Anyone with a non 24 hour circadian rhythm?

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I used to joke about being on a 30 hour cycle. I didn't know it was something that could actually be diagnosed. Anyone diagnosed with it? How is it diagnosed?

I'm not diagnosed with it or anything like that, but most of the time it seems as if I'm on a 25 or 26 hour cycle.

I'm not sure what the "rhythm" is, but recently I've been falling asleep later and later, until now I'm falling asleep at eight am, and sleeping till half one or two pm. It's bloody awful. I've been through this before, I only hope that I can get myself back to normal at some point.

Not officially diagnosed - but I'm right there with it, it's tied in with my AS and SAD -_-

I go through phases of being closer to 24 hours but with sleeping patterns that put me about 6 hours behind everyone else in when I sleep/wake, however I'd say my natural cycle falls more around 32-34 hours.

When you sleep your physical repair is roughly from 10-2am and your mental repair is 2-6am. You need to be going to bed on time or else you won't have optimal health.

my vary's between 20-30 hours. it starts at about 20-ish hours and slowly creeps up to about 30 then back down again.

The 24hr bodyclock isn't a given anyway. Some studies have put people in an artificial environment, with no external clues or cues as to actual time and let them wake & sleep to their own body's requirements. They found most subjects had a shorter circadian cycle of ~23hrs, but some 'did their own thing' with even a 48hr cycle.

LINK

How do you judge your sleep cycle? I tend to go to sleep around midnight and get up at 8 for school, but sometimes on days where I don't need to get up I can sleep until noon. Usually even on the days where I get 12 hours of sleep it doesn't feel like enough.

That's odd. I read about a study like that which was done on blind people, and it said that most of them settled into a 26 hour cycle. I actually remember the study being quoted a few years later as evidence of our descent from aliens. As in, if we evolved on Earth naturally over tens of thousands of years, we should surely have a 24 hour cycle. So we must be descended from beings from a planet with a 26 hour rotationary period.

I remember reading sci-fi books where humans colonised planets with different rotationary periods from Earth, and how it affected them in different ways. Interesting stuff.

No matter what sleeping schedule I'm on, I tend to get off of it extremely easily. It's like I don't like falling asleep and just want to stay up. I just never want the day to end because I want to keep doing stuff.

Definitely a real problem

I too had read that studies showed people generally had 25-26 hour sleep cycles. Most people seem to be evening rather than morning people (certainly in my experience) and this would make sense - without clocks or light cues, staying up later and later and getting up consequently later too.

I think I am the opposite however - without light (which I am very responsive too - sleep a lot less in summer than winter) and clocks or a schedule I'm sure I would be having shorter and shorter days. I am a morning person, I can't sleep for long stretches of time, and tend to sleep a lot better early in the night and worse later on. When I am feeling tired/down I have little problem getting up in the morning (unless I have woken a lot earlier but then fallen asleep again just before my alarm), but find myself going to bed earlier and earlier (sometimes has been as early as 7.30pm in the winter - can't do this if it is still light outside). Inability to get up in the morning was never a problem for me when I was depressed (until I was overmedicated), and when I learnt it was the major symptom I couldn't understand it. I tended to feel worse in the evenings too and more hopeful in the mornings - the opposite of the classic symptoms. Perhaps I really did come from a different planet than most people.

I know what you mean. I never sleep that well, struggling to stop myself thinking about lots of different things and flitting from one tangent to another while I lay there trying to fall asleep. Two or three times a year I go through a phase (I'm in one right now) of staying up for 36 hour periods trying to exhaust myself back into an 9pm to 6am routine. It begins because I just don't want the day to end (more so than usual) so I find myself still up after 4 or 5am doing something I find interesting at the time. Then I have to decide whether to enter a nocturnal cycle by sleeping the next day (which I hate because it feels unwholesome and lowers my self esteem and mood) or stay up the full 36 hours ensuring a good long sleep the next night.
Does this sound like AS to you guys? I still haven't been tested but I plan to be later in the year.

I'm in that phase as well right now. This will be my 4th night in a row to stay up til 7am and then sleep for 4 hours. I don't know how that works cause when I'm on a normal schedule, I feel best with 10 hours. I think if I had no obligations or need to interact with the outside world, I would be nocturnal. I was just thinking "hey, I should order a pizza, oh, wait, it's 3am, normal people are sleeping right now."

When left to my own devices, I am on roughly a 46 hour schedule. That's the longest I go (between 40 and 46 is ideal). I am awake with no fatigue or anything for about 36 hours, then I sleep for 10. I function quite well on this schedule, but unfortunately for me, the world does not. I can fit into a 24 hour day, but I still need 10 hours sleep, or I am not rested at all. I have never actually tried for any type of diagnosis related to this, but drs have given me sleeping pills for 'insomnia'. They usually give me Trazodone, but I do not like taking it because I feel drugged when I wake up ad it takes all morning to clear my head.

No idea. I'm a 'night' person. If left completely to my own devices (if I were single, lived alone, and didn't work), I would likely go to bed ~4-7 am every day, and wake up ~8-10 hours later. As is (I have to get up at 6 am for work on weekdays, and my wife prefers I get up before 10 on weekends ), I go to bed between 10 pm and 2 am with little rhyme or reason.