Out of Pod Experience

I don't know anything about the disorder you mentioned, but I can totally empathize with the symptoms you talk about experiencing. Life of a shift worker holding down two jobs lol

12h shifts that run in a month of nightshifts, followed by month of dayshifts with a second dayjob sprinkled inbetween. Lots of coffee too for obvious reasons. Result is a body-clock and sleeping pattern that is somewhat ... decimated.

Hope you find some answers or fixes for what you're going through, Reaver. For me it's simply a matter of holding out another year or two until I can quit this crappy job.

If I had a boss. I would work so hard to keep a decent job but it's very difficult for me to find anything available. And having a severe sleep disorder does not make it any easier.

I'm sure there are many people who try to claim DSPD to get easy benefits, but I actually have the condition and let me tell you it is NOT fun. I wouldn't mind it in the slightest if other people were active when I am, but all of the times I want to go out there's nothing to do and nobody to see. All of the times when I am ready to make phone calls, nobody is available. All of the times when I want to look for work, it's an effort just to drag myself out of the house, especially since even after coffee I'm sleepier than I was before it a couple of hours earlier when everyone was still asleep.

So I'll ask you to please refrain from calling my disorder a "cart of bullshit", as I would be more than willing to operate within normal human guidelines if it were at all possible for me to do so.

Perhaps if I could get benefits for my condition, it would be more bearable, but as it stands, it is only penalties for me.

My sleep cycle will flip over several hours in as little as a day, and immediately lock into a cycle I can't break out of until my general lifestyle makes a significant change such as work, place of residence, or something else major enough to disrupt my sleep cycle. It often changes from such things, but I can't find any pattern that will help me put it where I want it or control it, and I rarely have the resources available to choose to make the lifestyle changes that lead to these sleep cycle changes.

Yeah a lot of people tell me that. Eating seems to have a slight impact, but not significant enough to use as a treatment. Generally eating helps me fall asleep but it is about as effective as listening to boring music, if not less. Seems to work well for other people but unfortunately not for me.

Sure, but I don't have insomnia. I actually sleep rather well if left to my own devices. It's not my disorder that gives me trouble, rather it is the society I live in which feels I should get up at 7 in the morning that gives me trouble. If everyone agreed that we should go to sleep at about 7:00 AM, I'd have the best sleep of anyone I know.

And sleep time just keeps moving around the clock, it doesn't settle itself.

And CCP won't let me edit posts. GG.

Sometimes I stay up all night doing random stuff like drawing with crayons, exercising, playing guitar or watching videos or movies or something.

Usually if I do this I'll end up staying up till at least 5am, and by that point it's impossible to wake up the next day any earlier than lunch time.

So the next day I of course wake up late and due to waking up so late I will be unable to get to sleep at a reasonable hour as I stayed up all night the night before, so the sleep cycle is ****** at this point.

Usually what I do to fix it is to stay up all night and pull an all-nighter without going to sleep, stay up all day the following day, and then by the time night comes again I will have stayed up well over 24 hours so it's pretty easy at that point to get to sleep at a reasonable hour. This works like a charm but it can be hard to stay up all night sometimes.

Try some Melatonin, it's good for getting you to sleep.

The normal human circadian cycle is 25 hours. It is only because of the photosensitivy of the pineal gland that it gets corrected to 24 hours. However artificial light can disrupt this.


@Reaver. It is first time I have heard about the disorder. One thing you could do is limit the ammount of blue light you recieve during the evening. There should be programs out there that makes your computer tune down the blue light after sunset. Initially it will look odd, but when you get used to it it is hardly noticeable.

Well, i never saw it as a disorder really. Flexitime, lots of artificial light and lack of sporting activities were just bound to get me out of sync. (Go to work, stare at screen. Come home, stare at screen)
What i do now is basically a lighter version of this. If my sleep pattern is close to something "normal" i try to keep it there, but once it starts sliding again i just let it do so. When it becomes really impractical (getting up at 15:00 or so), i push it forward, preferably utilizing a weekend, and become able to use the forenoon again.

I have all outside light blocked from my room. I find that time of day only distracts me from what I'm doing. But, I'm in school full-time and I have this luxury. I've also scheduled all of my classes for late morning or afternoon, so I sleep without an alarm clock. (I know how to live by alarm clock--I spent nearly a decade performing 5:30 AM exercise in the military).

Although we're three hours apart in time zones, I force myself to bed on k8's schedule. Otherwise we'd never see each other online due to this flipping sleep pattern issue.

Whenever I'd set an alarm for myself, I'd wake up with 5-15 minutes left on the clock. Haven't heard what my alarm sounds like in ages.

Some uninformed conjectures about sleep patterns:
-I spent some time living on a Pacific island close to the equator. Because of the equatorial location, you had about 12 hours of daylight and 12 hours of night, year-round. There were no employers, and no 9:00 to 5:00 schedule to keep. But people generally went to bed around 9:30-10:00 PM (a couple of hours after dark), just because there was nothing to do in the dark but sit around a kerosene lantern and talk about not much. They got up before the birds, just because there was so much more to do in the daylight.

But-- When the full moon came around, and the fish were lively, the guys got up whenever and went out to harvest some good food. I'd be the only guy feeling like crap out in the lagoon at 2:00 AM, without enough sleep. I never saw one of the local guys not fully up, energized, and ready.

So, the circadian rhythm thing didn't seem to apply to those humans. They seemed to follow monthly Moon cycles, not daily Sun cycles. Sleep wasn't a set pattern for them. They did it and did not do it, according to what the body needed and what was going on at the time.

So, perhaps the modern world's circadian rhythm sleep cycle isn't hard-wired into us at all. Maybe it's a custom from temperate-zone people (Euros, N. Americans, N. Asians, etc.) that has become an expected norm for all humans. Even if their bodies are wired to follow lunar cycles, or no cycle, or whatever.

-Sometime in the early 19th century, I think, so French proto-anthropologists observed people in a village in the colder part of France. In the Fall, the people worked frantically to harvest all of the crops grown over the Spring and Summer. Then, when all of the food was put up and stored, they kind of hibernated all winter. During the long Winter nights, they'd sleep 12 hours or more. They'd wake up and groggily stoke the fire and cook and eat some food, making sure not to get too awake. After the grub down, everybody crawled back into the sack and slept again. The Winter passed by with minimal fuel (heating or food) needs. When Spring daylight and warmth came, everybody came out and resumed vigorous grower and animal husbandry life.

So, modern anthropologists think this may have been how our pre-Industrial ancestors lives. Not year-round intensive peasant labor, but cycles of moderate activity, intense activity, and little activity.

What's the point? Don't know, but is Delayed Sleep Phase Disorder really a 'disorder'? It could be that every community needed that one guy who could wake them up, at the time it was prime to get out there and put some good grub on the table.