Well that sucks, given I have a gene variant related to delayed sleep according to 23andme.
Last year I did an experiment of sorts while unemployed for a time and found that if I just slept and woke when tired that my sleep time would naturally recess and eventually "flip" after about a month.
My entire life I've wondered why I feel incredibly tired and found waking up so difficult. Turns out that if you follow your bodies dominant sleep cycle it's a synch to wake up. Unfortunately, it doesn't work with modern life very well.
I also have sleep drift problem and consistenyly had it for the past 7 years.
I discovered that it helps when I actually put in effort to fix my sleep schedule. Like getting off screen 1 hour before I sleep. Boxing bedtime to 23:00-08:00. And similar things.
It is just really difficult to fix for me but it doesn't feel impossible. I have made progress in last 6 months but trying different methods and only some portion of that progress stays permanent.
Also have the same experience fighting depression-like symptoms and anxiety. It just takes a lot of time and is difficult. Some people just don't have these problems and I do but this doesn't mean I am genetically attuned to be like this and I can't do anything. It is just difficult.
I have had a similar experience. I would find my sleep schedule constantly drifting later and later, which made it harder to wake up in the morning, so I would self medicate with caffeine which made me anxious, which contributed to the same cycle. But even when I stopped taking caffeine I always found it difficult to actually go to bed at the same time every day.
What finally worked for me were red light glasses. I wear the True Dark Twilights Classics (though I’m sure there are other brands on the market) for 2-3 hours before bed time and I’m actually sleepy. Way more effective than taking melatonin tablets ever was in my experience. And I haven’t even had to substantially change my screen usage either (though the glasses do make everything come out monochrome, which makes it difficult to use anything that’s not in color blind mode).
Interesting, at first I though you mean the active red-light therapy things. I've seen that a lot on Instagram.
Might have to try that myself. Do you still use your phone/tablet/etc or does it also encourage you to use them less?
Yeah, I'm not sure about the efficacy of those, my understanding is that blocking blue and green light is more important than exposure to red light, but not an expert.
I do still use my phone, and more importantly for me my computer, basically right up until bedtime. I have probably decreased my usage some but it’s not a huge factor.
Good points, if I am careful about caffeine and do all of that it's not unmanageable. Being outdoors and camping and getting good physical activity is the best I found. But it's a struggle for me.
> Also have the same experience fighting depression-like symptoms and anxiety. It just takes a lot of time and is difficult. Some people just don't have these problems and I do but this doesn't mean I am genetically attuned to be like this and I can't do anything. It is just difficult.
Should I mention that "neurodivergence" and different sleep pattern genes have a large co-morbidity? E.g. many people with anxiety / ADHD / dyslexia / depression / etc have a very high likelihood of having delayed sleep or other genes.
You might find some benefit from an app like Wavekength[1] that uses iPhone camera to coach your light exposure, based on current+desired circadian rhythms.
Disclaimer: I made the app.
[1] https://www.impulsearc.com/wavelength/
I had that my entire life, and then one day started having the strangest medical condition where it is literally impossible to sleep past ~6:30am.
It sounds unbelievable but you’d have to experience it to understand. But the end result is it “fixed” the delayed sleep issue.
I’d give just about anything to be able to just sleep and keep sleeping, but on the up side now I’m an early bird with extreme regularity and quite like it.
> having the strangest medical condition where it is literally impossible to sleep past ~6:30am.
It's it really? What if you go to bed at 6am? Will you really still wake up 30 mins later?
Yes.
I've found my sleep regularity to be pretty malleable. It can become a habit. When I was in grad school I went to bed at midnight and woke up at 7am. Once I started running more in the mornings, I gradually shifted to going to sleep at 9pm and waking up at 5am.
The first couple days or week will feel pretty bad, but if you give yourself enough time then you'll shift your sleep schedule around. Now I get tired at 8:30pm and fall asleep at 9ish like clockwork. grad school me would have considered that insane considering I'm doing less work on average during the day. My day is just shifted now so that I do more stuff in the mornings and really relax in the afternoons, which is the opposite of before.
A key is actually giving yourself enough time to fall asleep. Most people think they can hop into bed and just get 8hrs, when you actually need to hop into bed around 30mins beforehand and really relax with a book or something.
I also think it's important to not stress about sleep a lot. Unless you're literally feeling miserable or have apnea, I think it's better to just let yourself relax if you wake up in the middle of the night. Sometimes I'll snap awake at 2am and just read for 2hrs, then get 2 more hours of sleep and generally feel fine.
The only way I really made an early wake up work was wearing amber safety glasses to block blue light for an hour or two before bed every night.
I will note that if you feel absolutely terrible on 8-9 hours of sleep, you should check with a doctor about it. I have hypothyroidism and was on too low a dose of medication, and felt so tired after work that I almost drove on the wrong side of the road. I'd thought this was simply from moving my sleep schedule and getting less sleep after starting a new job, but I got a blood test for unrelated reasons and found I was hypothyroid. A couple weeks after starting the new dose of medication and I feel like a new person.
People are different. What you find easy and trainable, someone else will find it doesn't require training and someone else will try as hard as they can and won't succeed.
Do you have non24 sleep disorder? Eliezer Yudkowsky has it and @exfatloss150 . Both have written about how they manage it.
You are not alone.
Recalling from college neuroscience classes and subsequent reading of research, the studies show the ordinary human sleep cycle when unrestrained adds about a half hour per day, so 24.5 hours is 'natural'. Long-term studies with all time cues carefully removed ended up with subjects on a ~50 hour sleep schedule, as in awake 36-38 hours and sleeping 12-14hrs.
This is also why it is easier to travel across time zones to the west than to the east.
I think I'm gonna try and find a study that had the 50 hour sleep cycles
It was a person free-running in a cave. Here's one article about it [0] to get you started, and here's another [1] of multiple 9-day studies showing the fairly immediate shift to 24.5 - 25 hour cycles (we're actually Martians?).
[0] https://howandwhys.com/michel-siffre-time-experiment-body-sl...
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/339110740_Living_Wi...