Actually I do have something between delayed sleep phase syndrome and non 24. They are very much related. DSPS is when your sleep cycle is very much delayed, often by 5 hours or more. It means you can fall asleep, but when your body lets you. Getting up at 7 am feels like getting up at 1 am. Yep, chase kids outa bed at 1 am to go to school day after day....

DSPS can be stable or with progression, meaning your body still prefers the late hours but you even have a hard time keeping a schedule even if you are left to sleep whenever you want. As humans usually have a longer than 24 hour inside day, the person is tricked by his own head to go to bed later and later every day.

When there is no tendency to prefer late nights/early mornings for falling asleep, but left to yourself, you go to bed later and later (in rare cases earlier and earlier), you have non 24.

The way it has been explained to me is that the inner clock is very inaccurate, and it is with most people. I think with most people it is 25 hours or something like that. So we need a reset system, just like in the old days when you had a watch it was rarely as exact as digital watches so you had to reset it every day if you wanted it accurate. (For some reason LOL I remember my dad's watch, it used to only change 3 minutes per day but after an accidental run in the washer it changed 10 minutes per day. )

Anyway, for this reset we have a part of a protein which reacts to different cues in the environment. Even very basic life forms have this. In people with circadian rhythm disorders this is probably less prominent or maybe even totally missing. Which means you cannot, how hard you ever try, get a natural sleep pattern. You can have an artificial one, but it will never fully "take".

There are probably people with this deficiency who suffer less because their inner day happens to be around 24 hours, but the way I hear it, it can even change from day to day... And also I understand you can sort of run out... like produce it when you are younger and then it goes down.

Well, you probably know all these things, but maybe someone else is interested as well, who knows..? DSPS is often mistaken for insomnia so I think it is underdiagnosed.

I bet since you are a non 24 you can well relate to the DSPS and understand how absolutely frustrating and even disabling this can be.

I work on my sleep EVERY DAY. I don't think many people can understand this kind of effort. If I lose control and do a baddie like take a nap, everything is messed up and I have to start over again. Sometimes I want to slap the heck outa this disorder.

But yea, then people say, just go to bed earlier. Yea right. When I was one year old, my mom could not make me fall asleep until 10 pm! Even if I did not nap...