14 ms·

Scientists discover how a common mutation leads to ‘night owl’ sleep disorder

211 points by Hooke 6y ago

forgotmypw17 6y ago
I stand by my opinion that calling a common evolutionary adaptation a disorder is abusive and disrespectful and needlessly oppressive, no different from treating women or gay as inferior. I do not have a fucking disorder! I just sleep differently! When I sleep as I need, I feel great! It's only when I tried to follow idiotic schedule which ignores seasons, natural cycles and variations, that I felt bad. Sleep schedule theory tries to cram a living, breathing being into oversimplified one size fits all box, with perilous consequences.
- archi42 6y ago
  I can understand the sentiment, but as someone who has the symptoms (though up until now I thought that's just a bad habit), I can assure you that this can be straining on social life, work life and relationships. Also better understanding this can help with social acceptance. Edit: E.g. yes, I stay up late but that's not because I don't care or want to be an ass or whatever; it's because I genuinely can not sleep for reasons outside of my control and going to bed at 10 or 11 is actually unhealthy for me. Medicating that or living with it is a different question.
  - Jon_Lowtek 6y ago
    Isn't it great how many people come out as affected in this thread alone? Maybe the common mutation is common.
    - archi42 6y ago
      You forgot "I checked my symptoms, it must be super-cancer" ;) Of course on HN we're all smart enough to be immune to it /s I could have been more precise that I deem this a mere possibility for myself, not a factum. I responded to the parent for the other reasons, but wanted to add some weight to my opinion because I can definitely relate to the symptoms, independent of the actual cause.
- ojnabieoot 6y ago
  > I do not have a fucking disorder! I just sleep differently! Ok, well, delayed phase sleep disorder is in fact a disorder that can lead to serious health problems, even when people are allowed to self-select their sleep schedules. One proposal for the mechanism is that the circadian cycle is longer than 24 hours, which is in fact a medical problem. Society didn’t make the day 24 hours long. People without DPSD can generally fall asleep earlier than normal if they are sleep-deprived, but not people with DPSD. DPSD is very different than normal “night owl” syndrome, and is not an issue of society refusing to acknowledge different schedules. Are you sure you even have DPSD? > abusive and disrespectful and needlessly oppressive, no different from treating women or gay as inferior. Please please please please stop trivializing misogyny and homophobia with these ridiculous and narcissistic comparisons. “No different” - reeeeeaaaalllllly? Things are more difficult socially and professionally for people with DPSD. But they don’t get killed for it! You don’t have people musing about how DPSD are duplicitous wenches who are running our culture.
  - forgotmypw17 6y ago
    don,t change the subject. you don,t know me. sleeping same hours every day is not a given.
    - Schiendelman 6y ago
      Hey - this kind of reply isn’t welcome on HN. Can you try to engage productively next time?
      - rat9988 6y ago
        Why do you think you have more rights to decide about what is welcome in HN than him?
        kekebo 6y ago
        I'm unable to read the flagged comment but there are formulated guidelines for submissions and comments on hn[0]. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- ascar 6y ago
  > I stand by my opinion that calling a common evolutionary adaptation a disorder is abusive and disrespectful and needlessly oppressive While I agree with the general statement and dislike that a disorder might give the implication that it is abnormal and needs treatment, I rather have it acknowledged as a disorder than being told to just go to bed earlier. It's not ideal, but definitely better than ignoring it.
  - teknopaul 6y ago
    Id rather not be told when to go to bed. Its like saying left handed people are wrong-handed. It's dangerous territory. Live and let live. Vive le difference.
    - NeutronStar 6y ago
      No-one is telling you to go to bed early tho. We're just noticing the fact that you function differently than others.
    - selestify 6y ago
      The problem is in coordinating with other people who are different. For example, meeting with someone else requires you both be awake.
- andai 6y ago
  > evolutionary adaptation ... seasons, natural cycles and variations I noticed the amount of sleep I need varies significantly. In the summer I usually do OK with 6-7 hours, in the winter I need 8-10. And it makes sense! In winter the days are short and food is scarce, so the best strategy is to save energy and wait for summer. My mood follows a similar seasonal cycle. On another note, I highly recommend the r/n24 (named after non-24 hour circadian rhythm) subreddit and their Discord for support and discussion on all kinds of sleep disorders. It was very validating for me to find people with the same struggles.
- pif 6y ago
  > I do not have a fucking disorder! From a medical point of view, maybe you don't have a disorder. From a social point of view, you DO have a disorder and not recognizing it will not make it disappear. While you have the right to adapt your sleep schedule to your genes, expeting the majority of people not to expect you to be productive at 8.00 AM is anti-social. As you named them, same goes for homosexuals. They do have the right to leave and love how they wish, but expecting the majority of people not to be insinctively disgusted by your sexual practices is anti-social. If there is something worse than the tiranny of the majority, it's the tiranny of the minority.
  - griffoa 6y ago
    The social order you speak of is a fictional construct that you choose to subscribe to.
    - pif 6y ago
      No! It's just the normality, from a statistical point of view. People have the right to expect statistical normality in other people. Respecting everyone is fundamental, but people cannot be required to anticipate anyone's quirk.
      - guerrilla 6y ago
        Stastically normal for the current culture, which is mutable.
        pif 6y ago
        So what? Social rules only matters in your intercations with people surrounding you now and here. We are not talking about dogmas!
        Udo 6y ago
        > We are not talking about dogmas! I'm not sure about that. To keep with the examples you stated earlier as being normative (namely being disgusted by homosexuality and being an early riser), for example, I am neither. Which according to your opinion is abnormal and should be shunned by society, because you consider not shunning homosexuals and nightowls anti-social. That sounds fairly dogmatic in these specific cases, and in general the attitude that minority behavior and tolerance of minority behavior should both be punished is itself a dogma. To be fair, I don't see how dogma is avoidable. My assertion that minority lifestyles should not be shunned as long as they don't harm anyone is also dogmatic. It's just that we all have a habit of calling principles we disagree with dogma. But if I had one shot to change your mind about this specific issue, my argument would be like this: there are so many opinions to be had and so many behaviors to engage in. Chances are, you are yourself also holding opinions or doing activities that are not shared by the majority. Do you consider those tendencies abnormal and anti-social? You may not like homosexuals or nightowls, but surely there are things where you diverge from the statistical everydayman? Would you then apply those policies of social repercussions to these activities by default because their existence threatens the integrity of the majority? And if so, why do you allow yourself those outlier behaviors, but don't apply the same tolerance to others?
- eps 6y ago
  I once casually mentioned that I wished a day was 25 hours long to my family doctor and he gave me a lecture on how the majority of population does in fact have a sleep cycle of at least 25 hours. That is, if I go to bed at 23:00, wake up on my own, then I will be able to fall asleep only at midnight. The only "fix" for this drift is to under-sleep each day, but that all but guarantees shitty and groggy first two hours. I really hate this, it's such a nuisance. The good news is that there is apparently a lot of us who are his way. Yaaay.
  - dijksterhuis 6y ago
    Seems Harvard scientists debunked this idea back in 1999? https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/1999/07/human-biological-clock-set-back-an-hour/ https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/1999/07/human-biologi...
    - eps 6y ago
      I don't know what they debunked, but I do know that if I follow my natural sleeping rhythm, the wake-up time keeps advancing by an hour a day. If I wake up an hour earlier to compensate for this, it's really hard and unpleasant to do and I feel like shit afterwards. So what I converged to is sleeping 2 hours less on weekdays and then sleep in on the weekends. This is marginally better, but still Fridays aren't very nice.
      - Contax 6y ago
        I'm like you. If left alone -no schedule at all- I will go to bed about one hour later everyday.
        bg4 6y ago
        This is exactly me and I've struggled with it since I was a child.
- srean 6y ago
  That was unnecessarily combative and melodramatic. There are better ways of making point, may be the expectation of politeness is "abusive and disrespectful" to you as well. The comment reeks of persecution complex
  - kilroy123 6y ago
    Maybe they didn't get enough last night?
    - srean 6y ago
      It was possibly meant as a joke but there well maybe some truth in it. As a long suffering insomniac, I am surely crabbier when I get worse sleep than the usual.
  - mxmilkb 6y ago
    Maybe they have actually been persecuted because of what their body naturally pefers sleep wise? I'm not surprised that someone who sounds like they've been bullied over this would have their upset show through when they speak about something that directly related to this.
  - eps 6y ago
    It's a humorous comment, with the funny bit being how over-exaggerated and pompous it sounds.
- znpy 6y ago
  > no different from treating women or gay as inferior. Jesus Christ are you serious? I've never heard of somebody getting beaten (possibly to death), getting mocked at work or fired or publicly shamed because they go to bed late and get up late, disorder or not. I've never heard of somebody getting paid less, be dismissed or denied the right to vote because of their sleep cycle. Do yourself a favor, shut the f up.
  - mxmilkb 6y ago
    "never heard of somebody getting paid less, be dismissed" You really actually cannot imagine (let alone you have not actually heard of) this? Maybe you just deep in a self selecting cohort.
    - znpy 6y ago
      well I have problems with getting up early myself, I don't need to imagine it, yet I wouldn't compare that to the hardships that homosexuals and women have suffered through history.
  - Xelbair 6y ago
    It was overdramaticized, but yeah - shorter lifespan, lifelong torture of being permanently tired, missing quite a lot of jobs(because they must start at 7am, no exceptions). Yeah, no parallels at all..
  - shard972 6y ago
    > I've never heard of somebody getting paid less, be dismissed or denied the right to vote because of their sleep cycle. I have, so shut it
  - dijksterhuis 6y ago
    > I've never heard of somebody > getting mocked at work ... > getting paid less ... I have! I was the lowest paid member of my team, yet a subject matter expert who the rest of the team frequently sought advice on a plethora of issues. But because I turned up 10-15 minutes late most days (I woke up 30-40 minutes prior) I was considered to be "lacking" in performance reviews. My bonus and my wage was tied to those performance reviews. I'm not going to argue it was the sole reason (it wasn't), but it definitely was a factor. Also there were a lot of jokes made about my time keeping in a large open plan office. Which was.... Uncomfortable. Have I ever been beaten for turning up late? No. Has someone somewhere in the world, in the last year, been beaten for not showing up to work on time? I'd probably bet £10 on that one. Edit... just to clarify, I don't agree with the original parent comment's comparisons to sexuality etc. But I also appreciate that sleep issues are a problem in our society that we are yet to deal with.
- PicassoCTs 6y ago
  Now, how can we fix this, and bring all these productive escapees back into the mindless, chattering, open-floor swamp the rest of us lurks during the day so our alpha male masters can keep up the illusion that there is a crowd to govern for a purpose? /s
- zajio1am 6y ago
  > I do not have a fucking disorder! I just sleep differently! It seems to me that if the issue is classified as medical disorder, it may have some advantages in relation with society, e.g. requirement for employers to accommodate it. It is generally much stronger position than 'it is just my preference'.
  - zepto 6y ago
    You are right, but that seems orthogonal to the poster’s comment. Preference and disorder are not the only two options. Difference is another one.
  - Jon_Lowtek 6y ago
    That is true, but also f'd up.
  - NeutronStar 6y ago
    Having a disorder isn't inherently bad. It just means your body decided it would be different.
lmilcin 6y ago
I wonder if European descent has something to do with this. Northern Europe is very far north compared to other countries. For example, if you look at the globe, half of people in Canada live at the same lattitude as Croatia. Europe is uniquely warm for its lattitude and it causes unique situation where we have strong growing season and very dark winters. If you are in agriculture, you would want to stay up for long in the winter to do some at home stuff.
- ojnabieoot 6y ago
  The data seems kind of mixed on that. I would guess that the variant had little selective pressure - being grouchy and tired all the time isn't enough to kill people or prevent them from reproducing. Here is the specific mutation in the gnomAD genome browser / variant database: https://gnomad.broadinstitute.org/variant/12-107386740-T-G?dataset=gnomad_r2_1 https://gnomad.broadinstitute.org/variant/12-107386740-T-G?d... The variant is particularly frequent in Ashkenazi Jews (which says very little about any selective effects), but it seems to be more prevalent in African-descent people than Finns, and more prevalent in South Asians than Europeans. So it doesn't seem especially common in Europeans, or even particularly related to latitude/longitude.
  - im3w1l 6y ago
    > being grouchy and tired all the time isn't enough to kill people or prevent them from reproducing. It may not be enough by itself, but it's easy to imagine it being the last straw so to speak. An alternative explanation could be that society needs a certain percent of night owls. That there is a niche in which it's beneficial.
    - ojnabieoot 6y ago
      It’s a huge mistake to go grasping for an adaptive explanation to every single mutation. The null hypothesis is that “this disorder doesn’t kill people before sexual maturity, or provide some reproductive gain” and there’s literally no evidence for anything else. You are speculating about a solution to something that isn’t actually a mystery. And as I said in another comment, the disorder this mutation causes is not normal “sleep late, wake late” night owl syndrome.
yttrious 6y ago
I‘m a scientist diagnosed with delayed sleep phase disorder (DSPD). I studied the related protein CRY2 for part of my PhD (ironically not why I joined the lab), and now I’m doing human genomics research. It’s encouraging that this recently described heritable mutation causing familial DSPD is getting more attention. Most normal chronotypes (non-night owls) don’t even know DSPD is a thing. The Facebook groups for DSPD are full of truly emotional stories about how hard life with DSPD is. They are also full of people connecting over relief and validation that we’re neither freaks nor consciously at fault for our late schedules. Unfortunately, accessible genetic testing is probably a long way away. It looks like 23andMe won’t tell you if you have this mutation; the variant rs184039278 that causes CRY1 Δ11 disappointingly isn’t part of their panel. Whole exome sequencing might work, or might not, depending on the capture kit. But if you suspect you have DSPD, my advice is to see a sleep doctor as soon as possible to get a diagnosis. You’ll get prescribed a morning light box like I did. Your brain will get tricked into thinking it’s later than it actually is. It’s not a cure, but life and the 9-5 should get a little bit easier.
- partyboat1586 6y ago
  Anyone looking for a cheap morning light box should consider a grow lamp. They are designed for plants but they work pretty well for humans too. You get a lot more power per dollar than the human ones which are usually at the bottom end of the required light output. If you pair it with a smart home relay (or microcontroller with relay module if you are so inclined) you can have it turn on automatically with your alarm. I use a 100W 16x16 LED array grow lamp and if you're within 3ft it feels like a sunny day. I also recommend if you think you might have DSPD that you get bloodwork for cortisol and prolactin. Some people who don't have the mutation still have the symptoms because their cortisol is permanently elevated (chronic stress) and only falls when they are exhausted. Both can be treated with a light box and relaxing activities in low light in the evening but if you have elevated cortisol you may also need to consider additional treatment option for chronic stress. It's also possible to have both because constantly being on a different sleep schedule to the rest of the world can cause chronic stress.
  - nottorp 6y ago
darkhorse13 6y ago
I pray that this becomes more well known and accepted. For as long as I could remember, I have been uncomfortable (to say the least) with a normal sleeping schedule. School life was literally the worst, having to wake up at 8am. And this stuff has to be genetic. My mother has it, and so does my sister. I have also heard anecdotes from my mother about her father struggling to sleep at night as well.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- justiceforsaas 6y ago
  As a night owl, I feel blessed that I have a flexible work-from-home job. If I was forced to get up at 6-7AM and travel, I'd be sleep-deprived for years. So hopefully with more companies offering permanent WFH options, this is going to become more well-accepted.
  - darkhorse13 6y ago
    This is truly a blessing. On my last job with normal working hours, I would be sleep deprived for weeks on end. I would literally sleep all day on the weekends. It was the worst, and I could only do it for 4 months.
DoreenMichele 6y ago
This is cool info and all but: “This tells us we should be looking for drugs that bind to that pocket and can serve the same purpose as the cryptochrome tail.” We don't yet know why this genetic variation exists, but we are leaping to the conclusion that we just need to drug these folks and force their bodies to work 'normally' and that's that. I wish I were in a position to expand on why I think that's problematic, but I'm not. Ironically, I'm incredibly short of sleep myself at the moment and need to go try to get more sleep.
- im3w1l 6y ago
  > We don't yet know why this genetic variation exists, but we are leaping to the conclusion that we just need to drug these folks and force their bodies to work 'normally' and that's that. The normal way to deal with that is to make the medicine available but optional.
  - yokto 6y ago
    > "Why is it normal?" > "Because it is normal."
    - im3w1l 6y ago
      The word usage "drug these people" "force their bodies", indicated to me that she hadn't even considered the possibility of just making it available without forcing it, so I thought mentioning how it's usually done would be helpful.
  - DoreenMichele 6y ago
    I have long used a metaphor I call "Pale Skin Disorder." Imagine a world in which being Caucasian is treated like a Genetic Disorder and the world acts like you are weird and broken for not tolerating sunlight as well as others. In this world, everyone runs around nearly naked under a tropical sun and people with Pale Skin Disorder are constantly sunburned to the point of peeling and routinely die at very young ages of malignant skin cancer. There's really a simple fix: Acting like being Caucasian is normal and covering up when out in the sun is normal etc. But not only will no one think of that solution if you view the issue as Pale Skin Disorder, the possibility that this fixes the problem will be actively and openly mocked while people decry what an inordinate burden it is to expect people to wear long sleeves and how desperately important it is to find a genetic intervention -- and never mind that genetic treatments are still new enough that we don't really know how awful the unintended side effects might be but we can guess "probably pretty freaking bad, to be honest."
loa_in_ 6y ago
Night guard job was essential for literally hundreds of generations. It's no surprise there are adaptations in the gene pool.
ascar 6y ago
School starting times are one of the worst things for night owls and I hope ongoing research helps to raise awareness and bring change so night owl kids don't needlessly have to suffer for 10+ years. I long thought having different school starting/ending times is the way to go. Like one cohort starting at 8 and another starting at 10 or even 11. Standing up at 8 is hard for me and I'm happy to be in a job where I can start working at 10, but here in Bavaria school starts at 08:15 and I had to set my alarm to 06:30 for a huge part of my life even tho I rarely fell asleep before 00:30,sometimes much later. The result was that I regularly missed a day of school, because I was just too tired to go. Luckily my parents were supportive. Also my performance on the 8am classes was much worse than on later classes. In university I skipped all 8am lectures and even skipped early exams and waited for a "better scheduled" exam. The worst part about it was how non-understanding all the early-birds are. They just didn't grasp that asking me to be awake and productive at 8am was like asking them to do work after 11pm and that "just go to bed earlier" isn't a working solution. Just ignorance of a different rythm.
- grishka 6y ago
  > Like one cohort starting at 8 and another starting at 10 or even 11. What about at 14 or something? 10 or 11 for me is still very inconveniently early. BTW where I'm from, schools usually start at 9:00. It was a torture for me to get up this early, and I was drowsy for the first couple classes.
  - Macha 6y ago
    Yeah, in secondary (high) school it was not uncommon for me to basically nap the first class or two. Luckily I got pretty good grades and was capable of self study to keep ahead of the content and no subject was consistently a morning class, so I had no worse consequences than a teacher asking my parents if I was doing OK at home.
  - ascar 6y ago
    I mentioned 10 or 11, because I believe a shift of a couple of hours (by 1 or 2 classes) already brings a tremendous benefit for many students, while having only a small impact on the schools organization and other social activites of students (like late afternoon club activities). So while not ideal, I think the change is actually easily implementable without too many negative consequences. Personally, I would be even more productive in an afternoon only school. I did work for a while from 1pm to 8pm and I really enjoyed how rested I was, but this schedule definitely limits available club activites.
grishka 6y ago
Oh so it's genetic. Don't know if it's that or something else, but I have this weird problem that it's as if my biological clock day is a bit longer than 24 hours. So if I don't discipline myself, if I go to bed whenever I want and wake up without an alarm, my sleep schedule goes to crap fairly quickly. Even if I do, it still drifts somewhat. At some point it becomes so bad that my waking hours are at night and vice versa. I then have to fix it by forcing myself to stay up all day because I live in a society that sleeps at night after all. Waking up for school and then university was a torture for me, too, but at least that kept my sleep schedule in check somewhat at the price of only ever getting enough sleep on the weekends.
- globular-toast 6y ago
  It's really common among our types. There's an xkcd about it, naturally: https://xkcd.com/448/ https://xkcd.com/448/ I do wonder, though. Is it that we're different, or is it just that we have a hobby that can easily keep us awake slightly longer than we should be night on night? Maybe more people have the same innate tendency to slip, but they have structures that keep them more on track, like watching scheduled TV etc. It would be interesting to see if there are more cases of bad sleeping patterns now that on-demand TV is more popular.
  - grishka 6y ago
    Most jobs require physical presence, synchronous communication, or both. IT requires neither despite what some managers say, so this is what sets us apart IMO. We're able to work detached from the rest of the society most of the time. There of course are owls among non-IT people, but they never have the freedom to break their sleep schedule like we do.
- sergeykish 6y ago
  I was night owl until I had a son. Now I'm falling asleep at 10 PM and enjoy sunrise. Maybe it is not always genetic.
  - arpa 6y ago
wcoenen 6y ago
The article talks about different papers. The newest paper is about the mechanism of the molecular clock, but the one that found the mutation is "Mutation of the Human Circadian Clock Gene CRY1 in Familial Delayed Sleep Phase Disorder" from 2017. The mutation is described in that last paper as "CRY1 c.1657+3A>C". I'm a pretty bad night owl, so I'm currently trying to figure out whether my 23andme data can tell me anything about that locus. update: I think the CRY1 gene location is chromosome 12, position range 106,991,364 - 107,093,872, and I guess the "1657" is an offset from either the start or the end. But I don't seem to have any raw 23andme data (genotyping chip v2) in that range. On the other hand, I do get some SNPs if I search for "CRY1" via their website, so I'm obviously doing something wrong.
- wcoenen 6y ago
  update 2: SNPedia has the mutation listed as Rs184039278. I don't have data about it, but maybe newer versions of the 23andme chip or other genotyping platforms do. https://www.snpedia.com/index.php/Rs184039278 https://www.snpedia.com/index.php/Rs184039278
- herf 6y ago
  23andme doesn't report missense variants, so it doesn't report this.
  - wcoenen 6y ago
    I'm a little confused by your comment. As far as I understand, a "missense" mutation is a basic one nucleotide change which results in a change of one amino acid for the encoded protein. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missense_mutation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missense_mutation 23andme uses a "Illumina Infinium Global Screening Array" to find single nucleotide changes at certain locations, so isn't that exactly the type of thing they are detecting?
Kim_Bruning 6y ago
Imagine a world where no one would want to take the night shift. I always thought Early Bird/Night Owl were just two different modes, like right or left handedness. But while right and left handedness appear to be +/- selectively neutral (these days at least), a percentage of night owls in society would appear to confer a selective advantage. Having a potential oral medication would give night owls a new superpower: An ability to switch shifts at the drop of the hat; or at least much more easily than the early birds. In industrial programming you often need to take the customer's shifts into account; so this could be useful to a few colleagues of mine!
nicolas_t 6y ago
Do we have the SNP on SNPedia for this mutation? As a night owl (I tend to sleep later and later every night until 6-7am at which point I try to force myself to sleep early again and get jetlagged for a few days), I'm very curious if I have it...
nottorp 6y ago
Why a "sleep disorder"? I like it that way.
marvin 6y ago
I always tend to fall asleep after midnight. 00:30 on weekdays where I have to force myself to get out of bed to get to work, 02:30 on holidays or self-employed periods where I can allow myself to follow a rhythm that's closer to natural. I am most alert between 18:00 and 01:00. I am barely able to do brainy work before 12:00, and have just given up on trying to force it. If I'm forced to get up early multiple days in a row, my rhythm will shift slightly, but it comes back after a few days if there is no pressure. My partner is the opposite. She'll be almost comically tired after 22:00, but will normally wake up around 05:00 and be super alert in the morning. Sometimes even earlier. On our natural rhythms, we will cover all but two or three hours of the day awake, mostly with one person who is alert and performs excellently. This would be ridiculously useful in a more dangerous world than modern civilian society, and it comes in super useful on days when the routine is out of the ordinary. An active holiday, long car trips, errands that need to happen on odd hours etc. It's not a disorder, it's an adaption. At least unless it gets more extreme than our experience. If society doesn't fit, then screw society. Honestly. Make room for those who don't hit the median, please.
- JesseMReeves 6y ago
  What will happen is that big pharma will throw some pills on the market and do heavy marketing claiming that nightowlism is a severe disease that needs to be treated with “changing brain chemistry”, and night owls will be labeled as mentally ill or of weak character by society forever for their evolutionary adaptation. It already happens to an extend, night owls who can’t use their peak productivity hours around 2am because they have to adhere to some artificial schedule (often made by people who don’t have to do a lot of brainy things) are often on smart drugs during the day.
ainiriand 6y ago
This is why we have naps. My brother's wife can't live without them.
globular-toast 6y ago
I've always been a night owl. All the way into my late 20s I never got up earlier than midday and went to sleep in the small hours. But now I don't. I get up at the same time every day and try not to stay up too late at night. This has dramatically improved my happiness and performance. Back then I used to be depressed. It's a lonely life when you're nocturnal. There were days in the winter where I literally wouldn't see any daylight for days at a time. I remember reading about delayed sleep phase disorder and non-24 disorder and thinking I must have it. It made me think this was somewhat normal and even made me think I might be a victim of sorts. But really what has fixed this for me is just discipline and structure. No drugs. No therapy. No crying about my woes and how difficult it is for someone like me. Just good old-fashioned discipline.
- foldr 6y ago
  I've similarly shifted my sleep patterns to more normal hours compared to my 20s, but I think a lot of it is just down to a natural shift in sleep cycles with age. At least, I tried quite hard to change my sleep patterns in my 20s and failed, whereas now in my 30s they've changed without much effort on my part.
leto_ii 6y ago
Somewhere in a parallel universe: "Scientists discover how a common mutation leads to ‘early bird’ sleep disorder A new study by researchers at UC Santa Cruz shows how a genetic mutation throws off the timing of the biological clock, causing a common sleep syndrome called anticipated sleep phase disorder. People with this condition are unable to stay awake until later in the evening (often falling asleep before 10 p.m.) and get up abnormally early in the morning..." I'm sort of joking, but not quite. I can't think of an objective reason why being a 'night owl' is biologically an abnormality/deficiency. As many other commenters have pointed out, daily rhythms are socially/culturally imposed, not so much biologically determined. There are many cultures (think of Mediterranean ones for example) where people routinely have late dinners and go to bed after midnight. Hard to imagine that entire countries are just biologically abnormal.
- Jon_Lowtek 6y ago
  It's not limited to human cultures, many mammals are night-active, not only owls. Society must stop calling such variations genetic abnormalities/deficiencies.
- thotsBgone 6y ago
  > I'm sort of joking, but not quite. I can't think of an objective reason why being a 'night owl' is biologically an abnormality/deficiency. It leads to being awake during dark hours, and humans do not have night vision. Also Advanced Sleep Phase Disorder, while less common, is also a thing and also leads to being awake during dark hours.
  - leto_ii 6y ago
    > It leads to being awake during dark hours, and humans do not have night vision. Humans most definitely can see at night. Not as well as other animals, but we can do it. People also tend to actually stay awake in the dark, otherwise our sleeping times would vary quite a bit throughout the year - by this logic, if you live further up North you would have to sleep (almost) continuously throughout the winter.
varispeed 6y ago
I naturally go to sleep about 3am and wake up 9am. I tried different hours, but it was unsustainable. I would feel terrible the whole day as it is just to possible for me to fall asleep let's say at 11pm or even 1am. This was a horror for me and actually prompted to start my own business so I could be in charge of when I work. I was only able to find one employer before that, who was happy for me to come to work at 10 or 11. Different employers after a period of time would report that other staff feel that I am getting privileges and they also would want to come "when they please". So that would end up with me quitting. It's a shame that somehow 9-5 is embedded in our culture so strongly if you want to oppose it you are being viewed as if you were saying a blasphemy!
- the_only_law 6y ago
  Years ago, I used to work a night shift job. Naturally this meant I had to shift my sleep to mostly day time hours. Around the time I noticed something interesting. People around me (friends, family) considered me lazy, avoidant etc. because while they would be doing things all day I was mostly trying to catch some sleep. I always found to odd, because most of these people knew I worked nights too.
  - varispeed 6y ago
    That's perfect example of lazy thinking. They would see you catching sleep, but would never see you work and in their brain this would form as "he is lazy". The information that you work night shifts would get registered, but they would have to be informed with the same frequency as they see you sleep that you worked a night shift, otherwise after a day or two they would revert to thinking you are lazy. It is quite fascinating. I had the same problem with my partner - that is she would work night shifts and she wouldn't see me doing anything around the house, but I would do all the chores all the time. So if she came home in the evening and saw a little bit of rubbish that accumulated since the morning she would start making argument that I don't clean the house, but in the morning I did clean it. It helped when I started making a log on a sheet fixed to the fridge. I would always show her the log when she would come home. At the same time I had a feeling that she is not doing much and that I am doing all the chores. I wouldn't acknowledge that over the weekend she would do general cleaning as well that would take her almost as much time as myself doing chores over the week.
tehchromic 6y ago
Call it a mutational disorder if you will, I think I'm nocturnal mutant and proud of it. Use of the the word "disorder" throughout is highly retrograde and silly. It's part of the human genome and like all genetic mutation it's value is relative to selective pressure. But why should we not value individuals who have nocturnal tendencies as strategic advantage in the spectrum of human ability? Personality I must have inherited an extreme form of this mutation from my grandmother, who always seemed very proud of her nightowlishness. We often encountered eachother happily up to something or other past 2am. On the other hand the outside world has been a challenge. I'm not really awake until 11am. Highschool was pure hell. I was always late to class and always in trouble for it. In college I worked night jobs and took late classes. A few times I made up my mind to let go of making myself wake up or go to bed at certain times and let my natural cycle happen. Within two weeks I was very happily awake until almost dawn every night and up at 2ish.
rendall 6y ago
I had this pretty bad for decades, but I don't have it any more. I'm not sure how that reconciles with its being a genetic mutation, but if anyone were to tell me that I am genetically nocturnal I would absolutely believe it. Starting in my teens for decades, I would regularly be wide awake at 4 in the morning, and if I had a choice, my clock would drift so that I would naturally wake up around 1 in the afternoon. I read an article on, I think it was LifeHacker, back when it was a new thing years and years and years ago. The title was something like "I taught myself to be an early riser" and the advice changed my life. If I could find the article, I would write a personal letter thanking the author. Given my experience, I suspect that even if you do have a genetic predisposition to stay up late and sleep late, that it can be reset, so you can wake up as early as you want. Nowadays, I rarely sleep past 7 in the morning, and I never need an alarm to wake up. I wake up reasonably cheerful and clear-headed. Here's the advice, as I remember it. It may work for you. 1. First, want to be an early riser. In a way, that's the only step. When you wake up in the morning, your desire to be an early riser must override the physical pain and exhaustion that you will inevitably feel. You're going to want to roll over and go back under those warm, warm covers. No. Get up. Because you want this. 2. Stay up as late as you want! Yep. Read, play video games, code, do whatever it is you want to do as late as you want to do it. Heck, don't go to sleep if you want. Go to sleep only when you're ready. Those two steps are basically it, and anything else is just elaboration. If you stay up late, you will feel miserable the next day, but that's okay! Grind through. There are worse things. That night, when you start feeling peppy again, great! Stay up. Stay up as late as you want. But stick solidly to rule #1. Get up, because you want it. Eventually, after the inevitable bouts of backsliding and days of exhaustion, your body will adjust to the new schedule and ... go to sleep at a more normal time. You should start to see results within the first week, but I can say that I only could reasonably say I'm an early riser after several years of wanting it. Edit --- this is it! This is the article! https://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/05/how-to-become-an-early-riser/ https://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/05/how-to-become-an-e... I modified his method, in that I no longer use alarm clocks, and I allow myself to wake up slowly as long as I'm out of bed by 7
SubiculumCode 6y ago
"mutation" or adaptive gene for night time predators
weirdkid 6y ago
WFH orders during COVID19 have been a kind of blessing, with regard to my DSPD. I can sleep in an extra hour or two and hit that 8AM meeting 5 minutes after I wake up. When we have to go back to the office in June, I'm going to have a problem though. I work in tech, but I live in Michigan and work for the auto industry where the norm seems to be to wake up at 4 and start work with the farmers at 6 AM. I'm a "late" morning person since I prefer to start at 8 or 9. This has been held against me my entire 25 year career. 15 more to go and then I can sleep how the hell I want.

211 points by Hooke 6y ago

I stand by my opinion that calling a common evolutionary adaptation a disorder is abusive and disrespectful and needlessly oppressive, no different from treating women or gay as inferior. I do not have a fucking disorder! I just sleep differently! When I sleep as I need, I feel great! It's only when I tried to follow idiotic schedule which ignores seasons, natural cycles and variations, that I felt bad. Sleep schedule theory tries to cram a living, breathing being into oversimplified one size fits all box, with perilous consequences.

archi42 6y ago
I can understand the sentiment, but as someone who has the symptoms (though up until now I thought that's just a bad habit), I can assure you that this can be straining on social life, work life and relationships. Also better understanding this can help with social acceptance. Edit: E.g. yes, I stay up late but that's not because I don't care or want to be an ass or whatever; it's because I genuinely can not sleep for reasons outside of my control and going to bed at 10 or 11 is actually unhealthy for me. Medicating that or living with it is a different question.
- Jon_Lowtek 6y ago
  Isn't it great how many people come out as affected in this thread alone? Maybe the common mutation is common.
  - archi42 6y ago
    You forgot "I checked my symptoms, it must be super-cancer" ;) Of course on HN we're all smart enough to be immune to it /s I could have been more precise that I deem this a mere possibility for myself, not a factum. I responded to the parent for the other reasons, but wanted to add some weight to my opinion because I can definitely relate to the symptoms, independent of the actual cause.
ojnabieoot 6y ago
> I do not have a fucking disorder! I just sleep differently! Ok, well, delayed phase sleep disorder is in fact a disorder that can lead to serious health problems, even when people are allowed to self-select their sleep schedules. One proposal for the mechanism is that the circadian cycle is longer than 24 hours, which is in fact a medical problem. Society didn’t make the day 24 hours long. People without DPSD can generally fall asleep earlier than normal if they are sleep-deprived, but not people with DPSD. DPSD is very different than normal “night owl” syndrome, and is not an issue of society refusing to acknowledge different schedules. Are you sure you even have DPSD? > abusive and disrespectful and needlessly oppressive, no different from treating women or gay as inferior. Please please please please stop trivializing misogyny and homophobia with these ridiculous and narcissistic comparisons. “No different” - reeeeeaaaalllllly? Things are more difficult socially and professionally for people with DPSD. But they don’t get killed for it! You don’t have people musing about how DPSD are duplicitous wenches who are running our culture.
- forgotmypw17 6y ago
  don,t change the subject. you don,t know me. sleeping same hours every day is not a given.
  - Schiendelman 6y ago
    Hey - this kind of reply isn’t welcome on HN. Can you try to engage productively next time?
    - rat9988 6y ago
      Why do you think you have more rights to decide about what is welcome in HN than him?
      - kekebo 6y ago
        I'm unable to read the flagged comment but there are formulated guidelines for submissions and comments on hn[0]. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
ascar 6y ago
> I stand by my opinion that calling a common evolutionary adaptation a disorder is abusive and disrespectful and needlessly oppressive While I agree with the general statement and dislike that a disorder might give the implication that it is abnormal and needs treatment, I rather have it acknowledged as a disorder than being told to just go to bed earlier. It's not ideal, but definitely better than ignoring it.
- teknopaul 6y ago
  Id rather not be told when to go to bed. Its like saying left handed people are wrong-handed. It's dangerous territory. Live and let live. Vive le difference.
  - NeutronStar 6y ago
    No-one is telling you to go to bed early tho. We're just noticing the fact that you function differently than others.
  - selestify 6y ago
    The problem is in coordinating with other people who are different. For example, meeting with someone else requires you both be awake.
andai 6y ago
> evolutionary adaptation ... seasons, natural cycles and variations I noticed the amount of sleep I need varies significantly. In the summer I usually do OK with 6-7 hours, in the winter I need 8-10. And it makes sense! In winter the days are short and food is scarce, so the best strategy is to save energy and wait for summer. My mood follows a similar seasonal cycle. On another note, I highly recommend the r/n24 (named after non-24 hour circadian rhythm) subreddit and their Discord for support and discussion on all kinds of sleep disorders. It was very validating for me to find people with the same struggles.
pif 6y ago
> I do not have a fucking disorder! From a medical point of view, maybe you don't have a disorder. From a social point of view, you DO have a disorder and not recognizing it will not make it disappear. While you have the right to adapt your sleep schedule to your genes, expeting the majority of people not to expect you to be productive at 8.00 AM is anti-social. As you named them, same goes for homosexuals. They do have the right to leave and love how they wish, but expecting the majority of people not to be insinctively disgusted by your sexual practices is anti-social. If there is something worse than the tiranny of the majority, it's the tiranny of the minority.
- griffoa 6y ago
  The social order you speak of is a fictional construct that you choose to subscribe to.
  - pif 6y ago
    No! It's just the normality, from a statistical point of view. People have the right to expect statistical normality in other people. Respecting everyone is fundamental, but people cannot be required to anticipate anyone's quirk.
    - guerrilla 6y ago
      Stastically normal for the current culture, which is mutable.
      - pif 6y ago
        So what? Social rules only matters in your intercations with people surrounding you now and here. We are not talking about dogmas!
        Udo 6y ago
        > We are not talking about dogmas! I'm not sure about that. To keep with the examples you stated earlier as being normative (namely being disgusted by homosexuality and being an early riser), for example, I am neither. Which according to your opinion is abnormal and should be shunned by society, because you consider not shunning homosexuals and nightowls anti-social. That sounds fairly dogmatic in these specific cases, and in general the attitude that minority behavior and tolerance of minority behavior should both be punished is itself a dogma. To be fair, I don't see how dogma is avoidable. My assertion that minority lifestyles should not be shunned as long as they don't harm anyone is also dogmatic. It's just that we all have a habit of calling principles we disagree with dogma. But if I had one shot to change your mind about this specific issue, my argument would be like this: there are so many opinions to be had and so many behaviors to engage in. Chances are, you are yourself also holding opinions or doing activities that are not shared by the majority. Do you consider those tendencies abnormal and anti-social? You may not like homosexuals or nightowls, but surely there are things where you diverge from the statistical everydayman? Would you then apply those policies of social repercussions to these activities by default because their existence threatens the integrity of the majority? And if so, why do you allow yourself those outlier behaviors, but don't apply the same tolerance to others?
eps 6y ago
I once casually mentioned that I wished a day was 25 hours long to my family doctor and he gave me a lecture on how the majority of population does in fact have a sleep cycle of at least 25 hours. That is, if I go to bed at 23:00, wake up on my own, then I will be able to fall asleep only at midnight. The only "fix" for this drift is to under-sleep each day, but that all but guarantees shitty and groggy first two hours. I really hate this, it's such a nuisance. The good news is that there is apparently a lot of us who are his way. Yaaay.
- dijksterhuis 6y ago
  Seems Harvard scientists debunked this idea back in 1999? https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/1999/07/human-biological-clock-set-back-an-hour/ https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/1999/07/human-biologi...
  - eps 6y ago
    I don't know what they debunked, but I do know that if I follow my natural sleeping rhythm, the wake-up time keeps advancing by an hour a day. If I wake up an hour earlier to compensate for this, it's really hard and unpleasant to do and I feel like shit afterwards. So what I converged to is sleeping 2 hours less on weekdays and then sleep in on the weekends. This is marginally better, but still Fridays aren't very nice.
    - Contax 6y ago
      I'm like you. If left alone -no schedule at all- I will go to bed about one hour later everyday.
      - bg4 6y ago
        This is exactly me and I've struggled with it since I was a child.
srean 6y ago
That was unnecessarily combative and melodramatic. There are better ways of making point, may be the expectation of politeness is "abusive and disrespectful" to you as well. The comment reeks of persecution complex
- kilroy123 6y ago
  Maybe they didn't get enough last night?
  - srean 6y ago
    It was possibly meant as a joke but there well maybe some truth in it. As a long suffering insomniac, I am surely crabbier when I get worse sleep than the usual.
- mxmilkb 6y ago
  Maybe they have actually been persecuted because of what their body naturally pefers sleep wise? I'm not surprised that someone who sounds like they've been bullied over this would have their upset show through when they speak about something that directly related to this.
- eps 6y ago
  It's a humorous comment, with the funny bit being how over-exaggerated and pompous it sounds.
znpy 6y ago
> no different from treating women or gay as inferior. Jesus Christ are you serious? I've never heard of somebody getting beaten (possibly to death), getting mocked at work or fired or publicly shamed because they go to bed late and get up late, disorder or not. I've never heard of somebody getting paid less, be dismissed or denied the right to vote because of their sleep cycle. Do yourself a favor, shut the f up.
- mxmilkb 6y ago
  "never heard of somebody getting paid less, be dismissed" You really actually cannot imagine (let alone you have not actually heard of) this? Maybe you just deep in a self selecting cohort.
  - znpy 6y ago
    well I have problems with getting up early myself, I don't need to imagine it, yet I wouldn't compare that to the hardships that homosexuals and women have suffered through history.
- Xelbair 6y ago
  It was overdramaticized, but yeah - shorter lifespan, lifelong torture of being permanently tired, missing quite a lot of jobs(because they must start at 7am, no exceptions). Yeah, no parallels at all..
- shard972 6y ago
  > I've never heard of somebody getting paid less, be dismissed or denied the right to vote because of their sleep cycle. I have, so shut it
- dijksterhuis 6y ago
  > I've never heard of somebody > getting mocked at work ... > getting paid less ... I have! I was the lowest paid member of my team, yet a subject matter expert who the rest of the team frequently sought advice on a plethora of issues. But because I turned up 10-15 minutes late most days (I woke up 30-40 minutes prior) I was considered to be "lacking" in performance reviews. My bonus and my wage was tied to those performance reviews. I'm not going to argue it was the sole reason (it wasn't), but it definitely was a factor. Also there were a lot of jokes made about my time keeping in a large open plan office. Which was.... Uncomfortable. Have I ever been beaten for turning up late? No. Has someone somewhere in the world, in the last year, been beaten for not showing up to work on time? I'd probably bet £10 on that one. Edit... just to clarify, I don't agree with the original parent comment's comparisons to sexuality etc. But I also appreciate that sleep issues are a problem in our society that we are yet to deal with.
PicassoCTs 6y ago
Now, how can we fix this, and bring all these productive escapees back into the mindless, chattering, open-floor swamp the rest of us lurks during the day so our alpha male masters can keep up the illusion that there is a crowd to govern for a purpose? /s
zajio1am 6y ago
> I do not have a fucking disorder! I just sleep differently! It seems to me that if the issue is classified as medical disorder, it may have some advantages in relation with society, e.g. requirement for employers to accommodate it. It is generally much stronger position than 'it is just my preference'.
- zepto 6y ago
  You are right, but that seems orthogonal to the poster’s comment. Preference and disorder are not the only two options. Difference is another one.
- Jon_Lowtek 6y ago
  That is true, but also f'd up.
- NeutronStar 6y ago
  Having a disorder isn't inherently bad. It just means your body decided it would be different.

lmilcin 6y ago

I wonder if European descent has something to do with this. Northern Europe is very far north compared to other countries. For example, if you look at the globe, half of people in Canada live at the same lattitude as Croatia. Europe is uniquely warm for its lattitude and it causes unique situation where we have strong growing season and very dark winters. If you are in agriculture, you would want to stay up for long in the winter to do some at home stuff.

ojnabieoot 6y ago
The data seems kind of mixed on that. I would guess that the variant had little selective pressure - being grouchy and tired all the time isn't enough to kill people or prevent them from reproducing. Here is the specific mutation in the gnomAD genome browser / variant database: https://gnomad.broadinstitute.org/variant/12-107386740-T-G?dataset=gnomad_r2_1 https://gnomad.broadinstitute.org/variant/12-107386740-T-G?d... The variant is particularly frequent in Ashkenazi Jews (which says very little about any selective effects), but it seems to be more prevalent in African-descent people than Finns, and more prevalent in South Asians than Europeans. So it doesn't seem especially common in Europeans, or even particularly related to latitude/longitude.
- im3w1l 6y ago
  > being grouchy and tired all the time isn't enough to kill people or prevent them from reproducing. It may not be enough by itself, but it's easy to imagine it being the last straw so to speak. An alternative explanation could be that society needs a certain percent of night owls. That there is a niche in which it's beneficial.
  - ojnabieoot 6y ago
    It’s a huge mistake to go grasping for an adaptive explanation to every single mutation. The null hypothesis is that “this disorder doesn’t kill people before sexual maturity, or provide some reproductive gain” and there’s literally no evidence for anything else. You are speculating about a solution to something that isn’t actually a mystery. And as I said in another comment, the disorder this mutation causes is not normal “sleep late, wake late” night owl syndrome.

yttrious 6y ago

I‘m a scientist diagnosed with delayed sleep phase disorder (DSPD). I studied the related protein CRY2 for part of my PhD (ironically not why I joined the lab), and now I’m doing human genomics research. It’s encouraging that this recently described heritable mutation causing familial DSPD is getting more attention. Most normal chronotypes (non-night owls) don’t even know DSPD is a thing. The Facebook groups for DSPD are full of truly emotional stories about how hard life with DSPD is. They are also full of people connecting over relief and validation that we’re neither freaks nor consciously at fault for our late schedules. Unfortunately, accessible genetic testing is probably a long way away. It looks like 23andMe won’t tell you if you have this mutation; the variant rs184039278 that causes CRY1 Δ11 disappointingly isn’t part of their panel. Whole exome sequencing might work, or might not, depending on the capture kit. But if you suspect you have DSPD, my advice is to see a sleep doctor as soon as possible to get a diagnosis. You’ll get prescribed a morning light box like I did. Your brain will get tricked into thinking it’s later than it actually is. It’s not a cure, but life and the 9-5 should get a little bit easier.

partyboat1586 6y ago
Anyone looking for a cheap morning light box should consider a grow lamp. They are designed for plants but they work pretty well for humans too. You get a lot more power per dollar than the human ones which are usually at the bottom end of the required light output. If you pair it with a smart home relay (or microcontroller with relay module if you are so inclined) you can have it turn on automatically with your alarm. I use a 100W 16x16 LED array grow lamp and if you're within 3ft it feels like a sunny day. I also recommend if you think you might have DSPD that you get bloodwork for cortisol and prolactin. Some people who don't have the mutation still have the symptoms because their cortisol is permanently elevated (chronic stress) and only falls when they are exhausted. Both can be treated with a light box and relaxing activities in low light in the evening but if you have elevated cortisol you may also need to consider additional treatment option for chronic stress. It's also possible to have both because constantly being on a different sleep schedule to the rest of the world can cause chronic stress.
- nottorp 6y ago

darkhorse13 6y ago

I pray that this becomes more well known and accepted. For as long as I could remember, I have been uncomfortable (to say the least) with a normal sleeping schedule. School life was literally the worst, having to wake up at 8am. And this stuff has to be genetic. My mother has it, and so does my sister. I have also heard anecdotes from my mother about her father struggling to sleep at night as well.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
justiceforsaas 6y ago
As a night owl, I feel blessed that I have a flexible work-from-home job. If I was forced to get up at 6-7AM and travel, I'd be sleep-deprived for years. So hopefully with more companies offering permanent WFH options, this is going to become more well-accepted.
- darkhorse13 6y ago
  This is truly a blessing. On my last job with normal working hours, I would be sleep deprived for weeks on end. I would literally sleep all day on the weekends. It was the worst, and I could only do it for 4 months.

DoreenMichele 6y ago

This is cool info and all but: “This tells us we should be looking for drugs that bind to that pocket and can serve the same purpose as the cryptochrome tail.” We don't yet know why this genetic variation exists, but we are leaping to the conclusion that we just need to drug these folks and force their bodies to work 'normally' and that's that. I wish I were in a position to expand on why I think that's problematic, but I'm not. Ironically, I'm incredibly short of sleep myself at the moment and need to go try to get more sleep.

im3w1l 6y ago
> We don't yet know why this genetic variation exists, but we are leaping to the conclusion that we just need to drug these folks and force their bodies to work 'normally' and that's that. The normal way to deal with that is to make the medicine available but optional.
- yokto 6y ago
  > "Why is it normal?" > "Because it is normal."
  - im3w1l 6y ago
    The word usage "drug these people" "force their bodies", indicated to me that she hadn't even considered the possibility of just making it available without forcing it, so I thought mentioning how it's usually done would be helpful.
- DoreenMichele 6y ago
  I have long used a metaphor I call "Pale Skin Disorder." Imagine a world in which being Caucasian is treated like a Genetic Disorder and the world acts like you are weird and broken for not tolerating sunlight as well as others. In this world, everyone runs around nearly naked under a tropical sun and people with Pale Skin Disorder are constantly sunburned to the point of peeling and routinely die at very young ages of malignant skin cancer. There's really a simple fix: Acting like being Caucasian is normal and covering up when out in the sun is normal etc. But not only will no one think of that solution if you view the issue as Pale Skin Disorder, the possibility that this fixes the problem will be actively and openly mocked while people decry what an inordinate burden it is to expect people to wear long sleeves and how desperately important it is to find a genetic intervention -- and never mind that genetic treatments are still new enough that we don't really know how awful the unintended side effects might be but we can guess "probably pretty freaking bad, to be honest."

loa_in_ 6y ago

Night guard job was essential for literally hundreds of generations. It's no surprise there are adaptations in the gene pool.

ascar 6y ago

School starting times are one of the worst things for night owls and I hope ongoing research helps to raise awareness and bring change so night owl kids don't needlessly have to suffer for 10+ years. I long thought having different school starting/ending times is the way to go. Like one cohort starting at 8 and another starting at 10 or even 11. Standing up at 8 is hard for me and I'm happy to be in a job where I can start working at 10, but here in Bavaria school starts at 08:15 and I had to set my alarm to 06:30 for a huge part of my life even tho I rarely fell asleep before 00:30,sometimes much later. The result was that I regularly missed a day of school, because I was just too tired to go. Luckily my parents were supportive. Also my performance on the 8am classes was much worse than on later classes. In university I skipped all 8am lectures and even skipped early exams and waited for a "better scheduled" exam. The worst part about it was how non-understanding all the early-birds are. They just didn't grasp that asking me to be awake and productive at 8am was like asking them to do work after 11pm and that "just go to bed earlier" isn't a working solution. Just ignorance of a different rythm.

grishka 6y ago
> Like one cohort starting at 8 and another starting at 10 or even 11. What about at 14 or something? 10 or 11 for me is still very inconveniently early. BTW where I'm from, schools usually start at 9:00. It was a torture for me to get up this early, and I was drowsy for the first couple classes.
- Macha 6y ago
  Yeah, in secondary (high) school it was not uncommon for me to basically nap the first class or two. Luckily I got pretty good grades and was capable of self study to keep ahead of the content and no subject was consistently a morning class, so I had no worse consequences than a teacher asking my parents if I was doing OK at home.
- ascar 6y ago
  I mentioned 10 or 11, because I believe a shift of a couple of hours (by 1 or 2 classes) already brings a tremendous benefit for many students, while having only a small impact on the schools organization and other social activites of students (like late afternoon club activities). So while not ideal, I think the change is actually easily implementable without too many negative consequences. Personally, I would be even more productive in an afternoon only school. I did work for a while from 1pm to 8pm and I really enjoyed how rested I was, but this schedule definitely limits available club activites.

grishka 6y ago

Oh so it's genetic. Don't know if it's that or something else, but I have this weird problem that it's as if my biological clock day is a bit longer than 24 hours. So if I don't discipline myself, if I go to bed whenever I want and wake up without an alarm, my sleep schedule goes to crap fairly quickly. Even if I do, it still drifts somewhat. At some point it becomes so bad that my waking hours are at night and vice versa. I then have to fix it by forcing myself to stay up all day because I live in a society that sleeps at night after all. Waking up for school and then university was a torture for me, too, but at least that kept my sleep schedule in check somewhat at the price of only ever getting enough sleep on the weekends.

globular-toast 6y ago
It's really common among our types. There's an xkcd about it, naturally: https://xkcd.com/448/ https://xkcd.com/448/ I do wonder, though. Is it that we're different, or is it just that we have a hobby that can easily keep us awake slightly longer than we should be night on night? Maybe more people have the same innate tendency to slip, but they have structures that keep them more on track, like watching scheduled TV etc. It would be interesting to see if there are more cases of bad sleeping patterns now that on-demand TV is more popular.
- grishka 6y ago
  Most jobs require physical presence, synchronous communication, or both. IT requires neither despite what some managers say, so this is what sets us apart IMO. We're able to work detached from the rest of the society most of the time. There of course are owls among non-IT people, but they never have the freedom to break their sleep schedule like we do.
sergeykish 6y ago
I was night owl until I had a son. Now I'm falling asleep at 10 PM and enjoy sunrise. Maybe it is not always genetic.
- arpa 6y ago

wcoenen 6y ago

The article talks about different papers. The newest paper is about the mechanism of the molecular clock, but the one that found the mutation is "Mutation of the Human Circadian Clock Gene CRY1 in Familial Delayed Sleep Phase Disorder" from 2017. The mutation is described in that last paper as "CRY1 c.1657+3A>C". I'm a pretty bad night owl, so I'm currently trying to figure out whether my 23andme data can tell me anything about that locus. update: I think the CRY1 gene location is chromosome 12, position range 106,991,364 - 107,093,872, and I guess the "1657" is an offset from either the start or the end. But I don't seem to have any raw 23andme data (genotyping chip v2) in that range. On the other hand, I do get some SNPs if I search for "CRY1" via their website, so I'm obviously doing something wrong.

wcoenen 6y ago
update 2: SNPedia has the mutation listed as Rs184039278. I don't have data about it, but maybe newer versions of the 23andme chip or other genotyping platforms do. https://www.snpedia.com/index.php/Rs184039278 https://www.snpedia.com/index.php/Rs184039278
herf 6y ago
23andme doesn't report missense variants, so it doesn't report this.
- wcoenen 6y ago
  I'm a little confused by your comment. As far as I understand, a "missense" mutation is a basic one nucleotide change which results in a change of one amino acid for the encoded protein. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missense_mutation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missense_mutation 23andme uses a "Illumina Infinium Global Screening Array" to find single nucleotide changes at certain locations, so isn't that exactly the type of thing they are detecting?

Kim_Bruning 6y ago

Imagine a world where no one would want to take the night shift. I always thought Early Bird/Night Owl were just two different modes, like right or left handedness. But while right and left handedness appear to be +/- selectively neutral (these days at least), a percentage of night owls in society would appear to confer a selective advantage. Having a potential oral medication would give night owls a new superpower: An ability to switch shifts at the drop of the hat; or at least much more easily than the early birds. In industrial programming you often need to take the customer's shifts into account; so this could be useful to a few colleagues of mine!

nicolas_t 6y ago

Do we have the SNP on SNPedia for this mutation? As a night owl (I tend to sleep later and later every night until 6-7am at which point I try to force myself to sleep early again and get jetlagged for a few days), I'm very curious if I have it...

nottorp 6y ago

Why a "sleep disorder"? I like it that way.

marvin 6y ago

I always tend to fall asleep after midnight. 00:30 on weekdays where I have to force myself to get out of bed to get to work, 02:30 on holidays or self-employed periods where I can allow myself to follow a rhythm that's closer to natural. I am most alert between 18:00 and 01:00. I am barely able to do brainy work before 12:00, and have just given up on trying to force it. If I'm forced to get up early multiple days in a row, my rhythm will shift slightly, but it comes back after a few days if there is no pressure. My partner is the opposite. She'll be almost comically tired after 22:00, but will normally wake up around 05:00 and be super alert in the morning. Sometimes even earlier. On our natural rhythms, we will cover all but two or three hours of the day awake, mostly with one person who is alert and performs excellently. This would be ridiculously useful in a more dangerous world than modern civilian society, and it comes in super useful on days when the routine is out of the ordinary. An active holiday, long car trips, errands that need to happen on odd hours etc. It's not a disorder, it's an adaption. At least unless it gets more extreme than our experience. If society doesn't fit, then screw society. Honestly. Make room for those who don't hit the median, please.

JesseMReeves 6y ago
What will happen is that big pharma will throw some pills on the market and do heavy marketing claiming that nightowlism is a severe disease that needs to be treated with “changing brain chemistry”, and night owls will be labeled as mentally ill or of weak character by society forever for their evolutionary adaptation. It already happens to an extend, night owls who can’t use their peak productivity hours around 2am because they have to adhere to some artificial schedule (often made by people who don’t have to do a lot of brainy things) are often on smart drugs during the day.

ainiriand 6y ago

This is why we have naps. My brother's wife can't live without them.

globular-toast 6y ago

I've always been a night owl. All the way into my late 20s I never got up earlier than midday and went to sleep in the small hours. But now I don't. I get up at the same time every day and try not to stay up too late at night. This has dramatically improved my happiness and performance. Back then I used to be depressed. It's a lonely life when you're nocturnal. There were days in the winter where I literally wouldn't see any daylight for days at a time. I remember reading about delayed sleep phase disorder and non-24 disorder and thinking I must have it. It made me think this was somewhat normal and even made me think I might be a victim of sorts. But really what has fixed this for me is just discipline and structure. No drugs. No therapy. No crying about my woes and how difficult it is for someone like me. Just good old-fashioned discipline.

foldr 6y ago
I've similarly shifted my sleep patterns to more normal hours compared to my 20s, but I think a lot of it is just down to a natural shift in sleep cycles with age. At least, I tried quite hard to change my sleep patterns in my 20s and failed, whereas now in my 30s they've changed without much effort on my part.

leto_ii 6y ago

Somewhere in a parallel universe: "Scientists discover how a common mutation leads to ‘early bird’ sleep disorder A new study by researchers at UC Santa Cruz shows how a genetic mutation throws off the timing of the biological clock, causing a common sleep syndrome called anticipated sleep phase disorder. People with this condition are unable to stay awake until later in the evening (often falling asleep before 10 p.m.) and get up abnormally early in the morning..." I'm sort of joking, but not quite. I can't think of an objective reason why being a 'night owl' is biologically an abnormality/deficiency. As many other commenters have pointed out, daily rhythms are socially/culturally imposed, not so much biologically determined. There are many cultures (think of Mediterranean ones for example) where people routinely have late dinners and go to bed after midnight. Hard to imagine that entire countries are just biologically abnormal.

Jon_Lowtek 6y ago
It's not limited to human cultures, many mammals are night-active, not only owls. Society must stop calling such variations genetic abnormalities/deficiencies.
thotsBgone 6y ago
> I'm sort of joking, but not quite. I can't think of an objective reason why being a 'night owl' is biologically an abnormality/deficiency. It leads to being awake during dark hours, and humans do not have night vision. Also Advanced Sleep Phase Disorder, while less common, is also a thing and also leads to being awake during dark hours.
- leto_ii 6y ago
  > It leads to being awake during dark hours, and humans do not have night vision. Humans most definitely can see at night. Not as well as other animals, but we can do it. People also tend to actually stay awake in the dark, otherwise our sleeping times would vary quite a bit throughout the year - by this logic, if you live further up North you would have to sleep (almost) continuously throughout the winter.

varispeed 6y ago

I naturally go to sleep about 3am and wake up 9am. I tried different hours, but it was unsustainable. I would feel terrible the whole day as it is just to possible for me to fall asleep let's say at 11pm or even 1am. This was a horror for me and actually prompted to start my own business so I could be in charge of when I work. I was only able to find one employer before that, who was happy for me to come to work at 10 or 11. Different employers after a period of time would report that other staff feel that I am getting privileges and they also would want to come "when they please". So that would end up with me quitting. It's a shame that somehow 9-5 is embedded in our culture so strongly if you want to oppose it you are being viewed as if you were saying a blasphemy!

the_only_law 6y ago
Years ago, I used to work a night shift job. Naturally this meant I had to shift my sleep to mostly day time hours. Around the time I noticed something interesting. People around me (friends, family) considered me lazy, avoidant etc. because while they would be doing things all day I was mostly trying to catch some sleep. I always found to odd, because most of these people knew I worked nights too.
- varispeed 6y ago
  That's perfect example of lazy thinking. They would see you catching sleep, but would never see you work and in their brain this would form as "he is lazy". The information that you work night shifts would get registered, but they would have to be informed with the same frequency as they see you sleep that you worked a night shift, otherwise after a day or two they would revert to thinking you are lazy. It is quite fascinating. I had the same problem with my partner - that is she would work night shifts and she wouldn't see me doing anything around the house, but I would do all the chores all the time. So if she came home in the evening and saw a little bit of rubbish that accumulated since the morning she would start making argument that I don't clean the house, but in the morning I did clean it. It helped when I started making a log on a sheet fixed to the fridge. I would always show her the log when she would come home. At the same time I had a feeling that she is not doing much and that I am doing all the chores. I wouldn't acknowledge that over the weekend she would do general cleaning as well that would take her almost as much time as myself doing chores over the week.

tehchromic 6y ago

Call it a mutational disorder if you will, I think I'm nocturnal mutant and proud of it. Use of the the word "disorder" throughout is highly retrograde and silly. It's part of the human genome and like all genetic mutation it's value is relative to selective pressure. But why should we not value individuals who have nocturnal tendencies as strategic advantage in the spectrum of human ability? Personality I must have inherited an extreme form of this mutation from my grandmother, who always seemed very proud of her nightowlishness. We often encountered eachother happily up to something or other past 2am. On the other hand the outside world has been a challenge. I'm not really awake until 11am. Highschool was pure hell. I was always late to class and always in trouble for it. In college I worked night jobs and took late classes. A few times I made up my mind to let go of making myself wake up or go to bed at certain times and let my natural cycle happen. Within two weeks I was very happily awake until almost dawn every night and up at 2ish.

rendall 6y ago

I had this pretty bad for decades, but I don't have it any more. I'm not sure how that reconciles with its being a genetic mutation, but if anyone were to tell me that I am genetically nocturnal I would absolutely believe it. Starting in my teens for decades, I would regularly be wide awake at 4 in the morning, and if I had a choice, my clock would drift so that I would naturally wake up around 1 in the afternoon. I read an article on, I think it was LifeHacker, back when it was a new thing years and years and years ago. The title was something like "I taught myself to be an early riser" and the advice changed my life. If I could find the article, I would write a personal letter thanking the author. Given my experience, I suspect that even if you do have a genetic predisposition to stay up late and sleep late, that it can be reset, so you can wake up as early as you want. Nowadays, I rarely sleep past 7 in the morning, and I never need an alarm to wake up. I wake up reasonably cheerful and clear-headed. Here's the advice, as I remember it. It may work for you. 1. First, want to be an early riser. In a way, that's the only step. When you wake up in the morning, your desire to be an early riser must override the physical pain and exhaustion that you will inevitably feel. You're going to want to roll over and go back under those warm, warm covers. No. Get up. Because you want this. 2. Stay up as late as you want! Yep. Read, play video games, code, do whatever it is you want to do as late as you want to do it. Heck, don't go to sleep if you want. Go to sleep only when you're ready. Those two steps are basically it, and anything else is just elaboration. If you stay up late, you will feel miserable the next day, but that's okay! Grind through. There are worse things. That night, when you start feeling peppy again, great! Stay up. Stay up as late as you want. But stick solidly to rule #1. Get up, because you want it. Eventually, after the inevitable bouts of backsliding and days of exhaustion, your body will adjust to the new schedule and ... go to sleep at a more normal time. You should start to see results within the first week, but I can say that I only could reasonably say I'm an early riser after several years of wanting it. Edit --- this is it! This is the article! https://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/05/how-to-become-an-early-riser/ https://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/05/how-to-become-an-e... I modified his method, in that I no longer use alarm clocks, and I allow myself to wake up slowly as long as I'm out of bed by 7

SubiculumCode 6y ago

"mutation" or adaptive gene for night time predators

weirdkid 6y ago

WFH orders during COVID19 have been a kind of blessing, with regard to my DSPD. I can sleep in an extra hour or two and hit that 8AM meeting 5 minutes after I wake up. When we have to go back to the office in June, I'm going to have a problem though. I work in tech, but I live in Michigan and work for the auto industry where the norm seems to be to wake up at 4 and start work with the farmers at 6 AM. I'm a "late" morning person since I prefer to start at 8 or 9. This has been held against me my entire 25 year career. 15 more to go and then I can sleep how the hell I want.