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.