So I’m going to go ahead and start this off by doing the one thing that you should never, ever do: self-diagnose.

I’m pretty sure I have something called delayed sleep phase disorder, although I’ve never been formally diagnosed – though I do hold a Ph.D. in wikipedialogy. I actually never knew this was even a real “thing”, and without a professional diagnosis I can’t really say for sure that I even have this, but stumbling upon it and reading up all of the symptoms on that wiki page was pretty shocking for me, as it’s something I’ve wrestled with for the better part of my adolescent and adult life. One of the major reasons that I started the streaming schedule a while back was to see if I could hook myself onto a normal sleeping schedule. Though I was able to do it for a few months, I’ve had a couple of hiccups along the way.

For those of you who didn’t read the linked article, let me take a moment to explain what exactly this is like. For a normal person, when the sun rises, it naturally (via physiology) makes you more “awake”. Your “peek” hours where you feel the most awake, alert and intellectually functional occur around the mid-day, when the sun is at its peak. This isn’t “just” a feeling, it’s a complex set of biologically induced responses to sunlight and darkness. [1] This means that even if you wake up late in the day, say, around noon or 2 PM, it’s still relatively “easy” for you to fall asleep when it’s dark outside, because your body wants to reset itself anyway.

For me, and I guess for others with DSPD, the phenomenon that I mentioned occurs the exact same way, except in reverse.



For me, personally, I have a very difficult time sleeping when it’s dark outside. As soon as the sun goes down, I am physically wired to stay awake. And I don’t mean stay awake like “Oh I’m such a vampire! A night owl top lel!11”, I mean like feel like it’s daytime to me. I could go out and run errands, do my workout routine, stay awake and read stuff or study or play games, etc…etc…I feel like it’s “mid-day” to me around midnight to 2 AM. However, the second the sun comes out, the energy starts to completely and totally drain from my body. Even if I wake up late, say, at like 2-3AM, as soon as noon-time rolls around I am completely dead. When I’m trying to “reset” my sleep schedule to “normal hours”, it is an enormous struggle for me to stay awake once the sun comes out. I feel groggy, tired, and miserable. It almost feels like torture stretching out my awake cycle into the daylight hours.

That being said, if I do manage to barely make it through the day and the sun starts to go down, I will once again feel completely fucking wired at night time. This is one of the major reasons why it’s so hard for me to reset my sleep schedule. Even if I was exhausted at noon, barely conscious at 4PM, and almost falling asleep while standing at 6PM, as soon as 9-10PM rolls around I can effortlessly stay awake from another 4-8 hours. At that point I could honestly just stay awake until the sun came out again, and this has actually happened to me several times while resetting a sleep schedule. I’ll struggle to stay awake until night, and as soon as night rolls around I will easily waste 6-8 hours on other stupid shit, like reading reddit or messing around in chat.

So right now, I’m sure you’ve noticed, I’ve had trouble starting on time for the past couple of weeks. That’s because I stayed awake too late some night and got hooked into this night schedule again, and it’s insanely difficult for me to break it. I’ve considered just switching to a completely nocturnal schedule a few times, but this is a bad habit, socially, due to events and what not occurring during the day, and it’s bad for my European viewers.

There’s no real “point” to this post, other than to kind of shed some light on this little personal struggle of mine. If you’re going through something like this, I’d be curious to hear if you’ve found a way through it that doesn’t involve taking melatonin or something.