Are you a severe night owl LSPD late sleep phase disorder insomnia

Are you an extreme night owl?

In my quest to understand more about my slow metabolism, I've been looking more and more at my circadian rhythms.




I've always been a night owl and tend to come alive late at night becoming super productive and creative, when everyone else is asleep. When I've worked long hours in the city – and had to get up early, I would often try to go to bed at a sensible time. But I’d just lie in bed feeling wide awake and frustrated that sleep didn't come. Until much, much later.

When you Google struggling to sleep, you come up with lots of hits for insomnia. Insomnia didn't quite feel right, but what else could it be? Insomniacs often wake up in the middle of the night and struggle to get back to sleep. Once I'm asleep, I don’t wake up until my sleep is abruptly ended by an alarm, or I have the rare luxury of waking up naturally.

I noticed when I wasn't working, and was able to follow my natural routine, I'd eventually feel tired in the early hours of the morning, and wake up around 11:34am. When I say around, I mean precisely. Every single day. So I was getting a decent 8 or so hours sleep. It just wasn't at a socially acceptable time. Doesn't sound so much like insomnia.

Are you a severe night owl LSPD late sleep phase disorder insomnia

It has a name?

After researching this further, I eventually found out about other people who sleep like this too. And it has a name: Delayed Sleep Phase Disorder (DSPD – but most definitely not to be confused with the other DSPD – Dangerous and Severe Personality Disorder). DSPD is exactly what I have been experiencing. A complete shift of the socially acceptable sleeping time several hours to the right. Core body temperature, hormones, alertness, energy levels – all happening at the “wrong” time.

Jetlag reset

I recently travelling halfway round the world from Australia to the UK. I had expected to be able to use jetlag to my advantage and “reset” my sleep times. The first few days it all went to plan, I’d be unable to fight off the tiredness by 8pm – and would be wide awake by 5am. But, after just a few days I fell back into my middle of the night to 11:34am routine. After researching DSPD, this seems to be the same issue across the board. Changing time zones is not a fix.

Curing DSPS?

It’s all quite gloomy on most sites, as many people believe there is no cure. They suggest getting a job to fit in with your natural sleeping times, rather than trying to work a conventional job with a 6am alarm call. The most common “cure” recommends you force yourself to stay up for an extra hour or two each night, with the idea being that after a few weeks you could stop adding on the time when you get to your preferred new bedtime, perhaps 10pm? But that seems like a bit of a hard core solution. In the middle of that transition you’d be sleeping over the entire daylight hours. That can't be good!?

My solution

Over the last few weeks, I've been trying out my own method of solving this – and I've made some really good progress.

The answer seems to be in Circadian Rhythms. We get our cues from daylight as to what time of day it is, and crucially the early morning sun is completely different to late afternoon sun. There is far more blue light in the mornings, which I simply never got to see. Also at night, all the artificial street lights come on, TV’s, computer screens, smartphone – and we’re bathed in artificial blue light signalling to our brain that it’s morning and we should be at the peak of our alertness!

So it was clear to me that I needed to get natural sunlight as early as possible in the mornings. As soon as I wake up, I now head straight outside, barefoot, and walk for about an hour. I've also stopped wearing sunglasses, to make sure I'm getting as much natural light in as I possibly can, particularly in the first half of the day. After sunset, I try to reduce artificial blue light as much as I can.

Whilst I'm not at conventional sleeping hours yet, I am definitely slowly shifting my times to the left.  I'm starting to feel sleepy earlier and waking up naturally quite a lot earlier too. The biggest improvement has been my energy levels. I feel so much more alert and energetic during the morning and daytime. I'm also feeling a lot warmer during the day, which I think is a good indication that I may be on the track to normalising my circadian rhythm.

I'm never going to be an “Early Bird” naturally waking up at 5:30am everyday, weekend or weekday. But I hope to be able to shift my sleep and waking hours to something far more reasonable – and in turn increase my daytime metabolic rate and energy levels.

I’d love to hear more about your natural sleeping patterns in the comments, below. Are you a severe night owl (DSPD) too? Do you just live with it, or have you had any success in changing it? Any nuggets of information you have on circadian rhythms – I’d really like to hear!

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11 replies
  1. Sandra
    Sandra says:

    My partner and I are very different I am an early bird. whilst he is a night owl. This causes a lot of problems a lot of the time.

    He often wants to go out for the evening just when I feel like going to bed!
    Would be great to both have the same wakeful hours.

    Reply
  2. billnbree
    billnbree says:

    I too have “messed up” circadian rhythms. My husband is in the Army and wakes at the crack of dawn weekday and weekends and can’t keep his eyes open past 10pm, I on the other hand am doomed to live my life as a night owl. I do my best work and have the most energy while he and the children sleep! I am often crawling into bed when he is jumping out of bed. We have joked that I was born for a 3rd shift job…LOL I don’t know what the solution is, but I sure do wish society would realize that just because I sleep different hours than what is “socially acceptable”, it does not mean I sleep more than they do, nor does it mean I am lazy!

    Reply
    • Suz
      Suz says:

      I hear you! I’ll come and join you at the 3rd shift job! It must be especially hard having a husband who is naturally an early bird. It’s such a shame that everything in society is geared towards early birds. Hopefully with more companies offering flexible working, things will get easier for us night owls.

      Reply
  3. Tawny
    Tawny says:

    Thank you for this post! I had no idea this was a real thing. I have always had a VERY hard time getting out of bed in the morning and a hard time falling asleep at a normal bed time. An observation I have noticed is when I lived in a place that had big windows that lots of natural light could get in, I woke up around 7am every day. But now I live in a place without much natural light and I usually roll out of bed around 9-9:30am.
    I am definitely going to take your advice and get outside in the AM.
    Thank you!!

    Reply
  4. Deanna
    Deanna says:

    Hi, im 27 years of age, and i am a severe night owl. Im living with family who are all early risers. personally I love being up at night, because the quiet and peacefulness is like heaven to me. i have tried to adjust my sleeping pattern to make them happy, but the problem is my body can only do that for so long, then it reverts back to my night owl life. Then my family gets on my case, like i havent done anything to improve i have tried, and my body just prefers the cover of night. And I just cant get them to leave me alone. They say its “not normal” and that angers me, because its not something i think I can control because I have tried. So nowadays i try to just ignore them. Because no matter what I try. It just keeps getting bumped back to my night owl schedule. And I dont think theres a thing I can do about it…

    Reply
    • Steven
      Steven says:

      30 years of age and I’m in the same boat. It’s 3am here as I write this, I’m wide awake and I’ve been up for over 36hrs now trying to reset the clock, judging by how alert I feel it’s not going to work….again.

      My norm is around 7am-2pm and my family thinks I’m lazy because of it, they see me wake up half way through THEIR day and forget I was up all night. They also say they can control their sleep but I’ve seen them after a few late nights, zombies all day then fall asleep early to catch up, just like me when I try to sleep “normally.”

      I’d like to see them try to permanently work nothing but a graveyard shift because that’s effectively what they are asking of people like us, ignore our bodies and accept the status quo.

      Reply
  5. Stacey
    Stacey says:

    I’ve had this problem all my life. Never liked getting up the morning. As the years went by it gpt worse where I was staying up until 6 am or later and sleeping half the day away. Now I’m tired of it and want to change it. I’ve tried different things with temporary results but my old habits keep coming back Most everyone I know can’t believe my strange sleep habits and some pick on me for it. I didn’t know there were others out there that struggled with the sleep disorder.

    Reply
  6. K
    K says:

    I’m opposed to labeling something a disorder just because it deviates from the accepted norm. Our ancestors would have had a few members of the group awake to watch over the rest during the night. It makes sense that some of us would still carry that gene. I do work nights and I love it.

    Reply
  7. Leonie
    Leonie says:

    Something that may help all of you. Installing an app such as flux or twilight on your devices, I am sure there are others. These are the two I use. It removes the blue light on your phone or computer, which will help you body start to switch off.

    Reply
  8. ...
    ... says:

    My family is constantly criticizing my sleep schedule. I’m 18 years old right now and I’ve always been a night owl. When I was a little kid I was obsessed with trying to stay up past my bed time. Now though, my desire to stay up late has slowly gotten more and more extreme as I’ve gotten older. Each summer, I get up about a half hour later than the previous summer. Its not just because I sleep really late, but also because I have an exceptionally hard time getting out of bed even if I did get enough sleep the night before. I’ll wake up at 1:00 but then lie in bed for a whole hour before I actually get out. Even after that hour, I feel like I’m having to kick myself out of bed. I know most people my age get up a little later than most, but my case seems particularly extreme.

    I can see what you’re talking about with the blue light btw. I find it odd that I can easily sleep through the entire morning but during the nights where I fall asleep particularly late. Its because by the time I’ve gone to bed and made the decision to sleep, the sun is already rising and it makes it really hard to go to sleep so I don’t end up falling asleep until 6:00 or 7:00.

    Reply
    • July
      July says:

      I feel you… It really sucks. Back in high school, I always dreamt about sleeping as much as I want and when I moved to live alone that ended up being a 14 hour long sleep and STILL it felt like it wasn’t enough. I’ve seen some articles about links to depression, also it may have something to do with the age. They say as you get older it changes. But anyway, it’s really weird that until 10 p.m. or midnight I will feel sleepy and right after midnight I’m just super awake. Did waking up early helped you with that? Because I can wake up at 6/7 a.m., feel sleepy all day and still, when the night comes I can’t help myself, my eyes are wide open… How is it going for you since you wrote this comment?

      Reply

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