Help me shift my sleep cycle
December 6, 2024 4:39 PM Subscribe
For a variety of reasons, I would genuinely like to wake up at 6am. Unfortunately, my sleep cycle drifts and drifts until I wake up at 6pm! Help me shift my sleep cycle.
No suggestions which mention exercise, please, multiple doctors have banned me from exercising due to medical reasons (I have Chronic Fatigue Syndrome/Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, and exercising after I started getting sick contributed to me needing a powerwheelchair and being mostly bedbound: multiple doctors have told me more exercise has a very real possibility of making things permanently worse.)
I set an alarm on my phone (which is next to my bed) to go off every 5 minutes for an hour, eg
6am
6:05am
6:10am etc
I never ever press snooze, but apparently I am capable of sleeping through a full hour of alarms, despite the fact that the alarm is one that I find quite loud and annoying when I am awake.
Complicating factor: I can't do the "only use bed for sex and sleep" sleep hygiene thing as I spend 80% to 90% of my awake hours lying on my stomach in bed due to fatigue/exhaustion. (Sitting upright in bed, even with my legs propped up, is significantly more exhausting than lying down on my stomach.)
I take Bupropion to treat excessive daytime sleepiness; and I have a CPAP machine for sleep apnoea.
No suggestions which mention exercise, please, multiple doctors have banned me from exercising due to medical reasons (I have Chronic Fatigue Syndrome/Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, and exercising after I started getting sick contributed to me needing a powerwheelchair and being mostly bedbound: multiple doctors have told me more exercise has a very real possibility of making things permanently worse.)
I set an alarm on my phone (which is next to my bed) to go off every 5 minutes for an hour, eg
6am
6:05am
6:10am etc
I never ever press snooze, but apparently I am capable of sleeping through a full hour of alarms, despite the fact that the alarm is one that I find quite loud and annoying when I am awake.
Complicating factor: I can't do the "only use bed for sex and sleep" sleep hygiene thing as I spend 80% to 90% of my awake hours lying on my stomach in bed due to fatigue/exhaustion. (Sitting upright in bed, even with my legs propped up, is significantly more exhausting than lying down on my stomach.)
I take Bupropion to treat excessive daytime sleepiness; and I have a CPAP machine for sleep apnoea.
Does the room where you sleep have a window? The morning sun coming into the room where I’m sleeping wakes me up more effectively than any noisy alarm. Where I am, 6 AM is still dark, but morning light exposure should go a long way towards helping you eventually reach that 6 AM wake up goal.
posted by little mouth at 4:51 PM on December 6, 2024
posted by little mouth at 4:51 PM on December 6, 2024
One of the guidelines for jet lag or depression sleep-cycle resets is getting (real, if at all possible) daylight into your retinas for 10-15 minutes by midmorning at the latest. If you're only able to do it from a window, that's a little less desirable because of UV coatings so if you can open the window or have someone open it for that timeframe, it would help.
The rampant mis-use of melatonin makes me ragey, but if you can find it still in micrograms (the original dosage was 3 MICROgrams) or half-mg get that and hope it's not just sawdust. Take it no more than 2 nights in a row about 30 minutes before your target sleep time. You can take it again if you feel your schedule slipping again, but don't take it nightly.
Something you may need to track for a bit until you figure out your personal configuration, but I think that most people have a couple-three windows of time in which they fall asleep more easily in the evenings, and outside those windows you end up restless and frustrated. Middle age has mostly knocked that out of me, but up until I was 50 my sleep windows seemed to be around 9:40-10:20 and 11:40-12:20, so if I wasn't laying down in sleep position by 10 I might as well keep reading until 11ish.
posted by Lyn Never at 5:31 PM on December 6, 2024 [1 favorite]
The rampant mis-use of melatonin makes me ragey, but if you can find it still in micrograms (the original dosage was 3 MICROgrams) or half-mg get that and hope it's not just sawdust. Take it no more than 2 nights in a row about 30 minutes before your target sleep time. You can take it again if you feel your schedule slipping again, but don't take it nightly.
Something you may need to track for a bit until you figure out your personal configuration, but I think that most people have a couple-three windows of time in which they fall asleep more easily in the evenings, and outside those windows you end up restless and frustrated. Middle age has mostly knocked that out of me, but up until I was 50 my sleep windows seemed to be around 9:40-10:20 and 11:40-12:20, so if I wasn't laying down in sleep position by 10 I might as well keep reading until 11ish.
posted by Lyn Never at 5:31 PM on December 6, 2024 [1 favorite]
Another vote for light in the morning. I have smart lightbulbs in my bedroom and they are a huge help in waking up early.
Melatonin is prescription medicine in Australia, so worth talking about with your doctor (and available in proper dosage here, not the huge amounts sold overseas).
posted by third word on a random page at 6:26 PM on December 6, 2024
Melatonin is prescription medicine in Australia, so worth talking about with your doctor (and available in proper dosage here, not the huge amounts sold overseas).
posted by third word on a random page at 6:26 PM on December 6, 2024
Sounds like you have non-24-hour sleep-wake disorder which results when your body isn’t receiving or is not responding to the environmental cues which normally cause circadian rhythms to follow a 24 hr. cycle, and is falling back on your free-running circadian rhythm, which is longer than 24 hrs. for most people.
Various treatment modalities are described in the linked article, including drugs such as melatonin as well as a melatonin antagonist, interestingly enough.
posted by jamjam at 6:36 PM on December 6, 2024 [2 favorites]
Various treatment modalities are described in the linked article, including drugs such as melatonin as well as a melatonin antagonist, interestingly enough.
posted by jamjam at 6:36 PM on December 6, 2024 [2 favorites]
Light, light, light. I suggest one of the SAD lamps, on a timer. Set it to turn on at the same time as the alarm, maybe directed away from you to start, to simulate a kind of 'dawn.' But within about 10 minutes (if not immediately) you should turn it to shine on you. IIRC it should be within 2 ft. of you and slightly above your eyeline. In combination with the alarm that might wake you, and light is going to be one of the most important things to help you shift.
I recently trained myself with a sleep cue, and I bet you could do something similar with a waking cue. When I started yawning at night (after about 9pm), I played one game of solitaire on my phone. I didn't necessarily get into bed, but I kept building this connection for a few weeks. Then I added playing a game of solitaire when I got into bed. At this point, I would be playing one game when I started yawning, whether or not I went to bed then, and one game when I got in bed. And then I would go to sleep. Eventually I could simply play one game no matter when I got into bed, and fall asleep pretty easily.
For you - is there a small activity you can do when you are at your most energetic? Maybe it's listening to an audio-book. Maybe it's knitting. Maybe it's a crossword. For a few weeks, when you feel you're genuinely energetic, do the thing for about a minute. After a few weeks, start doing it also as the first thing you do when you wake up, and then again later in the day, when you feel your highest energy. Eventually, you may be able to do the thing only when you wake and use it to train your mind into marshalling more of your energy to the morning.
posted by cocoagirl at 6:38 PM on December 6, 2024 [1 favorite]
I recently trained myself with a sleep cue, and I bet you could do something similar with a waking cue. When I started yawning at night (after about 9pm), I played one game of solitaire on my phone. I didn't necessarily get into bed, but I kept building this connection for a few weeks. Then I added playing a game of solitaire when I got into bed. At this point, I would be playing one game when I started yawning, whether or not I went to bed then, and one game when I got in bed. And then I would go to sleep. Eventually I could simply play one game no matter when I got into bed, and fall asleep pretty easily.
For you - is there a small activity you can do when you are at your most energetic? Maybe it's listening to an audio-book. Maybe it's knitting. Maybe it's a crossword. For a few weeks, when you feel you're genuinely energetic, do the thing for about a minute. After a few weeks, start doing it also as the first thing you do when you wake up, and then again later in the day, when you feel your highest energy. Eventually, you may be able to do the thing only when you wake and use it to train your mind into marshalling more of your energy to the morning.
posted by cocoagirl at 6:38 PM on December 6, 2024 [1 favorite]
Frisky solution - Do you have pets? Could you put a timed feeder on your bed so they get trained to start crawling on you at 6am in advance of their 6:30 treat? (When you choose a time, make sure to compensate for their anticipation)
posted by nouvelle-personne at 1:40 AM on December 7, 2024
posted by nouvelle-personne at 1:40 AM on December 7, 2024
Anecdote: I have a friend who struggled for this for years, and after trying all sorts of treatments and systematic experiments, it eventually turned out to be a really specific kind of lactose intolerance; after eliminating lactose from his diet his sleep cycle was able to lock back onto the daylight cycle.
Of course, the causes may be completely different in your case, but I give it as an example of the sort of thing you might have to experiment to eliminate.
posted by automatronic at 6:46 AM on December 7, 2024
Of course, the causes may be completely different in your case, but I give it as an example of the sort of thing you might have to experiment to eliminate.
posted by automatronic at 6:46 AM on December 7, 2024
This is something I've struggled with my entire life, although I don't have the same chronic health issues as you do. This might affect how useful my advice is. I'm not going to presume, I'm just going offer some ideas and you can judge for yourself.
My sleep cycle is such that without active effort, I will keep falling asleep and getting up later until I've done a full tour of the clock and am back where I started. However, over the last few years I've been sleeping fairly regularly. It's really strange and also great.
1. I never sleep in, even on the weekends - at least not more than half an hour or an hour. To force myself to do this I had to get a commitment going; I needed something that would get me up every day. "Willpower" is a lie. For me, that's work. I have a 6-day a week work schedule (but with shorter daily hours) so I just can't let my sleep schedule creep much on the weekends.
This is big. It's much easier to fight smaller amounts of creep.
2. I arranged my environment to give me natural cues to sleep and wake. I'm actually not great about so-called sleep hygiene either. I do stuff in bed I shouldn't, including eating lasagna. (Fight me. I live alone.) I'm not convinced this actually matters much except that I'm more likely to get sleepy if I'm comfy in bed when I should be awake.
I don't know what your climate is like, Australia is a land of mystery and wonder, but I live in the US Midwest where the length of days and nights can vary a lot over the year. So I have thick blackout curtains to keep the room dark when I should be sleeping, and I have a sunrise alarm clock (simulates sunrise) to make the room light when I should be getting up. As for the rest of it, it's also mostly lighting; I've put my lights on a timer so they switch to softer and dimmer light as I get close to bedtime without me having to remember to do it.
I don't even have a bedtime routine. It's all lighting.
3. No snooze. No snooze. No snooze. No snooze. It seems like you're not using it, so you don't need to hear this. But it also seems like you're sleeping through your alarms. I might try combining a sunrise alarm with other alarms that you can't so easily tune out. You could try changing your alarm tone as your mind adjusts to the tone and starts tuning it out.
I would advise putting one out of reach so you have to get up but I'm not sure whether that's possible for you, or whether you even have an issue turning the alarm off while half-awake. If this is something that is an issue but you can't get up, maybe consider one that requires other extra steps, such as being on a remote that you have to unlock.
4. I figured out the right amount of sleep. For me, 6-7 hours is what I need in order to not be excessively sleepy during the day while also being sleepy at the right time at night. Fewer hours and I get tired and lose motivation; more hours and it's hard for me to fall asleep. I think I am always slightly sleep deprived, but on the other hand I feel much better than I did when I was getting 8 hours at completely wacky times of the day and was out of sync all the time.
5. Not using the internet when it's bedtime. Screens apparently keep you awake, but this isn't my personal experience - it's the dopamine from clicking on new things, especially on addictive sites. So if I have a book to read, I'll read it, but if I'm reading fanfiction on AO3 I'll just load the complete work and turn the internet off to prevent that mindless clicking. I do use dark mode though, and notice the difference if I don't.
Another trick I used to use but I don't really anymore because I need to wash after I get home, is taking a hot bath/shower before bed. The cooling off after you get out can induce sleepiness.
I'm going to assume that you already avoid stimulants in the afternoons and evenings. But if you aren't doing that already, you should be. Even decaf things have some caffeine (they're really just "less caffeinated").
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 7:19 AM on December 7, 2024 [3 favorites]
My sleep cycle is such that without active effort, I will keep falling asleep and getting up later until I've done a full tour of the clock and am back where I started. However, over the last few years I've been sleeping fairly regularly. It's really strange and also great.
1. I never sleep in, even on the weekends - at least not more than half an hour or an hour. To force myself to do this I had to get a commitment going; I needed something that would get me up every day. "Willpower" is a lie. For me, that's work. I have a 6-day a week work schedule (but with shorter daily hours) so I just can't let my sleep schedule creep much on the weekends.
This is big. It's much easier to fight smaller amounts of creep.
2. I arranged my environment to give me natural cues to sleep and wake. I'm actually not great about so-called sleep hygiene either. I do stuff in bed I shouldn't, including eating lasagna. (Fight me. I live alone.) I'm not convinced this actually matters much except that I'm more likely to get sleepy if I'm comfy in bed when I should be awake.
I don't know what your climate is like, Australia is a land of mystery and wonder, but I live in the US Midwest where the length of days and nights can vary a lot over the year. So I have thick blackout curtains to keep the room dark when I should be sleeping, and I have a sunrise alarm clock (simulates sunrise) to make the room light when I should be getting up. As for the rest of it, it's also mostly lighting; I've put my lights on a timer so they switch to softer and dimmer light as I get close to bedtime without me having to remember to do it.
I don't even have a bedtime routine. It's all lighting.
3. No snooze. No snooze. No snooze. No snooze. It seems like you're not using it, so you don't need to hear this. But it also seems like you're sleeping through your alarms. I might try combining a sunrise alarm with other alarms that you can't so easily tune out. You could try changing your alarm tone as your mind adjusts to the tone and starts tuning it out.
I would advise putting one out of reach so you have to get up but I'm not sure whether that's possible for you, or whether you even have an issue turning the alarm off while half-awake. If this is something that is an issue but you can't get up, maybe consider one that requires other extra steps, such as being on a remote that you have to unlock.
4. I figured out the right amount of sleep. For me, 6-7 hours is what I need in order to not be excessively sleepy during the day while also being sleepy at the right time at night. Fewer hours and I get tired and lose motivation; more hours and it's hard for me to fall asleep. I think I am always slightly sleep deprived, but on the other hand I feel much better than I did when I was getting 8 hours at completely wacky times of the day and was out of sync all the time.
5. Not using the internet when it's bedtime. Screens apparently keep you awake, but this isn't my personal experience - it's the dopamine from clicking on new things, especially on addictive sites. So if I have a book to read, I'll read it, but if I'm reading fanfiction on AO3 I'll just load the complete work and turn the internet off to prevent that mindless clicking. I do use dark mode though, and notice the difference if I don't.
Another trick I used to use but I don't really anymore because I need to wash after I get home, is taking a hot bath/shower before bed. The cooling off after you get out can induce sleepiness.
I'm going to assume that you already avoid stimulants in the afternoons and evenings. But if you aren't doing that already, you should be. Even decaf things have some caffeine (they're really just "less caffeinated").
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 7:19 AM on December 7, 2024 [3 favorites]
Not sure if your bedroom setup, energy, and mobility will support this, but you may still be able to create a distinction between sleep vs. non-sleep uses of the bed by changing orientation. You could try lying in bed with your head at the foot at daytime, and switching to your regular orientation at night. Or any other position change might help, like switching to the other side of the bed at daytime, or lying diagonally or sideways across the bed.
posted by expialidocious at 10:38 AM on December 7, 2024
posted by expialidocious at 10:38 AM on December 7, 2024
My sleep cycle also drifts like this. The two things I've found most helpful for stabilizing my schedule are: 1. developing a bedtime routine that consistently ends in me falling asleep, then starting that routine at a consistent time every night, and 2. eating something when I wake up. I find my schedule shifts until I wake up around when I need to eat, so if I'm only consistently eating dinner, it'll slowly shift toward around 6pm.
posted by panic at 5:54 PM on December 7, 2024
posted by panic at 5:54 PM on December 7, 2024
Sounds like you have non-24-hour sleep-wake syndrome and need to see a sleep specialist to get on medication.
Modafinil during the day and ramelteon at night haven't completely fixed things for me but they've helped.
posted by Jacqueline at 9:06 PM on December 7, 2024
Modafinil during the day and ramelteon at night haven't completely fixed things for me but they've helped.
posted by Jacqueline at 9:06 PM on December 7, 2024
Apologies if your already knew this, but have you discussed this with the doctors treating you for CFS/ME? My understanding from my friend with CFS/ME is that this can be a common symptom of the disorder. I don't remember if it's caused by lack of melatonin production or something else, bit your doctor might have some cfs-specific advice about what's likely to be effective for you.
posted by matildatakesovertheworld at 6:41 AM on December 8, 2024
posted by matildatakesovertheworld at 6:41 AM on December 8, 2024
I've always had insomnia but my sleep got even weirder when I had surgery and was stuck in bed for weeks. I think the lack of activity confused my brain and body. I have found that getting out of the house, even if I'm not doing so in a physically active way, helps: going to a friend's house or out shopping or whatever. I don't know if that's helpful to you, because I know chronic fatigue can make that sort of stimulation physically devastating even if you are able to do it without having to walk. But maybe there are ways to translate "change of scenery" in a way you can handle? Using your mind in different ways than usual perhaps, or having people visit?
posted by metasarah at 10:41 AM on December 8, 2024
posted by metasarah at 10:41 AM on December 8, 2024
The sunlight lamp is truly excellent, and I am in year 3 of Alarmy being the best evil alarm clock (also my mental maths is much better).
As an unexpected side effect, I set my phone to greyscale and everything remotely fun locked down from 8am to 5.59am about two weeks ago. I have been waking up with glee at the 6am alarm clock knowing I can stay in bed for another hour on tumblr in glorious colour. Maybe set something absolutely indulgent for 5am-6am?
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 11:42 PM on December 8, 2024
As an unexpected side effect, I set my phone to greyscale and everything remotely fun locked down from 8am to 5.59am about two weeks ago. I have been waking up with glee at the 6am alarm clock knowing I can stay in bed for another hour on tumblr in glorious colour. Maybe set something absolutely indulgent for 5am-6am?
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 11:42 PM on December 8, 2024
Something that has helped some folk in the non-24 groups I'm on, is setting up a tent in their backyard if they have one, and sleeping outside in that.
Also spending more time outside where possible. Basically for those who are a little deaf to light cues, having them really really "loud" helps some people. Sometimes the standard size of light therapy lights isn't enough, but the actual sun is far, far brighter.
Being outside for 10 minutes in the first and last hour of sunrise/sunset apparently helps more than other times of day.
posted by Elysum at 6:16 PM on December 22, 2024
Also spending more time outside where possible. Basically for those who are a little deaf to light cues, having them really really "loud" helps some people. Sometimes the standard size of light therapy lights isn't enough, but the actual sun is far, far brighter.
Being outside for 10 minutes in the first and last hour of sunrise/sunset apparently helps more than other times of day.
posted by Elysum at 6:16 PM on December 22, 2024
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Can you pair light with your alarm?
posted by freethefeet at 4:46 PM on December 6, 2024 [3 favorites]