Dex-chan lover
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- Jun 21, 2018
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You might have Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome like I do. It's a sleep disorder where your entire circadian rhythm is locked several hours out of synch with the typical diurnal rhythm.I for one am a VERY deep sleeper. My wife can do just about anything and I won’t even startle her…
Its nearly always been like that too, my grandparents used to have to pour cold water on me to “wake me up”.
Then again, I’ve never been a morning person either… meh.
Symptoms include:
- Extreme difficulty in waking in the mornings
- Even to the point of requiring multiple alarms and even outside assistance
- Extreme difficulty in falling asleep until the early-morning hours.
- This is regardless of sleep aids - they may work the first time or two, but afterwards they're pretty ineffective.
- Grogginess that lasts into the early afternoon, and then suddenly you finally "wake up".
- Caffeine and energy drinks help very little
- Doubly so if you're ADHD
- In this case, you drink the shit like it's water with no real ill effects
- Doubly so if you're ADHD
- The strange ability to skip an entire night's worth of sleep with no ill effects, provided you are already well-rested, and compensate by getting four extra hours of sleep the next night.
- You have an initial "sleepy" phase in the early morning, but once you push through it you're suddenly back to "normal"
- The compensation is typically done by going to sleep a few hours earlier than normal, and sleeping a few hours later.
- You rarely get sick
- This is a "buff" from the previous bullet point - your immune system is stronger than normal so you can tank that one night without sleep.
- Attempts to stick with a normal diurnal cycle require an inordinate amount of effort
- As in sticking with a routine with a fervor that can be called "religious" in nature
- This routine is easily thwarted by just one or two "late night(s)".
In some people, the disorder is so severe that it has prompted some medical professionals to call for this disorder to be classified as an invisible disability.
It often goes undiagnosed because many people attribute this condition to poor sleep-hygiene.
Talk to your doctor about it to see about getting referred to a sleep specialist. This can be useful because you can use the official diagnosis to set a stringent demand of a specific work shift with your employer (and make sure to get it in writing). If they disregard this and subsequently terminate your employment for missing work, then you can claim wrongful termination.
You can find more techinical information about the disorder here on Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed_sleep_phase_disorder