’all know frequent relapse is a thing here – i may be able to move my bed time to 2:30AM instead of 4AM).
the good news is that people with DSPS can live totally normal healthy lives – if they can find a job and a lifestyle AND FRIENDS that accommodates our preferred sleep patterns which – hey, look at that, I HAVE ALL THAT! hence why i’ve been working from home for most of my adult life. the best jobs i’ve ever had have been graveyard shifts. we tend to gravitate toward those. for example, people who work overnight in emergency rooms tend to categorically be dspd folks. lots of us are self-employed and happy and successful that way. (my favorite clients are aussies. 1AM skype meetings= GREAT!)
evolutionary biologists have a theory that us night owls are descended from a long and noble line of early ancestors – basically, that one guy amidst our cave ancestors who got night duty. basically, while the rest of the tribe snored away, that one guy had to stay up and make sure the fire kept going and keep watch so that the rest of the tribe wouldn’t freeze to death and no giant sloths or prehistoric dingos ate the cavebabies. be proud; our species literally couldn’t have survived without night owls like us.
so if you’re a chronic night owl, embrace who you are because you are okay. it’s not inherently healthier, wiser, or in any way better to be a morning person. so don’t beat yourself up because you don’t/can’t get up at dawn to exercise (exercise still counts if you do it at night – god bless 24-hour gyms). plan around it if you can. pick careers that let you sleep in until noon. don’t sign up for morning hikes or crack of dawn college classes or deprive yourself of sleep in order to exhaust yourself into magically morphing into a morning person. take it from personal experience. it won’t work.
you’re just wired that way, and there’s nothing wrong with that.