8 ms·

I stand by my opinion that calling a common evolutionary adaptation a disorder is abusive and disrespectful and needlessly oppressive, no different from treatin

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.

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.