Oh wow! I congratulate you on your efforts and curiousity.

Cry2, or Cryptochrome2, is from a fascinating family of genes. I’m a chronobiologist by training and pursuing independent research in it, so I’m always fascinated to hear more about how it feels like from the inside.

I'm interested in how you went about analyzing your own genome? Did you use a service?

There’s no clear set of genes that causes delayed sleep. You definitely have those rare mutations of core clock genes which causes their circadian cycle to have distinct properties, one of the outputs of which is a natural sleep preference that’s out of phase with typical societal rhythms, but is still a normal amount of sleep, and its consolidated and restful etc.

But the clock itself has a population wide variation in its actual period. It varies between 23.8 hours and 24.6 hours, and everyone far from the 24 hour ideal pays a tax. The clock either has to phase advance or phase delay to synchronize, and over time that has all kinds of impacts, including on sleep, but also memory and learning, stress, attention…

The whole system is clocked. Every cell in our body runs a 24 hour cycle, driven by the transcription, translation, inhibition and breakdown of the core clock proteins. They’re in a negative feedback loop, with a time delay, and all kinds of mutations can shift the overall period of the clock. If it’s of a core clock protein, the effect will be strong, but other genes cycle or have their functions in a cycle due to the clock, and feed back into the clock, so small mutations can accumulate to cause circadian period variation.

It’s also why you see circadian phenotypes in all kinds of diseases. Definitely needs more research, but the research is also hard. You need to observe the body in high resolution over many time points to start making sense of all this, and that’s expensive and exhausting. We’ll get there, though.

Creative types often have sensory differences and staying up at night helps alleviate the overload that intense sunlight and people cause.

I know because I am on the spectrum and suffer from overload. At night is my "flow time" when the creativity happens.

I have had the opposite effect. The days where I get 8 hours of good quality sleep per Oura and Garmin have been some of my least productive days, which is always contrary to my expectations. My most productive and focused days are usually when I get 5 hours after a few nights of solid sleep. It might relate to the hangover effect, but I've never really been hung over before so I don't know if that would affect me.

Hmm… surprisingly sparse. Some chronobiology labs have good outlines. YouTube has a few good videos, including some from the Royal Society Lectures that walk you through the basics of the clock, this one especially:

https://youtu.be/KZJAmcpc9SE?is=5XZvvDQwLMC_rIdv

A book recommendation:

Internal Time — Till Roenneberg

Papers: 1. https://physoc.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1113/expp...

Somewhat old, but still a good systems level review. We know some of this stuff to higher resolution now.

2. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7202392/

This one is a very approachable one on sleep and rhythms, and especially talks about why mental health disorders and sleep disruption tend to co-occur.

Yes. Our rhythms tend to pattern the environment. And generations with the kinds of seasonal light changes you have close to the poles likely had a broad impact on many genes.

Ah on the 30 hour day: I had some success living a 28 hour day for a few months, which has the nice property of meaning your awake hours are identical week to week making it at least somewhat possible to interface with polite circadian society.

6x 28 hour days pack cleanly into a 7-day week, so all Mondays you wake at the same time, then all Tuesdays you wake 4 hours later and so on. It was one of the most productive times of my life but ultimately left my partner feeling unhappy and lonely.

Fuck it we do our best with 24 hour days…

The 30 hour day feeling resonates. If I have no external schedule or I'm just living as I see fit, I end up gravitating to 3am bed, ~12pm wake sorta schedule. The only real problem is that it's functionally incompatible with jobs and many other services, even fully remote

I can confirm this effect. One winter I left 2x300w living room lights on perm, and it had a dramatic effect. The only issue is that its nice to turn lights off at night, and if you do that, now you're in habit-dependent territory.

This sounds amazing- do you have part list or pics/write up?

Indeed.

The following (informally described) symptoms are well-known consequences of ADHD:

- Delayed Sleep Phase [1]

- Staying Up Late [2]

- Revenge Bedtime Procrastination [3]

Newsflash, getting a full night's sleep helps alleviate ADHD symptoms, while being perpetually sleep-deprived wrecks us.

But there are reasons why we stay up late. Simply forcing us to sleep doesn't address those reasons.

Which is why I wrote about it so much, and keep spamming these links even though it feels so darn obvious. Not to the authors of the study, it appears.

[1] https://romankogan.net/adhd/#Delayed%20Sleep%20Phase

[2] https://romankogan.net/adhd/#Staying%20Up%20Late

[3] https://romankogan.net/adhd/#Revenge%20Bedtime

Then add in the use of powerful stimulants (e.g. Adderall) to power through a workday, only to have that cause insomnia that night, and a wrecked sleep schedule for the following 3 days.

I'm used to reviews of recent work, not of work from a decade ago

Melatonin lately (about 500 mcg) has helped me get better sleep and hopefully to help with the sleep drift.

However, it's almost like I'm so conditioned to being groggy in the mornings that I still find it hard to get up even if I feel fairly refreshed.

Completely agree, and tend towards the same schedule. I don't even mind working in-person with people, but this idea that everyone should just be uniformly aligned to operate on the same hours is alienating and humiliating at times.

> I have ADHD and left to my own devices I would go to sleep somewhere between 2-4am. At work, I don't function so well before about 2pm some days... and by that point that day is almost over.

Indeed. I've struggled with it since childhood, not only me. The same "symptoms" for lack of a better word are seen with my mother, my aunt and my grandmother. All are night owls, all sleep poorly etc.

For whatever reason, regardless of how much sleep i've had, my brain begins to kick into high gear with a clarity of thought and capacity to dedicate myself to things starting at about 9PM. This remains true REGARDLESS of sleep, how well rested I am, general health, etc. I could have had NO sleep for 24 hours, still be away at 9PM the next night, and it's like a switch.

The ONLY time this ever differs, for reasons still unknown, and where I fit into "normal society" is for whatever reason, when I visit Russia (which I have not done for some time for obvious reasons.)

When I am in Russia, with no effort at all, I sleep normal hours without issue, and wake up during the day time actually well rested. This ceases once I return to my timezone. This same pattern is not seen when say, I visit the US instead.

If only I could harness this magic...

being a night owl is not good for your health for a lot of reasons (I am one).

Nope wrong.

What's wrong with being toast? :P

My sleep issues are at least manageable.

If you haven't had a sleep study to check for sleep apnoea you should get one. It's very common, anyone can have it and the only way to check properly is a sleep study. You can have sleep apnoea without being a snorer and you can sleep next to someone without them being aware of it. It's extremely bad for your health and very treatable.

I was like you. A year ago, I was tired as hell despite sleeping (well, not enough, but I've never slept 'enough'). A few people said sleep apnea but i was not overweight and didn't snore. I tried the test anyway, and it turns out I wasn't breathing. I used an oral appliance and a year later, it's gone and I feel better.

Also, without doing anything my triglycerides, LDL cholesterol and blood sugar which had gone way out of whack, went back to normal.

I started using my oral appliance on a Monday. That Friday I was so energetic I ran 12 miles in one go. I hardly ever run or even practice that much, but I was just so wired that I couldn't help it. It was an amazing feeling. I highly suggest sleep apnea treatment even if you don't think it sounds like you.

Smart bulbs.

You can make your artificial sunrise take as long as you want, and connect them to a sleep tracker so they're timed to wake you up during a comfortable phase.

I've been doing this for 12 years, and I don't think I have ever been upset to hear my alarm since, as long as I'm home and the lights have prepared me. Lately I've even been waking up before my alarm about half the time, even though I work on a schedule one time zone east of where I am.

It's shocking to me that it's not more popular for everybody. I guess the benefit is hard to explain.

I have a sunrise alarm clock, I think from Phillips. If I set the alarm for 8am, the light will start turning on at 7:30am then slowly increase in brightness over the next 30 minutes until 8am when it's at full brightness and the alarm goes off (which are nature sounds).

When it first starts, it's more of a warm glow than a light. The max brightness can also be set.

Google for "wake-up light". Philips is the brand I'm familiar with but there are others.

It's a controllable dimmer switch that I fade in over the course of an hour or so using a Home Assistant script.

I do the same with a lifx bulb, it can be set up to fade and colour shift over any duration you like.

With most everyone medicated its impossible to find a control group. Same applies to any emf studies.

Second para, line 1 in that Wikipedia link: “ Common side effects include sleepiness,”

ADHD is highly treatable with medication, and any other intervention is at best mild mitigation. So how many? Amongst people with ADHD, basically nobody.

Sun and proper sleep is certainly helpful for people with ADHD but the likelihood of them getting that is vastly increased if they’re medicated correctly.

Roughly, zero. Stimulants are not a fun dependency, come with a bucket list of side effects and downsides, and only mitigate one aspect of ADHD.

That is doubly important given that one of the effects of the medications, is to disrupt sleep.

Just an FYI, in circles similar to HN, people will respond very negatively to anyone suggesting anything that might hint at tightening amphetamine prescriptions.

Any psychiatrist worth a damn already considers these things.

"ADHD" symptoms can manifest for a variety of reasons, and that's why good ADHD testing involves multiple exams alongside the traditional ADHD ones to help figure out what actual issues are present.

Also, comorbidities make this all the more complicated. Your assertion that people need "more sun" and "regular sleep" could very well be true, yet someone can still have ADHD.