Scientists discover how a common mutation leads to ‘night owl’ sleep disorder

I long thought having different school starting/ending times is the way to go. Like one cohort starting at 8 and another starting at 10 or even 11. Standing up at 8 is hard for me and I'm happy to be in a job where I can start working at 10, but here in Bavaria school starts at 08:15 and I had to set my alarm to 06:30 for a huge part of my life even tho I rarely fell asleep before 00:30,sometimes much later. The result was that I regularly missed a day of school, because I was just too tired to go. Luckily my parents were supportive.

Also my performance on the 8am classes was much worse than on later classes. In university I skipped all 8am lectures and even skipped early exams and waited for a "better scheduled" exam.

The worst part about it was how non-understanding all the early-birds are. They just didn't grasp that asking me to be awake and productive at 8am was like asking them to do work after 11pm and that "just go to bed earlier" isn't a working solution. Just ignorance of a different rythm.

I do not have a fucking disorder! I just sleep differently!

When I sleep as I need, I feel great! It's only when I tried to follow idiotic schedule which ignores seasons, natural cycles and variations, that I felt bad.

Sleep schedule theory tries to cram a living, breathing being into oversimplified one size fits all box, with perilous consequences.

Unfortunately, accessible genetic testing is probably a long way away. It looks like 23andMe won’t tell you if you have this mutation; the variant rs184039278 that causes CRY1 Δ11 disappointingly isn’t part of their panel. Whole exome sequencing might work, or might not, depending on the capture kit. But if you suspect you have DSPD, my advice is to see a sleep doctor as soon as possible to get a diagnosis. You’ll get prescribed a morning light box like I did. Your brain will get tricked into thinking it’s later than it actually is. It’s not a cure, but life and the 9-5 should get a little bit easier.

My partner is the opposite. She'll be almost comically tired after 22:00, but will normally wake up around 05:00 and be super alert in the morning. Sometimes even earlier.

On our natural rhythms, we will cover all but two or three hours of the day awake, mostly with one person who is alert and performs excellently. This would be ridiculously useful in a more dangerous world than modern civilian society, and it comes in super useful on days when the routine is out of the ordinary. An active holiday, long car trips, errands that need to happen on odd hours etc.

It's not a disorder, it's an adaption. At least unless it gets more extreme than our experience. If society doesn't fit, then screw society. Honestly. Make room for those who don't hit the median, please.

“This tells us we should be looking for drugs that bind to that pocket and can serve the same purpose as the cryptochrome tail.”

We don't yet know why this genetic variation exists, but we are leaping to the conclusion that we just need to drug these folks and force their bodies to work 'normally' and that's that.

I wish I were in a position to expand on why I think that's problematic, but I'm not. Ironically, I'm incredibly short of sleep myself at the moment and need to go try to get more sleep.

"Scientists discover how a common mutation leads to ‘early bird’ sleep disorder

A new study by researchers at UC Santa Cruz shows how a genetic mutation throws off the timing of the biological clock, causing a common sleep syndrome called anticipated sleep phase disorder.

People with this condition are unable to stay awake until later in the evening (often falling asleep before 10 p.m.) and get up abnormally early in the morning..."

I'm sort of joking, but not quite. I can't think of an objective reason why being a 'night owl' is biologically an abnormality/deficiency. As many other commenters have pointed out, daily rhythms are socially/culturally imposed, not so much biologically determined.

There are many cultures (think of Mediterranean ones for example) where people routinely have late dinners and go to bed after midnight. Hard to imagine that entire countries are just biologically abnormal.

Use of the the word "disorder" throughout is highly retrograde and silly. It's part of the human genome and like all genetic mutation it's value is relative to selective pressure. But why should we not value individuals who have nocturnal tendencies as strategic advantage in the spectrum of human ability?

Personality I must have inherited an extreme form of this mutation from my grandmother, who always seemed very proud of her nightowlishness. We often encountered eachother happily up to something or other past 2am.

On the other hand the outside world has been a challenge. I'm not really awake until 11am. Highschool was pure hell. I was always late to class and always in trouble for it. In college I worked night jobs and took late classes. A few times I made up my mind to let go of making myself wake up or go to bed at certain times and let my natural cycle happen. Within two weeks I was very happily awake until almost dawn every night and up at 2ish.

Northern Europe is very far north compared to other countries. For example, if you look at the globe, half of people in Canada live at the same lattitude as Croatia.

Europe is uniquely warm for its lattitude and it causes unique situation where we have strong growing season and very dark winters. If you are in agriculture, you would want to stay up for long in the winter to do some at home stuff.

I remember reading about delayed sleep phase disorder and non-24 disorder and thinking I must have it. It made me think this was somewhat normal and even made me think I might be a victim of sorts. But really what has fixed this for me is just discipline and structure. No drugs. No therapy. No crying about my woes and how difficult it is for someone like me. Just good old-fashioned discipline.

The mutation is described in that last paper as "CRY1 c.1657+3A>C".

I'm a pretty bad night owl, so I'm currently trying to figure out whether my 23andme data can tell me anything about that locus.

update: I think the CRY1 gene location is chromosome 12, position range 106,991,364 - 107,093,872, and I guess the "1657" is an offset from either the start or the end. But I don't seem to have any raw 23andme data (genotyping chip v2) in that range. On the other hand, I do get some SNPs if I search for "CRY1" via their website, so I'm obviously doing something wrong.

I always thought Early Bird/Night Owl were just two different modes, like right or left handedness.

But while right and left handedness appear to be +/- selectively neutral (these days at least), a percentage of night owls in society would appear to confer a selective advantage.

Having a potential oral medication would give night owls a new superpower: An ability to switch shifts at the drop of the hat; or at least much more easily than the early birds.

In industrial programming you often need to take the customer's shifts into account; so this could be useful to a few colleagues of mine!

I work in tech, but I live in Michigan and work for the auto industry where the norm seems to be to wake up at 4 and start work with the farmers at 6 AM. I'm a "late" morning person since I prefer to start at 8 or 9.

This has been held against me my entire 25 year career. 15 more to go and then I can sleep how the hell I want.

I read an article on, I think it was LifeHacker, back when it was a new thing years and years and years ago. The title was something like "I taught myself to be an early riser" and the advice changed my life. If I could find the article, I would write a personal letter thanking the author. Given my experience, I suspect that even if you do have a genetic predisposition to stay up late and sleep late, that it can be reset, so you can wake up as early as you want. Nowadays, I rarely sleep past 7 in the morning, and I never need an alarm to wake up. I wake up reasonably cheerful and clear-headed. Here's the advice, as I remember it. It may work for you.

1. First, want to be an early riser. In a way, that's the only step. When you wake up in the morning, your desire to be an early riser must override the physical pain and exhaustion that you will inevitably feel. You're going to want to roll over and go back under those warm, warm covers. No. Get up. Because you want this.

2. Stay up as late as you want! Yep. Read, play video games, code, do whatever it is you want to do as late as you want to do it. Heck, don't go to sleep if you want. Go to sleep only when you're ready.

Those two steps are basically it, and anything else is just elaboration. If you stay up late, you will feel miserable the next day, but that's okay! Grind through. There are worse things. That night, when you start feeling peppy again, great! Stay up. Stay up as late as you want. But stick solidly to rule #1. Get up, because you want it.

Eventually, after the inevitable bouts of backsliding and days of exhaustion, your body will adjust to the new schedule and ... go to sleep at a more normal time.

You should start to see results within the first week, but I can say that I only could reasonably say I'm an early riser after several years of wanting it.

Edit --- this is it! This is the article! https://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/05/how-to-become-an-e...

I modified his method, in that I no longer use alarm clocks, and I allow myself to wake up slowly as long as I'm out of bed by 7