I have recently discovered something. I think it might be a major life discovery. Background info: I have never slept like a normal person. I am driven to stay up late, incapable of forcing myself to go to bed early, fairly incapable of waking up on time if on time means the early morning, am always exhausted during the day because i never get much sleep at night because i've had to wake up early, can easily pull all-nighters and so it way more often than most people, and i don't get tired until around 2-3 am. Up until yesterday, I thought I was just a nightowl, not a morning lark, and that I was just unique in that my peak activity hours were in the evening/at night.
Then I decided I might be nocturnal and went to wikipedia to see what it had to say about the possibility of nocturnality in people. I was reading just the general article about nocturnality and what makes some animals nocturnal and some animals diurnal, and it mentioned that for humans a similar phenomenon to nocturnality was Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrom (DSPS). I immediately clicked on the link to that article, read it, and was ASTOUNDED! Now I'm not usually a hypochondriac, but there have been other times when I read about some syndrom or disorder on wiki and thought I might have it because I could relate to a few of the symptoms or one thing in the article seemd to fit my life. This DSPS article was not like that, it was as if it was written specifically about me. Every single sentence and symptom it listed are things i relate to 100% and experience every single day of my life. I really think I might have this syndrom, which is a circadian rhthym disorder (the circadian rhythm is our biological clock that tells us rise with the sun/light, sleep with the sunsent/dark.) I have never read anything else in the world I have related to on so many levels, every single level possible, even for the diseases/conditions I know that I have/have long been diagnosed as having and treated for (a chronic allergy pulmonary condition called *surprise surprise* chronic broncheal sinusitic allergic rhinitis = chronic lungs and sinuses nasal allergies/ the reason i'm allergic to most things in the world. it's like basic hay fever on crack to summarize).
So back to DSPS, it is as summarized by wiki, "a circadian rhythm sleep disorder, a chronic disorder of the timing of sleep, peak period of alertness, the core body temperature rhythm, hormonal and other daily rhythms relative to societal norms. People with DSPS tend to fall asleep some hours after midnight and have difficulty waking up in the morning." The symptoms listed are as follows;
1. There is an intractable delay in the phase of the major sleep period in relation to the desired clock time, as evidenced by a chronic or recurrent complaint of inability to fall asleep at a desired conventional clock time together with the inability to awaken at a desired and socially acceptable time.
2. When not required to maintain a strict schedule, patients will exhibit normal sleep quality and duration for their age and maintain a delayed, but stable, phase of entrainment to local time.
3. Patients have little or no reported difficulty in maintaining sleep once sleep has begun.
4. Patients have a relatively severe to absolute inability to advance the sleep phase to earlier hours by enforcing conventional sleep and wake times.
5. Sleep-wake logs and/or actigraphy monitoring for at least two weeks document a consistent habitual pattern of sleep onsets, usually later than 2 a.m., and lengthy sleeps.
6. Occasional noncircadian days may occur (i.e., sleep is "skipped" for an entire day and night plus some portion of the following day), followed by a sleep period lasting 12 to 18 hours.
7. The symptoms do not meet the criteria for any other sleep disorder causing inability to initiate sleep or excessive sleepiness.
8. If any of the following laboratory methods is used, it must demonstrate a delay in the timing of the habitual sleep period: 1) Twenty-four-hour polysomnographic monitoring (or by means of two consecutive nights of polysomnography and an intervening multiple sleep latency test), 2) Continuous temperature monitoring showing that the time of the absolute temperature nadir is delayed into the second half of the habitual (delayed) sleep episode.
So other than the last one about lab tests, I have experienced all of those symptoms every single day of my life, especially so for the last FEW YEARS!!!! I always thought I was just a night owl, but now I feel so astonished, overwhelmed, happy and sad that there is a good chance I have this disorder and therefore a reason for my bizarre sleeping habits. There are treatments for DSPS, but it's mostly a case by case basis of managing the condition and living with it. There is no cure, and if I do have it, I'll have to go through some different treatments to figure out which one works for me, some of the most common ones being light therapy, melatonin supplements, vitamin B12, and a few perscription drugs that have shown to help, along with efforts to change the sleeping cycle upheld and practiced every single day. It's a pretty scary thought, but also oddly exhilerating to know that there may be a reason for all of it. I'm going to start keeping a sleep log and hope to see a specialist when i get back to california this summer. I can't wait to find out, the idea of maybe having to start weird treatments for it is a scary thought, but the idea of knowing why I'm like this is refreshing and exciting. It's a really rare condition (3 in 2,000), and there may even be support groups, and there are definitely groups like that and blogs about it online along with a related condition called Non-24 Sleep-Hour-Wake Syndrom.
here's the link to the article for anyone interested, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed_sleep_phase_syndrome
In other news, my crazy crochet pineapple tablecloth project is going super well after scrapping the initial pattern which was just not working and finding a different one that is even cuter and working so much better. It's a beautiful pattern, is working up quickly and pineapple stitch isn't even that hard after all, its intricate and you have to count stitches and make sure not to mess up the pattern, but the crocheting itself is simple. I might make another one of them for my mom after I finish Monique and Maurice's. I love crochet so much! It's a good hobby and time waster when I should be studying for the insane amount of exams and projects I have coming up!
