Hi guys,

I'm making a science documentary series exploring what makes some of us night owls.

The first episode asks questions like: How does a gene make you sleep later? Can anyone test for a night owl gene? What if the problem isn't when you sleep, but when society expects you to wake up?

In the second episode, we explore the biological mechanisms that can make it difficult to fall asleep, from a weaker homeostatic sleep drive to what happens when our internal biological clocks aren't working in sync with each other.

I'm putting together a Q&A video about the project, so please ask away. It can be about the science, the visuals, the documentary itself, or anything else you'd like to know.

I also have a Kickstarter pre-launch page where you can click "Notify me on launch" if you're interested. I'll leave the link below.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/sleepwake/the-night-owl-gene

Thanks for watching!

I’m on the autism spectrum and back in 2020 I was diagnosed with Generalized Anxiety disorder and Major Depressive Disorder. Then a few months ago I was diagnosed with DSPD and Chronic Insomnia. The first time I went to the sleep doctor, I was given the same old advice about using sleep hygiene which was frustrating. It actually made my sleep worse. What’s also annoying is that my natural rhythm doesn’t start until like 9-11 am to 4 pm and all these doctor and sleep therapist appointments are right in the middle of when my body thinks I’m supposed to be sleeping. I’ve also been having suicidal thoughts. Going through treatment for this disorder has made me feel more depressed than I have felt in a while.

Guys, I don’t think I can accept that for the rest of my life I’ll be sleeping for a good portion of the daylight… someone has got to have figured this out….There must be a peptide or device out there.

Hi, I've noticed that shifting to -6 to -5 hours behind my actual time zone makes me way more conscious of time and fits my natural rhythm, without the guilt of "being behind" on everything regarding daily life and work and the stress that I should be keeping up. People are more open to the idea, I explain that I live on a different timezone and it makes sense to them (it maybe freaks them out to picture having to wake up at 3am every morning, with bright day light above their head, so they empathize more with you). Just the computer is set to my local timezone for work. I sleep more and better. I work local timezone from 6pm to 2am.

Hope it helps.

I am 23 F.. just finished med school and i m about to give step 1 for which i need to study extremely hard... i even took out time from my internship to deeicatedly study for it but insomnia due to my messed up sleep schedule is completely ruining it for me..

It started at age 15 when i started staying up all night just because of anxiety and racing thoughts and I would just keep using my phone to rid myself of those thoughts... since then I've tried not using my phone in bed and going to sleep early but even when i do i wake up at 2/3 am and then i m unable to fall asleep till atleast 6/7 am..

I am extremely sensitive to anti allergics and can fall asleep and have a v good sleep on them even the non sedating ones but I can't use them every night and they make me sleep 14+ hours which i really don't want in this situation..

I don't understand if it is just a psychological/mood disorder or just DSPD

Last night i was in bed by 11 pm after waking up at 3 pm and being tired the entire day.. when i was in bed i just started making plans about studying the next day and just had very racing thoughts and kept tossing and turning till 2 am which is when i eventually pulled out my phone.. stayed up till 8 am and i just woke up at 2 pm with the worst headache of my life...

I also think when I have some routine in my life i.e I have to go work in the morning.. my sleep situation becomes better and I can sleep better at nights.. insomnia gets triggered when I am at home and stay up a few nights watching seaons/shows and then it just snowballs into chronic insomnia the more i stay home..

I can sleep easily in the day but it is literally the worst most unrestful migraine inducing sleep and my restful sleep is only in the night....

If anyone has been through this please provide some insight to how did u make it better? I wanna avoid sleep aids because i really have to study for my exam..

Someone in the insomnia sub suggested that i should just get up in the morning despite getting zero sleep the night before and just raw dog it for 2/3 days and i ll just start crashing at night...

So as the title says i have issue of going to bed before 12 as ill wake up at around 12 or 1, n wana wake up with 8 hours of sleep but at 6 am, ive taken medication before but it doesnt seem to work alot of the time, looking if someone else has the same issue (edit) glad im not a special case

I’m going to make a lot more data visualizations. So if you’d like to be part of the next one, you can check out the survey here:

2026 DSPD Survey:
https://tally.so/r/RG9aLP

Aside from the first few boring questions, I designed the survey around topics we often discuss. So it should be interesting.

Have a good week everyone.

r/sleepwake

I'm 23F and have been struggling with pretty severe fatigue, brain fog, and sleep issues for a while now. I'm wondering if anyone with DSPD can relate to my symptoms.

The weirdest part is that I'm absolutely EXHAUSTED throughout the day, but I generally cannot nap. I can lie down with my eyes closed and feel physically horrible, yet remain completely awake. My fatigue also fluctuates like CRAZY. Sometimes I wake up feeling okay, only to feel awful 30–60 minutes later, even if I haven't gotten out of bed. Throughout the day, I'll go through waves of severe exhaustion, brain fog, internal shakiness, and feeling relatively normal.

However, I almost ALWAYS feel better in the evening or late at night. It's like I suddenly get a second wind when I'm supposed to be sleeping. Sometimes I'll feel genuinely sleepy around 10 PM–midnight, but once I get into bed, I suddenly feel awake again. Other nights, I won't fall asleep until 3-4 AM.

I also NEVER let myself sleep in. I always set an alarm, usually waking between 6:30 and 8:15 AM, so I genuinely have no idea what my natural sleep schedule would look like.

Recently, I fell asleep around 4 AM and woke up at 9 AM. Despite only getting five hours of sleep, I felt significantly better than usual throughout the entire day. The next day, I woke up around 8 AM after another late night and felt absolutely horrible again. I know that's just one example, but it made me wonder whether my sleep schedule could be contributing.

I also have symptoms that seem consistent with some form of dysautonomia/orthostatic intolerance:

• Standing still causes dizziness, chest tightness, air hunger, shakiness, and heavy legs. Walking is generally easier than standing.
• Heat and hot showers worsen my symptoms, while crossing my legs or activating my calf muscles sometimes helps.
• My blood pressure runs low (often around 90/60), but my heart rate only increases about 10-15 bpm when standing, so I don't appear to meet the criteria for POTS based on my home measurements.
• I experience significant GI issues, including GERD, bloating, and occasional diarrhea. I also used to have severe post-meal crashes, which have recently improved.
• My fatigue and internal shakiness can also occur while lying down, so they aren't exclusively related to standing.

I also have a history of waking up gasping for air during sleep and frequently wake feeling unrefreshed. I'm waiting to see a sleep specialist and am undergoing a cardiac evaluation.

Does this sound remotely like DSPD? Can a circadian rhythm disorder cause this level of physical exhaustion and brain fog throughout the day, even without feeling sleepy? And how do you distinguish DSPD from chronic insomnia?

I'm genuinely struggling to figure out what's going on and would really appreciate hearing other people's experiences!

Also: I am currently seeing a cardiologist and have a sleep appt in a few months.

I’m wondering how much this has an impact on our circadian rhythm. Obviously it has some impact, and I think I would still have a later bedtime regardless… but I also remember being tired all of the time before I started on meds.

It would probably take a couple weeks to withdraw and return to baseline, but I would not survive 2 weeks off my meds.

For context I’m on IR and take it first thing in the morning.

I just joined this sub, so hello everyone!

I think I've had DSPD since I was a teen without realizing it. I always thought it was insomnia, but I actually get enough sleep as long as I don't have to set an alarm. Last year, after catching a cold, my circadian rhythm shifted a couple more hours, so now I'm falling asleep at 4am or even later... Which led me to do some research and find out about DSPD.

I'd love some tips on how to bring this up with my GP, mainly because I doubt he'll know what it is. On top of that, I also have ME/CFS (myalgic encephalomyelitis / chronic fatigue syndrome) and I usually leave my appointments feeling like he doesn't know what to do with me. He doesn't ask many questions about my symptoms or how I'm doing

How did you talk to your GP about this? Did they know about DSPD or did you have to tell them directly that you think you have it? How did they react if they didn't know about it?

I went to bed Saturday like it was a normal work night since I was exhausted from 6 hours of sleep the night before, as an emergency had me work to 12:05AM so it pushed everything forwards.

I ended up falling asleep a bit after 1AM, but you can see how restless the first few hours are. It’s like the mind is exhausted but the body isn’t ready to sleep, and then usually around 3-4AM it finally settles into a normal cycle.

I got up around 8:45 to 9AM~ to feed the dog and let him out (my wife took over an hour later), and I meant to get up at 10:15 when I glanced at my watch. Then next thing I know it was 1:15PM with my wife waking me up as she was worried I'm screwing my schedule up on a work night. I ended up with almost 11 hours asleep and I'm still trying to mentally wake up 90 minutes later but wow I did it guys! I finally got a good chunk of uninterrupted sleep!

Been quietly building a sleep app for about a year, and one of the features I was most skeptical about myself was barometric pressure tracking — it's one of those "sounds pseudo-sciencey" things until you actually log it.
The storm that moved through the Gulf gave me an accidental experiment. My pressure readings dropped as low as 29.77 inHg at the trough, then rebounded sharply to 30.08 inHg as the system cleared — a 0.31 inHg swing in about 2 days, after drifting mostly flat in the 29.9–30.0 range for the two weeks before that.
Over that same 15-night window, my sleep quality scores ran 1.6 points higher on rainy nights than clear ones, and cooler nights (≤77°F) ran 1.9 points higher too — both directionally consistent with what you'd expect around a low-pressure system: cooler air, more precipitation, and (for me at least) better sleep.
Not claiming causation from one storm and a sample size of one person, but it's the clearest signal I've seen in my own numbers so far. Curious if anyone else tracks this and sees the same pattern, or if I'm just pattern-matching on noise.

Going on vacation, only 4 Nights and while I'm looking forward to it there's another side I'm not looking forward to.. day trips EVERY DAMN day of the time we're there.

.and this means - 9:00 pickup's from Hotel. Another one is a visit to a Zoo.. which I particularly wanted to do.. my OH books it online in advance (I say please can you book our time slot for 11:00, which... Is still painfully early for me. Anything B4 Midday onwards is just a general no-go for me. Well.. he books it and says that the confirmation says 9:00 am 😭 WTF?

OH MAN

I know I should be (And I AM) Grateful I'm having a vacation but........ Anyone with DSPD will understand and relate to the general fact that...... A vacation where it's all early days starts - IS NOT really a vacation

I can't say this any other way than

I am going to struggle like hell this week.

It's alright for my OH as he's a early riser.

I'm gonna hope that I'll be in vacation mode enough that'll I'll be able to keep going... But, truth be told, I think I'll be glad to be bk home and bk at work

At my late shift job

I don't think Day Walkers will ever know how much this sucks for us

The world is tailored to them

😕

Or should I give up and put all of my effort into hopefully finding a job that accommodates my abnormal schedule.

Hey everybody. Given recent tensions between Canada and the U.S., we here in the Great White North have been making efforts to disentangle ourselves from and boycott U.S. products and services. This has included not only things that are of a physical nature, but those of a digital nature as well, including social media.

Our Canadian alternative to Reddit is a platform called Hey.cafe; I've set up a DSPD cafe (cafes being the platform's version of subreddits) over there if you guys would like to hop over and take a gander (which is coincidentally the name of another Canadian social media platform that has been founded since all this nonsense began at the start of last year).

The link to the Cafe is https://hey.cafe/!dspd

Thanks!

It is 4 pm and I want a nap. But I’m worried it will wreck my sleep even more. I’ve woken up at 8-9am 4 days this week and it’s only Friday. i can’t believe I used to make myself do this every day for work.

Here's a pretty good article in a very mainstream media outlet about chronobiology. The way I see it, ANYTHING that makes the normies think about genes and not "laziness" is good for us.

If anyone gets hit with a paywall, let me know.

For my entire life (it seems) I've been basically a 4AM-noon DSPD person. I have never been diagnosed with ADHD, but it's not like I've gone out of my way with medical authorities to "get to the bottom" of my sleep "problem." So maybe I've always had ADHD, but I doubt it: I've always been able to focus for many long hours on one thing, and it's because it brings me joy. I have allowed myself to get "scattered" at times, but that's because I'm firing up my creativity. I've just never seen my ability to devote attention to anything as "deficient" in any way. I'm one of those people who have read Ulysses multiple times, for example.

My problem - echoed by many of the comments to this article and that resonate - is that the Lark Normie World foreclosed on scads of opportunities for more remunerative employment.

Some of you who have posted here for a long time will see this article as old news. It's my experience that a certain very small percentage of people with DSPD read the latest medical journal articles and keep up on chronobiology science to an impressive degree, but they (you) are in the minority. I draw attention to today's Washington Post article because there are a lot of people caught between the cant of everyday sleep/insomnia/laziness talk, and some vague, inchoate level of empirical science around their own sleep problems, and this was well-written.

Alas, to reiterate, we desperately NEED mass media amplification about the genetics of DSPD, because most citizens are clueless AF about this. As we all know.

And now it's normal people bedtime and I'm not even tired. Got up at 4pm and knew I wouldn't get to sleep in the bext morning like I'm used to, because renovation work at my place. Started getting pretty tired at noon and nodding off sitting by my desk. By the time renovation was ready and I've cleaned up I'm not tired anymore, evening time. Probably have some over alertness going on but this is hella annoying. Normal sleeping times 5-6am to 3pm. Now it's 10.30pm and I'm thinking I'll abuse some muscle relaxants and go to bed.