#my body is conditioned to wake up at 6-7am no matter how early or late i sleep 😭😭😭

[starmocha]

Well, yes....because I went to bed three hours ago and it's now 7am 💀

[missmentelle]

how do i know if i just have a bad sleep schedule or im an insomniac? it may be very obvious, i havent done much research. (i usually have trouble falling asleep and dont get asleep until around 6 in the morning, and sleep until 1 or 2 pm, no matter how much sleep i get i never can go to sleep on time or early. ive tried correcting it and ive given up at this point)

It’s not possible for me to give you any kind of diagnosis over the internet, but you might want to talk to your doctor about the possibility of Delayed Sleep Phase Disorder. 

I was diagnosed with moderate-severe Delayed Sleep Phase Disorder at an extremely young age, and I can understand the struggle of living with a seriously disjointed circadian rhythm. My parents brought me in for my first sleep study when I was less than a year old, because I had extremely strange sleep habits for a baby, and they haven’t improved 26 years later - throughout my entire life, I’ve been unable to go to bed at a normal hours, and there’s sort of nothing I can do about that. It’s 4:00am local time as I’m writing this, and I’ll be wide awake for at least another hour. People with DSPD cannot really change their sleep schedules without an immense amount of effort, and trying to run on a “normal” circadian rhythm leaves us feeling jet-lagged. DSPD is not a form of insomnia - we are perfectly capable of falling asleep quickly and staying asleep for a reasonable amount of time. The issue is that our brains and bodies cannot make sleep happen on the same schedule as the rest of the world - trying to go to bed before our internal bedtime usually just means hours of lying awake, and trying to get up at a normal time in the morning feels like being unearthed from the grave and brought back to life as a zombie. 

There really isn’t any consistently effective treatment for DSPD - I’ve been trying throughout my life, and I haven’t really gotten anywhere. You can, however, make adjustments to your life to accommodate your sleep schedule. Obviously, getting a job that doesn’t start early in the morning would be ideal, though it’s not always possible. When I had a job that required me to be there by 8am, I coped by sleeping from 4am- 7am, making sure that I did more “mindless” tasks like photocopying my test forms in the morning, and having a nap from 7 - 11pm when I got home. Trying to adhere to any other sleep schedule just didn’t work for me, and my brain refused to cooperate. Finding a partner who has the same sleep schedule as you, or is a very heavy sleeper is also ideal - my boyfriend nods off by midnight every night, like clockwork, but he sleeps like the dead, so I can read a book or use my tablet in bed beside him without disturbing him. Some people with DSPD have also had success with light therapy and melatonin - for best results with those, you should really consult a doctor, since trying to mess with your circadian rhythm on your own can actually make it much worse. 

The most important thing I’ve also learned about living with DSPD is that it’s important to stop assigning moral value to what time you wake up in the morning. Our culture associates early rising with productivity and late rising with laziness, and those are both harmful and untrue assumptions. I get just as much done as a person who springs out of bed at 6:30am every day - I just happen to get it done at different hours than they do. The fact that normal work hours don’t coincide with my most alert and creative hours is not my fault, and it’s not something I can control. The world is built for people with normal circadian rhythms, and sometimes I have to get creative in order to live in it. But it’s not all bad - being awake for 4+ hours after everyone else has gone to sleep gives me a lot of uninterrupted creative time to work on projects I care about, and jobs with flexible work hours are becoming increasingly normal. It can be frustrating and embarrassing to have a condition that no one has heard of that makes people think you are “lazy”, but you aren’t alone, and running on your own schedule doesn’t have to be a bad thing. Best of luck to you!

Miss Mentelle