For the past six or so years I’ve had what is called non-24 sleep wake disorder or free running sleep. My internal clock runs at a little over 25 hours, which of course means that since there are 24 hours in a day I go to bed one hour later each night and wake up one hour later the next day.
There is little I can do about it. I can’t just force myself into a normal 24 hour schedule. The longest I can manage is maybe little over a week, if I’m lucky, but then it will leap 7 or 8 hours forward to where it should be, after which it just keeps on rolling forward at a steady pace of roughly +1 hour per day. I make a full trip round the clock every three weeks or so.
It is nigh impossible for me to put on the brakes and wake up earlier, I can only push it forward.
Take a look at this graph
As you can tell by looking at this chart I’ve never had an office job.
The offset is not exactly one hour each day but it averages out and the general trend is always the same: up, up, up. I have tried to explain this to many people and no one seems to get it. They think that I’m just staying up late and say things like “Why don’t you just reset your sleep schedule?” Or “Oh wow, so your sleep schedule is very inconsistent?” No, I can’t reset it. There is nothing to reset. I don’t stay up late. Even if I did “reset” it it would start rolling again. And my sleeping schedule is highly regular, there’s nothing inconsistent about it. I wake up every 25 hours. To put it another way I wake up at n+1 hours every day, where n = the time I woke up at yesterday.
Here’s what a regular person’s chart might look like
Flat as a pancake.
And speaking of pancakes, it’s not only my sleep that is affected. If for some reason I have to force myself to deviate from my usual pattern I’ll feel sick as my metabolism is out of whack; I’m eating when I should be sleeping. It’s awful.
I never thought there was anything strange about this until recently it dawned on me how dysfunctional this is, were I to try and integrate into normal society. To me this is normal. If I wake up at 7AM I know that I won’t be seeing the sunrise in the morning for a while, maybe until next month. But also that soon I’ll be able to read in peace and quiet during the night because I’ll be waking up at sunset and going to bed in the morning (and seeing the sunrise in the evening so to speak). I get to experience all the hours of the day at different points of the day, if that makes sense.
If it wasn’t obvious by now I am a NEET with very few obligations. If I have a doctor’s appointment or something of the sort and it doesn’t align with my schedule I’ll have to pull an all-nighter to be able to hold up my end and show up on time (or at all). Not a very healthy thing to do and I don’t particularly enjoy staying awake for long periods of time. And you’d think that after staying up for a whole day I’d be really tired and sleep for a long time but actually the opposite happens. After an all-nighter I sleep maybe 4-5 hours–half of what I normally do. I’ll feel the effects of my sleep deprivation delayed by a few days.
No amount of exposure to daylight changes whether I get tired or not. I will get sleepy when my body says it’s time to do so. Sometimes I am really sleepy during the day and might fall into a biphasic pattern for a short while. I might also be unexplicably fatigued without feeling tired but I’m not sure if this is related to non-24 or if it’s something else entirely.
As long as I am left to my own devices with no external expectations sabotaging me I don’t suffer from having non-24 and nothing is stopping me from doing normal things. Going for a run, doing chores, having lunch, its’ all the same whether I do it in the middle of the night or at the “proper” time.
Just let me be.
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