Sleep issues run in my family. My uncle sleep walks. My father worked nights for decades by choice. I've experienced weird altered mental states while sleeping, and always had problems sleeping. My kid is experiencing some of the same stuff.

Caffeine definitely exacerbated my problem. But quitting caffeine alone was not enough. Avoiding screens (and using f.lux), making my bed a 'sacred space' where only sex and sleep happen (although I still read fiction in it because it helps me nod off), using a red light, and a few other things have also been necessary and even then I sometimes have trouble sleeping.

My kid is experiencing much the same problems and she is not allowed to have caffeine. I'm trying to teach her good sleep hygiene, but the things she's describing and the things I see are very very similar to the things I went through as a teen and sometimes still struggle with.

It may or may not be a coincidence that we trace a significant portion of our ancestry back to places of high latitude. In fact, now I'm kind of curious to ask some of my distance cousins if they've had any of the same issues.

You have a point. I thought I was a night owl, until I figured out that if you wake up everyday (weekends too) at the exact same time, your body adjusts and naturally wakes up at 7am (for example) feeling well-rested, and you start getting drowsy at around 10pm.

However, I gave up and reverted back to my night-owl ways because it's just not fun going to bed early. Not enough time after working out. And working out in the morning only makes my mornings 3 times more hectic and I hate that.

If you didn't use an absolute and instead said something like 'The large majority of people who think they're night owls just drink too much caffeine,' you'd probably be right and not downvoted so much.

For me, I switched from being a night owl to a morning person when I kicked my caffeine habit of 1-2 cups per day.

I have never been a consumer of any sort of caffeine (don't like hot drinks or fizzy drinks) and I have always struggled to get to bed or to sleep before, say, 2am. I don't know whether it's genetic, though I'm not aware of any reason why it shouldn't be, but night-owl-ism is definitely not caused exclusively by caffeine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed_sleep_phase_disorder#M... seems to suggest that in extreme cases at least some of this is, in fact, genetic: it runs in families and there's a specific gene it's thought to be related to.

I have one cup of tea in the morning, drink water the rest of the time, and still struggle to get to sleep before 1am.

Edit: own stupidity.

Hard to believe it when you are young but I was a 'night owl" that wakes up early now. 'night owl' for me now means just that the person doesn't know how the body works and/or doesn't take care of themselves.