During the nights I am wide awake and exceptionally productive with work. Once the sun rises, my body shuts down. The only true sound sleep comes with the midday sun. Sound familiar? Imagine my surprise when I realized that prestigious organizations and institutions know this exact set of symptoms — places like the Cleveland Clinic, the Mayo Clinic, and the American Sleep Association.
They call it delayed sleep phase syndrome, also commonly called delayed sleep phase disorder. Delayed sleep phase syndrome is described as primarily a problem of adolescents and young adults.
This particular group has a far higher percentage of people who stay up until the early morning hours and sleep through until the early afternoon hours.
Such verbiage — and, I suspect, such data — suggests a very strong lifestyle correlation with delayed sleep phase syndrome.
This can, perhaps, obscure what is likely a relatively very small percentage of people whose sleep cycles cannot be explained away by lifestyle. Several treatments are suggested for delayed sleep phase syndrome, including a process of pushing the sleep schedule forward a couple of hours every couple of days, ceasing to push forward once the desired hours are reached.
Another suggests simply picking a schedule and sticking to it, come hell or high water. They say that abnormal sleep phases for three months or more constitutes a disorder or syndrome.
This can mean sleeping and waking too early, too late, around swing shifts, or while adjusting to new time zones. We talked to her about what it's like to live with her condition and be at odds with everyone else's schedule.
Julia Plant: With the use of medication, I go to bed around midnight and wake up around 8. But I do not ever sleep through an entire night, ever. I wake up times. I have a sleep study coming up because [a doctor] was telling me I should not be waking up that much during the night, so they're going to monitor me during the night and see why I keep waking up.
It used to be I would have problems falling asleep. Without medicine I'll be up until , then I'll want to sleep until , 11, or But I would be able to sleep pretty well at least—it would be restful. But now it's different. Maybe I'm starting to become immune to Ambien, since I've been on it since I was like If you were to just fall asleep and wake up naturally, what would your ideal schedule be?
I would say 4 AM to noon would be my ideal sleep schedule. In college I worked at Applebee's and I was a bartender. That schedule was great. I was totally down to be at work until 1 AM, not fall asleep until , but be able to sleep in the next day. I think a lot of people with sleeping disorders just work those kinds of jobs. Why not just embrace it and say, "okay, this is my schedule, I'll stay up all night"?
I did when my job could accommodate that. But I want to be in the field or directing a TV show someday. In college it was nice. I could schedule my classes later. But for high school it was awful.
I'd have to be up at 7 AM. High school was definitely the worst hours for me. If I had to do a job and be up from 6 AM, there would be no way I would ever do that job. If I had an option to work different hours, I totally would. I just don't want my sleeping disorder to affect my goals and my career.
The exact diagnosis is "Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome. One percent of people have it. That's what I've been told, at least. A lot of people have it in their teens and will grow out of it in their twenties, so there is a chance that my body will just right itself. You know that pill melatonin that people take? It's over the counter to help you sleep. Your brain naturally secretes that drug when the sun starts going down. So say like 6 o'clock, 7 o'clock, it starts to get darker outside—your brain sees that and says "okay, secrete a little bit of that sleepy drug.
Okay it's pitch black out now, tons of that melatonin coming out of your brain. My brain does it opposite. When it gets dark out, it does not start to release that. Instead it would be like, oh the Sun's coming up or it's bright out.
Right in the morning is when my brain would be releasing that chemical. What was it like before you got a diagnosis? My parents just thought I was full of shit. I was always sneaking out of bed, running around. It was impossible. My mom was like, "we thought that you were just the worst child ever until we found out you just have this disorder.
I would get sick a lot too because I just wouldn't sleep, and then I would just do all the same daily activities that all the other kids do, so I just had a lower immune system. In 7th grade I missed like 32 days of school, or 40 days, something just nuts. It was partially because when I would wake up I'd be so tired, I'd be like, "I can't go to school.
Doha Ayish, neurologist at Houston Methodist, is here to explain what makes a night owl a night owl, as well as why being a night owl comes with both advantages and disadvantages. This clock primarily runs in sync with ambient light, and it's why we're sleepiest when it's dark outside and most alert during the daytime. However, your internal clock is influenced by several other cues, too — which can allow for some pretty significant variation in the pace of your internal clock compared to someone else's.
If you're a night owl, some behaviors, such as consistently eating late dinners or exposing yourself to bright non-ambient light in the evening, may have helped train your internal clock to shift a bit later than normal. But, being a night owl may also just be in your genes. While you may feel like you're living your best life late into the hours of the night, being a night owl does, unfortunately, come with a few downsides.
Whether due to your work schedule or parenting obligations, most night owls still have to get up early in the morning — which translates into a lot of night owls not getting enough sleep.
For instance, sleep disturbances can increase your stress level and cause irregular heartbeats," warns Dr.
In fact, a study analyzing the relationship between bedtime habits and health in almost half a million adults found that night owls are at more at risk for developing diabetes, when compared with individuals who identified as morning people. These sleep disturbances can have other consequences, too.
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