10 ms·

I usually eschew labels, preferring simply "sleep weirdo", but I fit the pattern of "Non-24 Sleep-Wake Disorder", with my sleep and waking times drifting progre

by wheels 7y ago

I usually eschew labels, preferring simply "sleep weirdo", but I fit the pattern of "Non-24 Sleep-Wake Disorder", with my sleep and waking times drifting progressively later at semi-regular intervals. The result is that I'm often awake through the night. (This week I'm going to bed around 9:00 a.m.) Even with that, I've noticed some pretty big productivity swings based on the season. Interestingly, this hit me very hard in moving from where I'm from (southern Texas) to Michigan (for college) and then to Berlin (for the last 14 years). Right now, in Berlin, which is approximately as far north as Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, North America's northernmost large city, the sun sets before 4:00 p.m. I usually try to spend a month of winter closer to the equator to keep my productivity levels and spirits up. Between the seasonal adjustment (where the sunset time swings by a full 7 hours in Berlin) and my sleep weirdo-ness, I've also come to love me some artificial-sun-level lighting. I tend towards 400-500 watt halogen bulbs. I have an up-firing light of approximately that wattage in every room of my home. A question for other folks that compensate sunlight with artificial lighting: Do LEDs really work for you? I'm a wanna-be hippie, and I'd love to use energy efficient bulbs and have tried every generation of them, but the light just doesn't do it for me. I keep going back to halogen as the sweet-spot between black-body radiation and energy efficiency. I can immediately spot the difference between an LED or CFL and incandescent bulb. I've had some success in mixing them in about 50/50 ratios. They've already been banned for sale in the EU, but I have a stockpile that will last me a decade in a pinch. Does anyone else struggle with the light quality from modern lighting?

benkuhn 7y ago
Have you tried buying higher CRI LEDs? Halogens have very good color rendering compared to typical LEDs (100 vs ~80 for typical LEDs), but you can buy specialty bulbs with closer-to-natural spectra. I haven't dug much into off the shelf options, but one of my coworkers did and got excited about these lights: https://store.yujiintl.com/collections/high-cri-led-lights/products/high-cri-95-high-bay-ufo-led-light-pack-1pcs https://store.yujiintl.com/collections/high-cri-led-lights/p...
- wheels 7y ago
  Hmm, that's sounds interesting and is at least an avenue to chase down. Sadly, next to my stockpile of halogen bulbs, I also basically have a lifetime supply of LEDs and CFLs that didn't pass muster. Maybe someday I'll have a really big garage that needs lighting. ;-) The specific bulbs you linked to have a crazy high lumen rating, which appeals to me despite their high price. I have noticed that name brand (and pricier) LEDs tend to do better for me. Some of the ones from e.g. Phillips and Osram put out a different quality of light (though it's still not up there with incandescents for me).
  - ta0987 7y ago
    There's also this company, but I haven't pulled the trigger myself because of the cost: https://www.waveformlighting.com/high-cri-led-strip-lights https://www.waveformlighting.com/high-cri-led-strip-lights
    - PowerfulWizard 7y ago
      Thanks, that's interesting -- I'll have to buy one of their bulbs to compare to my other LED bulbs. Looks like the lowest cost might be the 100W COB LED ... It would need a bunch of supporting equipment but it might be possible to do it for around $2 per watt. Edit: I guess the normal bulbs and the led tubes could also come in around $2/watt and they can take mains power so that might be an easier but physically larger route.
    - wheels 7y ago
      Their standard socket bulb prices aren't bad (about $15 if you get a 6-pack), and they do produce bulbs for the slightly different European sockets, but shipping to Europe is about $40 (plus I'd then have to deal with picking them up at the customs office, which is always a multi-hour ordeal). But assuming I haven't found something decent before I'm next in the US in March, I'll pick some up then.
gligorot 7y ago
I absolutely hate LEDs. I don't know why, but I just hate them. Especially the white ones. The yellower are similar to a mid summer day and I can cope with them, but there's always this feeling of something being off. I guess it's connected to us humans being used to non-sun light being (similar to) a fire - mainly consisting of yellow/orange tones. Also, I don't exactly remember from where I read this, but when a (town) changed the street lights to LED's, a lot of people started having sleep problems, and it supposedly was connected to the blue light emmiting properties of (lower quality?) LEDs.
- AngryData 7y ago
  Possibly due to the lights being driven from AC power making them pulse. You gotta find ones with big enough caps that they don't flicker, or buy some grow LEDs and a decent DC driver to emulate the sun.
- bitexploder 7y ago
  The flickering. It’s not nice.
  - garmaine 7y ago
    LEDs do not flicker.
    - novok 7y ago
      Cheap led light systems do
      - mcv 7y ago
        Yeah, I get the impression there's a massive difference in quality between cheap and good LEDs, and it's not always easy to tell which is which. In theory, when done right, LEDs can have a perfect spectrum with no flicker. But many manufacturers cut corners.
- wheels 7y ago
honr 7y ago
I kept seeing the following problem with several different LED lights we were installing until I found one that was better: Take your phone and take a video of the lights when on (normal framerate should be enough, try slow-motion for further investing). Most lights I got from the local hardware store were flickering quite visibly. And I'm pretty sure it's a design insufficiency of the adaptor electronics attached to it, not the LEDs themselves. If I were to guess I'd say most of them probably go the simple path of cutting off the negative half of the AC cycle and feeding the rest directly, without a decent low-pass filter to the LEDs. What worked reasonably well for me, was getting a normal DC power supply and a few LED strips (with fairly dense and higher power LEDs) and installed that in a room. That light feels pretty satisfying to me. All that being said, I don't like anything even remotely close to daylight level ambience when I am working on a computer screen; the custom lighting I set up is for other living areas.
lainga 7y ago
Did you mean Edmonton?
blattimwind 7y ago
> Do LEDs really work for you? All of them suck (objectively and subjectively) compared to full spectrum lamps. > Does anyone else struggle with the light quality from modern lighting? Besides poor light quality, another issue are dimmable LED lights which are often just PWM'd at a couple hundred Hz. This is a migraine trigger for me.
Marsymars 7y ago
> Berlin, which is approximately as far north as Alberta, Canada, North America's northernmost large city Presumably you mean the city of Edmonton. Alberta is about twice the size of Germany. ;) > Do LEDs really work for you? Mostly, yes. It's easy to buy halogens that all have pretty much the same good quality of light. LEDs you need balance CRI, R9, dimming quality, flickering, etc., but I've found LEDs that work for most of my use cases.
- wheels 7y ago
  Eek, yes, meant Edmonton -- typed too fast. Corrected.
jacquesm 7y ago
Good morning to you Scott, Much the same here, I never could keep a rhythm.
LargoLasskhyfv 7y ago
Try some of these: [1] https://www.osram.de/ecat/Professional%20LED-Lampen%20mit%20LED-Technologie%20im%20Gl%C3%BChwendel-Design-LED-Lampen-Lampen-Digital%20Systems/de/de/GPS01_3122242/PP_EUROPE_DE_eCat/ https://www.osram.de/ecat/Professional%20LED-Lampen%20mit%20... [2] https://www.osram.com/ecat/Professional%20LED%20lamps%20with%20filament-style%20LED%20technology-LED%20lamps-Lamps-Digital%20Systems/com/en/GPS01_3122242/PP_EUROPE_Europe_eCat/ https://www.osram.com/ecat/Professional%20LED%20lamps%20with... They work fine for me, while i'm considering myself sensitive to all sorts of flickering, or "strange" colors. Don't be afraid of the "professional", they aren't much more expensive, 8 to 9€ per piece instead of something like 4 to 6€ for the others. They make a warm light but are too bright to directly look into, even the candlelike things at only 2 Watts. I bought the first ones out of frustrations with broken CFLs maybe three to four years ago (not a single CFL lasted over a year!), their warmup times, noise, and such, as a test. Now the only other light i have is some flexible/movable Halogen spot light, which i rarely use. Anything else is that stuff from the links. It just works for me, while even saving some energy. So far no defects. Instant on. No noise. No flickering for me. They are commonly available. I got mine at the Bauhaus. Test one or two and see for yourself. Though you won't get a single thing with 500 Watts. They max out at 75W equivalent while using 8Watts. So you'd need many of them.
seltzered_ 7y ago
"I keep going back to halogen as the sweet-spot between black-body radiation and energy efficiency." Permies put out an article arguing for incandescent if your goal is light AND warmth: From https://richsoil.com/electric-heat.jsp https://richsoil.com/electric-heat.jsp - "This last one was the most important. A standard incandescent light bulb heats something to the point that it glows white hot. So I used this to heat myself and it doubled as a light source. And, I should point out that in a few months this light bulb will be banned by the US government. It is already banned in many countries. The comedy is that it is being banned to save energy. And yet, I think people can save far more energy by keeping it."
- anewguy9000 7y ago
  yup. like my low flow toilet that i need to flush twice...
  - ars 7y ago
    Not anymore, technology has improved a lot! Get this one (or variant on it): https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B001KAFKRM https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B001KAFKRM I've owned it for 5 years and it's clogged only once (it happened in the first week of ownership) then never again. And one time (in 5 years) I needed to flush it twice.
    - jessaustin 7y ago
      That one is bragging about a 3" valve. There are other toilets available now that have 4" valves.
- basilgohar 7y ago
  But incandescent light bulbs are a terrible heat source from an efficiency perspective. You're losing an incredible amount from the power plant, to the transmission, and pretty much everything else. Once it arrives, yes, the energy gets converted nearly 100% to heat eventually, mostly in your proximity. But a heat pump or even gas heating is far more efficient if the goal is to get heat.
taneq 7y ago
> I fit the pattern of "Non-24 Sleep-Wake Disorder", with my sleep and waking times drifting progressively later at semi-regular intervals. This is a disorder now? I thought that's just how humans worked. It's how I work, anyway - if nothing else (like work, or children waking up at 5:30am) forces me to get up at a set time, I'll slowly cycle through until I'm going to bed at sun-up and waking up at 3pm.
- SirHound 7y ago
  No this isn’t typical. Are you particulary good at coping with jetlag?
  - archi42 7y ago
    Out of curiosity: Assume the answer is yes?
  - taneq 7y ago
    Depends which way I'm flying. :) Flying westwards is fine, I can absorb the extra hours without much noticing them. Flying eastwards is awful.
  - dijit 7y ago
    I identify with the parent, and I've always been fine with "jet lag" to the point where I often don't even notice it or it only lasts until I go to bed the first night. (IE; Sweden->Los Angeles, the inverse is harder but not as hard as most people seem to have it, it knocks some colleagues out for an entire week)
    - taneq 7y ago
      A week? Yeah I'm scragged for a day if I'm losing hours on a flight (although this is exacerbated by the fact that if I'm flying east I'm usually going from my 'starts around 9ish' desk job to 'be on site by 6am' minesite commissioning, so I'm effectively waking up at 2am when I'm used to waking up at 8:30am) but after that I'm fine.
- 7y ago
osrec 7y ago
I'm going through this currently. It doesn't help that my inspiration for work can sometimes make me work through the night, which 'messes up' the following day. I'm my own boss, so can do this without repercussions, but I sometimes think I'd be more productive if I stuck to a more regimented sleep schedule. I did have a normal-ish sleep schedule when I had my job in finance, but I remember feeling exhausted all the time, especially weekday mornings. I certainly feel healthier now, just sleeping when I'm tired. On occasion this can mean missing a bunch of daylight. Not sure if that's actually all that healthy though...
- wheels 7y ago
  It sounds like we're similar. My personal, entirely unscientific self-diagnosis is that I have a well-defined circadian rhythm like most people, but it's easier for me to override by obsessive interest than for most people. Even sans coffee (which I'm pretty careful about as I near 40), if I'm really interested in something, I can work on it in a block of time up to and over 24 hours. Naturally that futzes with my sleep. My "tired-impulse" is relatively weak compared to my "this is exciting" or "people are waiting on this" impulse. Before I ran a company (about 1/3 of my career), I mostly managed to hold things down on a "normal" schedule, but I was always tired and frequently had performance reviews where the only complaint was my tardiness. There are some interesting data points: while camping (which I do a lot of -- several weeks per year), I do tend to sync up with the sun, even though in northern Europe that means waking up before 5:00 a.m. There's also limited screen time. (Though I did work from tent on a remote beach in Crete for a month this year.) I picked up some melatonin tablets in my wife's home country (where it doesn't require a prescription), and will experiment with that in the near future for I-really-need-to-sleep-now times, but as much as my sleep is weird, it's so intertwined with my personality now that I'm hesitant to medicate it away even given the chance.
bvinc 7y ago
You're probably never going to see this so I'll keep it short. I just want to say that your disorder might be due to a circadian rhythm disruption. Instead of just focusing on light, you should also focus on darkness. Try not to look at any unnatural light after sundown. If you want to cheat for convenience, they make red glasses that block all blue and green light which can interrupt your melatonin. You want to find red glasses that have barriers on the side to prevent the light from coming through from the sides. They sell 2 different kinds on Amazon. I found the effect to be very profound. You get tired quickly and when you fall asleep, you feel like you're in a coma and wake up refreshed. Unnatural light after sundown really does interrupt your sleep cycle.
parkerhoyes 7y ago
I have this disorder as well, it started when I was 11 or 12. I've tried every trick that sleep doctors recommend (literally, everything) but nothing works. The only way I was able to maintain a 24-hour sleep cycle though school was to drink coffee every morning and take sleep medication regularly (from the age of 12). That was enough to make my sleep cycle 24 hours, but it didn't improve my sleep quality, so I spent most of school in a significantly sleep deprived state (only getting 3-5 hours of sleep a night). That's a pretty miserable state to live in for an extended period of time. When I started living on my own and I was free to choose my own schedule, I decided to stop "forcing" myself onto a schedule that my body didn't agree with and instead let my sleep schedule naturally align with my circadian rhythms. It took about a month to get adjusted, but I remember waking up one morning and feeling like I had got my first full night's sleep in my entire life - it was an amazing feeling! Since then I've been living on a ~ 24h 50m sleep cycle and I sleep like a baby (8 - 9 hrs) every night. Interestingly enough, I've discovered that I'm actually a morning person, when I used to think I was a night owl. I'm very grateful that I have the freedom to choose my own schedule (I'm a remote-only contractor), I dread ever having to go back to a 24h sleep cycle. I haven't noticed much change in how I feel with seasons (I live in southern Ontario, Canada), but there's a big difference in my energy level depending on how much light I get in the morning (my mornings, not Earth mornings). If I don't get a good amount of bright light in the morning I feel sluggish and tired all day, regardless of how much sleep I got. If the sun's up when I wake up, I go for a run or walk every morning; otherwise I have about five 10,000 lux LED lights around my apartment that I turn on all morning (I have two right next to my desk in my peripheral vision, just like the person in the article). The LEDs are pretty weak, but they're enough if they're a few feet away from me. I start turning off all the lights and closing all the blinds in my apartment about 4 hours before bed or else it'll keep me up. I would be very interested in reading more research about the cause of Non-24 Hour Sleep-Wake Disorder in sighted people; as far as I'm aware there's very little research on the matter. I didn't even know it existed until last year, I expect some more research and awareness could be very helpful to people in the same boat.
- _carl_jung 7y ago
  What does it mean to be on a "24h 50m" sleep cycle? Does your sleep time progressively become later until you're nocturnal, then continue looping round until it returns to a "normal" night's sleep?
Hitton 7y ago
>I tend towards 400-500 watt halogen bulbs. Are those really 400-500 watt or just give light equivalent to 400-500 watts worth of incandescent light bulbs?
akvadrako 7y ago
You might want to try a 28-hour day.

by wheels 7y ago

benkuhn 7y ago

Have you tried buying higher CRI LEDs? Halogens have very good color rendering compared to typical LEDs (100 vs ~80 for typical LEDs), but you can buy specialty bulbs with closer-to-natural spectra. I haven't dug much into off the shelf options, but one of my coworkers did and got excited about these lights: https://store.yujiintl.com/collections/high-cri-led-lights/products/high-cri-95-high-bay-ufo-led-light-pack-1pcs https://store.yujiintl.com/collections/high-cri-led-lights/p...

wheels 7y ago
Hmm, that's sounds interesting and is at least an avenue to chase down. Sadly, next to my stockpile of halogen bulbs, I also basically have a lifetime supply of LEDs and CFLs that didn't pass muster. Maybe someday I'll have a really big garage that needs lighting. ;-) The specific bulbs you linked to have a crazy high lumen rating, which appeals to me despite their high price. I have noticed that name brand (and pricier) LEDs tend to do better for me. Some of the ones from e.g. Phillips and Osram put out a different quality of light (though it's still not up there with incandescents for me).
- ta0987 7y ago
  There's also this company, but I haven't pulled the trigger myself because of the cost: https://www.waveformlighting.com/high-cri-led-strip-lights https://www.waveformlighting.com/high-cri-led-strip-lights
  - PowerfulWizard 7y ago
    Thanks, that's interesting -- I'll have to buy one of their bulbs to compare to my other LED bulbs. Looks like the lowest cost might be the 100W COB LED ... It would need a bunch of supporting equipment but it might be possible to do it for around $2 per watt. Edit: I guess the normal bulbs and the led tubes could also come in around $2/watt and they can take mains power so that might be an easier but physically larger route.
  - wheels 7y ago
    Their standard socket bulb prices aren't bad (about $15 if you get a 6-pack), and they do produce bulbs for the slightly different European sockets, but shipping to Europe is about $40 (plus I'd then have to deal with picking them up at the customs office, which is always a multi-hour ordeal). But assuming I haven't found something decent before I'm next in the US in March, I'll pick some up then.

gligorot 7y ago

I absolutely hate LEDs. I don't know why, but I just hate them. Especially the white ones. The yellower are similar to a mid summer day and I can cope with them, but there's always this feeling of something being off. I guess it's connected to us humans being used to non-sun light being (similar to) a fire - mainly consisting of yellow/orange tones. Also, I don't exactly remember from where I read this, but when a (town) changed the street lights to LED's, a lot of people started having sleep problems, and it supposedly was connected to the blue light emmiting properties of (lower quality?) LEDs.

AngryData 7y ago
Possibly due to the lights being driven from AC power making them pulse. You gotta find ones with big enough caps that they don't flicker, or buy some grow LEDs and a decent DC driver to emulate the sun.
bitexploder 7y ago
The flickering. It’s not nice.
- garmaine 7y ago
  LEDs do not flicker.
  - novok 7y ago
    Cheap led light systems do
    - mcv 7y ago
      Yeah, I get the impression there's a massive difference in quality between cheap and good LEDs, and it's not always easy to tell which is which. In theory, when done right, LEDs can have a perfect spectrum with no flicker. But many manufacturers cut corners.
wheels 7y ago

honr 7y ago

I kept seeing the following problem with several different LED lights we were installing until I found one that was better: Take your phone and take a video of the lights when on (normal framerate should be enough, try slow-motion for further investing). Most lights I got from the local hardware store were flickering quite visibly. And I'm pretty sure it's a design insufficiency of the adaptor electronics attached to it, not the LEDs themselves. If I were to guess I'd say most of them probably go the simple path of cutting off the negative half of the AC cycle and feeding the rest directly, without a decent low-pass filter to the LEDs. What worked reasonably well for me, was getting a normal DC power supply and a few LED strips (with fairly dense and higher power LEDs) and installed that in a room. That light feels pretty satisfying to me. All that being said, I don't like anything even remotely close to daylight level ambience when I am working on a computer screen; the custom lighting I set up is for other living areas.

lainga 7y ago

Did you mean Edmonton?

blattimwind 7y ago

> Do LEDs really work for you? All of them suck (objectively and subjectively) compared to full spectrum lamps. > Does anyone else struggle with the light quality from modern lighting? Besides poor light quality, another issue are dimmable LED lights which are often just PWM'd at a couple hundred Hz. This is a migraine trigger for me.

Marsymars 7y ago

> Berlin, which is approximately as far north as Alberta, Canada, North America's northernmost large city Presumably you mean the city of Edmonton. Alberta is about twice the size of Germany. ;) > Do LEDs really work for you? Mostly, yes. It's easy to buy halogens that all have pretty much the same good quality of light. LEDs you need balance CRI, R9, dimming quality, flickering, etc., but I've found LEDs that work for most of my use cases.

wheels 7y ago
Eek, yes, meant Edmonton -- typed too fast. Corrected.

jacquesm 7y ago

Good morning to you Scott, Much the same here, I never could keep a rhythm.

LargoLasskhyfv 7y ago

Try some of these: [1] https://www.osram.de/ecat/Professional%20LED-Lampen%20mit%20LED-Technologie%20im%20Gl%C3%BChwendel-Design-LED-Lampen-Lampen-Digital%20Systems/de/de/GPS01_3122242/PP_EUROPE_DE_eCat/ https://www.osram.de/ecat/Professional%20LED-Lampen%20mit%20... [2] https://www.osram.com/ecat/Professional%20LED%20lamps%20with%20filament-style%20LED%20technology-LED%20lamps-Lamps-Digital%20Systems/com/en/GPS01_3122242/PP_EUROPE_Europe_eCat/ https://www.osram.com/ecat/Professional%20LED%20lamps%20with... They work fine for me, while i'm considering myself sensitive to all sorts of flickering, or "strange" colors. Don't be afraid of the "professional", they aren't much more expensive, 8 to 9€ per piece instead of something like 4 to 6€ for the others. They make a warm light but are too bright to directly look into, even the candlelike things at only 2 Watts. I bought the first ones out of frustrations with broken CFLs maybe three to four years ago (not a single CFL lasted over a year!), their warmup times, noise, and such, as a test. Now the only other light i have is some flexible/movable Halogen spot light, which i rarely use. Anything else is that stuff from the links. It just works for me, while even saving some energy. So far no defects. Instant on. No noise. No flickering for me. They are commonly available. I got mine at the Bauhaus. Test one or two and see for yourself. Though you won't get a single thing with 500 Watts. They max out at 75W equivalent while using 8Watts. So you'd need many of them.

seltzered_ 7y ago

"I keep going back to halogen as the sweet-spot between black-body radiation and energy efficiency." Permies put out an article arguing for incandescent if your goal is light AND warmth: From https://richsoil.com/electric-heat.jsp https://richsoil.com/electric-heat.jsp - "This last one was the most important. A standard incandescent light bulb heats something to the point that it glows white hot. So I used this to heat myself and it doubled as a light source. And, I should point out that in a few months this light bulb will be banned by the US government. It is already banned in many countries. The comedy is that it is being banned to save energy. And yet, I think people can save far more energy by keeping it."

anewguy9000 7y ago
yup. like my low flow toilet that i need to flush twice...
- ars 7y ago
  Not anymore, technology has improved a lot! Get this one (or variant on it): https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B001KAFKRM https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B001KAFKRM I've owned it for 5 years and it's clogged only once (it happened in the first week of ownership) then never again. And one time (in 5 years) I needed to flush it twice.
  - jessaustin 7y ago
    That one is bragging about a 3" valve. There are other toilets available now that have 4" valves.
basilgohar 7y ago
But incandescent light bulbs are a terrible heat source from an efficiency perspective. You're losing an incredible amount from the power plant, to the transmission, and pretty much everything else. Once it arrives, yes, the energy gets converted nearly 100% to heat eventually, mostly in your proximity. But a heat pump or even gas heating is far more efficient if the goal is to get heat.

taneq 7y ago

> I fit the pattern of "Non-24 Sleep-Wake Disorder", with my sleep and waking times drifting progressively later at semi-regular intervals. This is a disorder now? I thought that's just how humans worked. It's how I work, anyway - if nothing else (like work, or children waking up at 5:30am) forces me to get up at a set time, I'll slowly cycle through until I'm going to bed at sun-up and waking up at 3pm.

SirHound 7y ago
No this isn’t typical. Are you particulary good at coping with jetlag?
- archi42 7y ago
  Out of curiosity: Assume the answer is yes?
- taneq 7y ago
  Depends which way I'm flying. :) Flying westwards is fine, I can absorb the extra hours without much noticing them. Flying eastwards is awful.
- dijit 7y ago
  I identify with the parent, and I've always been fine with "jet lag" to the point where I often don't even notice it or it only lasts until I go to bed the first night. (IE; Sweden->Los Angeles, the inverse is harder but not as hard as most people seem to have it, it knocks some colleagues out for an entire week)
  - taneq 7y ago
    A week? Yeah I'm scragged for a day if I'm losing hours on a flight (although this is exacerbated by the fact that if I'm flying east I'm usually going from my 'starts around 9ish' desk job to 'be on site by 6am' minesite commissioning, so I'm effectively waking up at 2am when I'm used to waking up at 8:30am) but after that I'm fine.
7y ago

osrec 7y ago

I'm going through this currently. It doesn't help that my inspiration for work can sometimes make me work through the night, which 'messes up' the following day. I'm my own boss, so can do this without repercussions, but I sometimes think I'd be more productive if I stuck to a more regimented sleep schedule. I did have a normal-ish sleep schedule when I had my job in finance, but I remember feeling exhausted all the time, especially weekday mornings. I certainly feel healthier now, just sleeping when I'm tired. On occasion this can mean missing a bunch of daylight. Not sure if that's actually all that healthy though...

wheels 7y ago
It sounds like we're similar. My personal, entirely unscientific self-diagnosis is that I have a well-defined circadian rhythm like most people, but it's easier for me to override by obsessive interest than for most people. Even sans coffee (which I'm pretty careful about as I near 40), if I'm really interested in something, I can work on it in a block of time up to and over 24 hours. Naturally that futzes with my sleep. My "tired-impulse" is relatively weak compared to my "this is exciting" or "people are waiting on this" impulse. Before I ran a company (about 1/3 of my career), I mostly managed to hold things down on a "normal" schedule, but I was always tired and frequently had performance reviews where the only complaint was my tardiness. There are some interesting data points: while camping (which I do a lot of -- several weeks per year), I do tend to sync up with the sun, even though in northern Europe that means waking up before 5:00 a.m. There's also limited screen time. (Though I did work from tent on a remote beach in Crete for a month this year.) I picked up some melatonin tablets in my wife's home country (where it doesn't require a prescription), and will experiment with that in the near future for I-really-need-to-sleep-now times, but as much as my sleep is weird, it's so intertwined with my personality now that I'm hesitant to medicate it away even given the chance.

bvinc 7y ago

You're probably never going to see this so I'll keep it short. I just want to say that your disorder might be due to a circadian rhythm disruption. Instead of just focusing on light, you should also focus on darkness. Try not to look at any unnatural light after sundown. If you want to cheat for convenience, they make red glasses that block all blue and green light which can interrupt your melatonin. You want to find red glasses that have barriers on the side to prevent the light from coming through from the sides. They sell 2 different kinds on Amazon. I found the effect to be very profound. You get tired quickly and when you fall asleep, you feel like you're in a coma and wake up refreshed. Unnatural light after sundown really does interrupt your sleep cycle.

parkerhoyes 7y ago

I have this disorder as well, it started when I was 11 or 12. I've tried every trick that sleep doctors recommend (literally, everything) but nothing works. The only way I was able to maintain a 24-hour sleep cycle though school was to drink coffee every morning and take sleep medication regularly (from the age of 12). That was enough to make my sleep cycle 24 hours, but it didn't improve my sleep quality, so I spent most of school in a significantly sleep deprived state (only getting 3-5 hours of sleep a night). That's a pretty miserable state to live in for an extended period of time. When I started living on my own and I was free to choose my own schedule, I decided to stop "forcing" myself onto a schedule that my body didn't agree with and instead let my sleep schedule naturally align with my circadian rhythms. It took about a month to get adjusted, but I remember waking up one morning and feeling like I had got my first full night's sleep in my entire life - it was an amazing feeling! Since then I've been living on a ~ 24h 50m sleep cycle and I sleep like a baby (8 - 9 hrs) every night. Interestingly enough, I've discovered that I'm actually a morning person, when I used to think I was a night owl. I'm very grateful that I have the freedom to choose my own schedule (I'm a remote-only contractor), I dread ever having to go back to a 24h sleep cycle. I haven't noticed much change in how I feel with seasons (I live in southern Ontario, Canada), but there's a big difference in my energy level depending on how much light I get in the morning (my mornings, not Earth mornings). If I don't get a good amount of bright light in the morning I feel sluggish and tired all day, regardless of how much sleep I got. If the sun's up when I wake up, I go for a run or walk every morning; otherwise I have about five 10,000 lux LED lights around my apartment that I turn on all morning (I have two right next to my desk in my peripheral vision, just like the person in the article). The LEDs are pretty weak, but they're enough if they're a few feet away from me. I start turning off all the lights and closing all the blinds in my apartment about 4 hours before bed or else it'll keep me up. I would be very interested in reading more research about the cause of Non-24 Hour Sleep-Wake Disorder in sighted people; as far as I'm aware there's very little research on the matter. I didn't even know it existed until last year, I expect some more research and awareness could be very helpful to people in the same boat.

_carl_jung 7y ago
What does it mean to be on a "24h 50m" sleep cycle? Does your sleep time progressively become later until you're nocturnal, then continue looping round until it returns to a "normal" night's sleep?

Hitton 7y ago

>I tend towards 400-500 watt halogen bulbs. Are those really 400-500 watt or just give light equivalent to 400-500 watts worth of incandescent light bulbs?

akvadrako 7y ago

You might want to try a 28-hour day.