one of the most enlightening realizations ive had was finding out that non-24 hour circadian rhythm people were a pretty large group and most of us have oddly similar cycles of usually around 28hr internal “days” and this masquerades as “insomnia” but if allowed to sleep and wake naturally we will just advance forward through time an extra 2-4 hours a day at a relatively stable pace. we can’t go to school or jobs or even run errands on normal schedules without massive pharmacological and behavioral intervention. most of the people who have been diagnosed or figured it out themselves will report horrific, life-ruining disruption in their professional lives and terrible health from accrued lack of sleep. this disorder is most common in vision-impaired people which seems to suggest it’s related to light cues. anyway just thinking about this as extremely loud yard work woke me up at 8am for the second day in a row
lot of people reblogging this identifying themselves in it so i wanted to give you a link to a more detailed desription of Non-24-Hour Sleep-Wake Disorder, and mention theres a similar disorder called Delayed Sleep Phase disorder where you are on a regular 24 hour cycle but you naturally get sleepy around 3-4am every day and wake up around 10am-12pm (roughly). as far as i can tell, despite the widespread nature of both these disorders, its basically impossible to get diagnosed bvecause sleep medicine is probably the single most useless specialty and if you dont have sleep apnea they dont want to hear about it.
I"m fascinated by the implication that our internal biological circadian clock is 28 hours.. is is possible that in the earth’s rotation/orbit used to be longer or slower???
i knew a surgeon and he once told me “nobodys insides look like how the textbooks say they will. you never know what you’re going to find in there once you open them up” and that was easily the most ominous thing anyone’s ever said to me
