Good morning, John.  I have a disorder, I th--I don't know.  I'm not diagnosed, 'cause like, I don't feel like I need support with it, I feel like, I'm like, handling it well, but I'm pretty sure I have a disorder that's called delayed sleep wake phase disorder.  This is not new, and I think I have like a somewhat, like, unique experience of this disorder, where, for many, many years, I had it and then I didn't have it and now I have it again, but nothing about me changed.  The thing that changed was the world around me and that affected whether or not I had a disorder, which is very weird to me and I want to talk about that.

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Alright, so back to my disorder.  We tend to think of early birds and night owls as like, a subjective personal preference thing.  Some people like to wake up early.  Some people like to stay up late, and maybe there's even like a tiny bit of morality to this, like, driven, hard-working people get up early.  CEOs get up early.  Lazy slackers stay up late, and look, I do think that like, population-wide, there is a self-control aspect, but mostly that's to do with like, putting down the phone and not letting Instagram have its way with your amygdala, which I think all people of all sleep phases can have trouble with, but when scientists who study body clocks and sleep look deeply at early birds and night owls, what they find is that these people often, though not always, actually are like, preprogrammed to have different sleep phases, and this makes sense, right, because when we were evolving to be cultural, having early birds and night owls meant more of the night hours covered for caregiving or keeping watch or whatever else pre-agricultural people got up to in the night time.  

If everybody in a social group's sleep phase were like, perfectly matched up, that would have been a liability for those people.  So as far as we can tell, some people, and I think that I am one of them, just have a sleep phase that starts more than a couple hours after the average.  

This isn't particularly common.  In fact, we think, at least among adults, it's fairly rare.  It's more common in young people and teenagers, and again, I want to emphasize, this does not excuse me staying up late looking at TikToks, that's a different thing.  I naturally fall asleep around 2am and I naturally get up around 10.  This, every time I have ever been left to my own devices, this is how I sleep.  It's not because I feel like I'm staying up late.  It's because I'm falling asleep when I feel like I should be falling asleep.  I don't have disordered sleep, I don't have insomnia, I have good sleep hygiene.  I just have a sleep phase that begins on the later edge of the bell curve.  

This was very hard for me during school.  A significant challenge to social and academic life for me, and there's no easy solution to this problem, which is why we haven't fixed it, 'cause of course, it makes sense that all of the kids have to go to school at the same time so you don't have to build like a bunch of different schools for everybody's different sleep phases.  Also, of course, many adults have to go to work at the same time because you work together.  You're not doing it by yourself.  There's a reason you're going to a place.  Getting everyone on a matched schedule means we get better at working together and maximizing the scarce resources of each other's time and energy, and so, during school, my delayed sleep phase became a disorder.

It was a disorder because it was making my life worse.  It became a disorder because I was inside of a cultural optimization that could not allow for my natural variation.

In college though, it was easier for me to pick classes that allowed for this natural variation.  Like, freshman year, harder.  As it went on, easier and easier, and things got even better when I ended up being able to work for myself, when I was a blogger and a YouTuber, and I had a very long stretch of time between like the year 2000 and 2016, when I just like, lived my delayed sleep phase life and it was awesome.  

Now, of course, it caused problems.  John, you will remember that I lived in Mountain Time Zone and woke up at 10:00 in the morning which for you was noon, so there wasn't a lot of like, overlapping work time between the two of us, but mostly I went to bed at 2, I got up at 10, I got a whole lot of work done, I made money, I added value to the world, etc.  I had the same sleep phase, but I no longer had a disorder, because the sleep phase was not causing me problems.

And then, do you know what happened?  I had a child, and honestly, of course, sleep is always gonna be a bit of a mess when you first have a kid, because they wake up a lot and they sleep a lot, but they wake up a lot.  They don't sleep for like, the whole nighttime stretch.  Eventually they do, and that's great, but like, beyond even infancy, kids wake up early in the beginning and also, many of their activities, especially school, are back on that like, necessarily rigid schedule.

However, I think a couple of things have changed that have actually made this easier for me as I am more of an adult.  First, the importance and responsibility of a child means that it's just easier to push myself into a different sleep schedule, which I did.  The obligation to the child is so high and the relationship is so rewarding that this shift has become easier over the years.  Also, possibly, I'm older and this sometimes comes with a move toward earlier bedtimes, so if you naturally went to bed at 2 as a teenager, then maybe it's like 1 or midnight when you're in your 40s and 50s.

Still, I do feel it, especially like, when I'm traveling and I'm on my own and I like, let myself slip into my natural sleep schedule again, then I have to come home and I have to work back against it, which I am actually dealing with right now, which is why I am making this video right now, because I'm so tired after having a really lovely vacation where everybody, in fact, also, like, part of what's happening is that Orin is starting to wake up later and go to bed later and so that is like, letting me get more back into my former ways, which is not good, but my point is not mostly to complain.  My point is that having this disorder, this syndrome, this situation, has been clarifying for me in a few ways.

I understand that I have natural ways my body wants to be, but because society has to function for other purposes, my natural inclination can become an impairment and that would then be classified as a disorder, and that seems super wrong to my brain but it's important to remember that a disorder doesn't have to be like a clear mechanical failure, like your pancreas forgot how to make insulin or something.

In psychiatry, a disorder is, and this is a quote from the DSM-V, "a clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning," and that does not specify whether or not that impairment would still exist given a different world, and so I'm not sure what to do about this, but like, my natural inclination is this: I used to think that the problem was with me, and then I realized that the problem was with society, but what if, third thing, the problem just is.  

Like, I am aware that my son's school can't start later because I'm a night owl.   That would be really weird, and certainly that doesn't mean that we shouldn't try to solve the problem in various ways, it's just like, a part of my life that is harder for me than for the average person, and like, everybody has those, and it's also not that hard for me.  I've done all three of the things that people suggest you do. 

First, I have, at times, built a world for myself that is more forgiving of my natural variation.  Second, I have at other times used things like light therapy and good sleep hygiene strategies to alter my natural schedule, and third, I have, at yet other times, just lived in the discomfort and decreased ability that come with neither of those things.  In short, the three buckets: change yourself, change your world, or just grin and bear it. 

John, thank you for inviting me into your beautiful and risky and terrifying love of AFC Wimbledon.  I cannot believe that it turned out so well.  I was like, aw man, they blew it.  But then three goals in three games!  I don't know how you love sports.  It is too scary for me.  It is too much risk to put into something I have no control over, and also everybody, thank you so much if you have considered getting a Crash Course Coin.  If you're on the fence, this is your last chance, so if you want the Coin, do it now.  John, I'll see you on Tuesday.