User talk:BanditmanEXE

Free-Running Sleep
Banditman, welcome to wikipedia. Sorry to hear you're having trouble. Here's my two cents, keeping in mind, I'm not a doctor and don't know what I'm doing.

The first thing would be to try to CURE your free-running sleep through the right combination of light therapy in the early morning and then doses of melatonin at night. Between the two of them, they almost always synch sleep schedules.

If that really can't work, there are a few things that can help. It is an actual medical disorder, and universities in the US at least are required to help accomodate you if possible, so discussing this with your university would be a start. Hopefully, they could provide you with lecture notes, alternate test times, and things like that. On-line classes, which are now being done by lots of reputable universities, is another option.

Regarding work possibilities-- telecommuting would be something to look at, as would any job that doesn't require you to be anywhere at a given time-- author comes to mind. --Alecmconroy 08:18, 5 October 2006 (UTC)

Another welcome
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You might want to join the Niteowl listserv. It's a support group for people with delayed sleep phase syndrome, but many people on it have non-24-hour tendencies as well. Best of luck and take care, Kla'quot 05:46, 6 October 2006 (UTC)

A personal account
I've been running a non-24 cycle for more than two decades. In my case, it seems as if various components of my internal circadian clock become unglued if forced to conform to external cues.

In addition to drift, I used to have monthly episodes of 24-28 hour waking periods (without fatigue), then crash hard for 12 to 16 hours, waking up feeling quite normal, and able to maintain a consistent waking schedule for a week or two before things would come unglued again. On a few occassions I would find myself under deadline pressure and I would hammer out complex source code for the entire 28 hour period. There wasn't a noticable drop-off in the accuracy of the work I produced toward the end of the day contrary to the norm for extended waking periods (my work was all in source control so it was easier to establish this after the fact; it was clear, however, that my creativity waned as the day progressed). From the point of my first yawn after hammering out code for 27 hours to becoming a functional imbecile could be as short as twenty minutes. On those days I always crashed hard. These extended waking events were like hitting a giant reset switch on my broken sleep metabolism.

About four years ago, as my metabolism began to slow with the onset of middle age, those extended waking periods dried up. Now I have a more-or-less consistent three week pattern.

I count the cycle as beginning with my first sleep that crosses midnight. I define the portion of my sleep cycle where my sleep interval crosses midnight as "day mode", a far more liberal definition than people lacking this condition would appreciate, but it is quite necessary for what I'm trying to accomplish.

My first day of day mode usually involves a waking time between midnight and 01:00. My day length is about 16 hours, my sleep length is about nine hours. After waking at 01:00 I'm back in bed again late afternoon, between 17:00 and 18:00. This is why I define this as day mode: it includes the industry standard period 09:00 to 17:00 which allows me to keep work/health appointments.

My internal clock usually advances by about an hour a day, but during my day mode period, I try to resist this, and continue rising at ridiculous wee hours for as long as I can manage. Within about two weeks, my waking time will have advanced to late morning or early afternoon, and my bedtime will have advanced until after midnight, which I define as "night mode", even through getting to bed at 03:00 would be defined as day mode if I only had a bad case of DSPS (which my brother suffers from).

The awkward portion of "night mode" is when my bedtime falls between 05:00 and 15:00. I try to power through this segment by stetching my cycle length to 26 to 28 hours, so I'm advancing two to four hours a day. It averages out that I'm in day mode for two weeks and upside down for one week out of every three week cycle, but that is as far as I can manipulate things without sacrificing mood, focus and competence.

In my night mode phase where I'm trying to strech my day length, I often take 5 to 10mg of amitriptyline (AT) just before bed time, which causes me to sleep much more deeply than normal, and longer as well. I sometimes suffer from fuzziness on waking that takes about 16 hours to fully clear from the time of dosing. Caffeine is somehow antagonistic to AT. It feels like more caffeine will clear the fuzziness, but it doesn't actually succeed, although it does manage to make the AT less useful. One 10mg dose of AT will also cure listlessness as a result of not sleeping well.

My state of listlessness is directly correlated with the number of nights I've slept poorly. After one night of poor sleep, my function is mostly normal, on momentum. After two consecutive nights of poor sleep, my function is mediocre, but ability to discern this is also mediocre, so I don't always recognize this immediately. After three consecutive nights of poor sleep, I'm dead in the water for doing anything useful, but functioning so poorly I'm lucky if I recognize I need to dose myself.

It's been a long running mystery exactly what factor is involved with the state of "poor sleep". I spend the same length of time in bed, apparently sleeping, but some nights the sleep doesn't "take". There's a fairly strong correlate to how much I can recall about the sleep period. If I can't remember a thing since my head hit the pillow, the sleep was fabulous. If I can recall every time I rolled over with sore ribs for the last six hours, the sleep was worthless. Almost any "night" I take 10mg of AT, the sleep is deep and black. So black, it often sends me to the chiropractor because I failed to protect my troublesome ribs.

When my ribs float, it causes a mild impingement on my gastric nerve, which doesn't improve sleep quality. If I'm not sleeping too deep, when my ribs are a problem I manipulate the thin end of a softball bat under a pillow supporting the sore rib until the impingement is eliminated. I sleep too deep with the AT to manage that task.

I have no idea whether these problems are all related to some fundamental imbalance in my biochemistry, or if I just managed to draw all the black balls in my personal health in the sleep-related side of my life. It took me about fifteen years to put all the pieces together until I'm almost always having good days in terms of sleep quality, even if I haven't fully controlled the drift.

As you are aware, this whole routine creates a lot of career management issues. I've tried a lot of things. Lately I'm doing some freelance writing and editing.

I've been involved in a couple of startup ventures over the years on the premise that when you're working 80-100 hours/week, people complain less about the hours you keep. In both cases, it wasn't that simple. As Woody Allen once said, "eighty percent of succees is showing up." The problem is, the 9-5ers only count showing up between the hours of 9 to 5. Putting in a highly effective 16 hour day from 17:00 to 09:00 only counts for half as much in the minds of these "normal" people. You're not at work to defend yourself, you're not even there to explain to people how difficult your technical challenges are, and what you had to do to overcome them.

There ends up being a huge disconnect between what you are actually doing and the perception of what you are doing. This isn't healthy for the organization, either. You'd need to have exceptional social skills to manage around these issues. The first time around I worked with a really good group of people, a little top heavy in eccentricity. The second time around, far less eccentricity, but several dullards in the mix with the ability to see past the nose on their face in only the most narrow contexts.

The best work configuration I've found is a semi-freelance gig as a worker bee behind the scenes with a partner you like as a person who enjoys being the 9-5 face of your business, and who trusts you completely to do good work on your own schedule, and few tasks that require less than 24 hour turn around.

Realistically, working around my sleep constraint, I've accomplished about half as much as I might have living a more regular routine, though there were some fun times living the free life.

If you have the option to treat or control the condition, I'd recommend you pursue it. The same energy expended achieves less traction in the world if not done on the terms of the people around you. There is also a huge social cost, at least for me, because my three week cycle isn't predictable enough to schedule anything much more than a week in advance. One summer I managed to join a short-term rowing team and make every practice, twice a week, for six weeks straight, by sheer will power, and more than a few 24 hour waking periods. I'd love to do this again, but I'm no longer willing to torment myself to that degree, so I miss out on a lot of stuff I would have enjoyed doing.

Melatonin does almost nothing for me except contribute to dry mouth. Bright daylight upon wakening has no effect on my clock, but it can reduce my sleep quality unless I keep a darkened room. I did seem to experience some effect from exposure to a cyan LED for half an hour before sleeping, but I never had a huge desire to stare at a blue light bulb for half an hour a day for the rest of my life, so I ceased to play with it. See http://www.neuropsychiatryreviews.com/sep06/blue.html Recent research suggests you don't need 10,000 LUX white light to get this effect. Other research I don't have at my fingertips explores using this on old people before bed time to reduce their sleep onset lag.

If you go the semi-freelance route, you'll need to develop exceptional written communication skills to offset the lack of face time and mundane "breathing the same air" with your other coworkers, which nevertheless seems to matter in most political contexts.

If I had to do it again, I would keep a detailed sleep journal. That would have helped my uncover my patterns years sooner than I finally managed to piece them together. The AT was a godsend for me, since I had a concomitant issue with degenerative sleep quality. If your issues with circadian phase also include issues with sleep quality (as my condition does), you need to be aware that poor sleep quality is associated with extremely poor levels of self-assessment, and you might find yourself failing to make good choices when you are most in need of responding to the situation. Recent research on sleep deprivation suggests that accurate self-assessment is among the most impacted of all cognitive skills (you think you're functioning well, but you're not). If I tell myself I'm functioning at 70%, the next day after taking the AT with my head clear again I'll look back and say "that was more like 30%".

Along the way, when I've attempted to mess with my sleep routine too aggressively, I've managed to get my core body temperature and mental alertness cycles twelve hours out of phase, which is a truly miserable and unproductive condition, completely unlike any normal state of fatigue, but no one around you will understand this. Hard drinkers and other right thinking people believe the only state of fatigue is the self inflicted one.

Good luck, and feel free to contact me if you wish to discuss this further. MaxEnt 13:42, 15 May 2007 (UTC)

Sleep science
I visit sciencedaily about once a month, and found some articles along the lines of my comments above:


 * Circadian adaptation for Mars -- with a 24.65 hour day
 * Dueling circadian clocks

MaxEnt 12:46, 16 May 2007 (UTC) —