Quote:
Originally Posted by Verencat
I know! 
I woke up at 5:30 these two last morning, depriving me of precious hours of sleep and leaving me desperate and turning around in my bed trying to catch the little sleep still available to me... I never ever had that kind of problem before, I used to be the night bird type! Now at 8pm I'm in my bed!  Who am I? |
It has been my experience that, despite the world completing a rotation in about 24 hours, the circadian rhythms of some are not in sync with that.
There's no metaphysical mojo involved. If left to my own devices, for example, and I went to bed when I was tired and got up whenever I woke up, we would find my wakeup time getting later by about an hour every day, more or less in sync with my bedtime getting later such that I would start out getting up in the morning, then it would be afternoon, then evening, eventually getting up in the mornings again. I believe (and have yet to see proof to the contrary) that most have a margin-of-error of maybe a few minutes, but a few of us can be noticeably off-kilter, and I wouldn't be surprised if the truly deranged in society have a sleep disorder that simply goes undiagnosed in light of having bigger mental fish to fry. What's worse is that
everything will follow this pattern, from gastrointestinal behavior to hormone peaks, or pretty much everything that is regulated by the (assumed) 24-hour clock. Interestingly, I have mood swings which roughly follow this same pattern; for approximately 2 weeks I'll be a nice guy (well, nice as I can muster anyway), and the next two, to quote Chevy Chase, "I'm not." I realize that in terms of science correlation does not mean causation, but the results are repeatable and cannot be easily explained by anything else. Your mileage may vary.
It's actually rather annoying.
The point is, it's different for everyone (not that any psychologist will ever admit this) and if you try to mess with it your mind will conceive all kinds of mutinous acts.
Or, you could look at me as proof that there are truly not enough hours in the day
. In any event, I now refer to this condition as Circadian Arrhythmia.
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