JULY
121
ELLE.INincreasing at about
half an hour every
week, my sleep
time became a full
eight hours. Trouble
was, I still wasn’t
sleeping at nights.
Life as a freelancer
has its advantages
but you still have
to work and, by 4
pm, when I was
ready to start my
workday, most of
my colleagues were
wrapping up theirs.
I would wake up to
several texts and
emails and as a
result I was waking up stressed and
felt like I was always playing catch-up.
This wasn’t working.
So I decided to get disciplined
and set a work schedule that began at
11am. But this meant I was sleeping
less again, except now I also didn’t
have a salary. I found myself right
back in that cycle of falling asleep in
the afternoon and hence staying up
later and later every night. Addictive
Netflix series didn’t help.
One night last year, frustrated
with the lack of sleep, I decided to
look up my symptoms online again.
This time, I chanced upon a new
sleep disorder. Delayed Sleep Phase
Syndrome (DSPS), according to the
American Sleep Association, is a
disorder when a person’s sleep/wake
cycle is delayed from the usual day/
night cycle. One could sleep longer
or shorter than the average sleeping
hours but almost never at the ‘right’
time. This sounded closer to my
condition than insomnia, which is
an inability to sleep at all. My sleep
cycle was just out of sync with the
rest of my world.
Since the 1980s, several health
organisations in the US and other
western countries have been
conducting research on the causes
of this lifestyle illness without any
conclusive results. The closest cause
for DSPS was revealed in a research
paper by Sleep Health Foundation,
Australia, which claimed that
“young adults often
stay up too late
and this moves
the timing of their
body clock”. With
a dysfunctional
body clock, your
mind gives you the
wrong signals for
sleep time. This
explanation made
sense to me as I
had spent a large
part of my early life
deliberately sleeping
too late (argh).
In India, sleep
clinics are focussed
on severe disorders
like sleep apnea or
milder symptoms
like snoring. So I
reached out to an
American sleep
doctor. After I’d
filled a questionnaire, Dr Michael
Breus, diplomate, American
Board of Sleep Medicine & Fellow,
American Academy of Sleep
Medicine, confirmed that I was
displaying symptoms of DSPS. It
was a revelation.
All my life I have struggled to
explain my debilitating condition
to people. When you wake up in the
afternoon everyone just thinks you
are a lazy slob. Catching
morning flights—I’m
talking 11 am—still
induces such panic in
me that I can’t sleep
at all. Finally finding
the correct diagnosis
was a starting point to
feeling better. It is quite
another matter that,
just like the cause, there
is no conclusive cure for
DSPS either.Delayed Sleep
Phase Syndrome
(DSPS), according
to the American
Sleep Association,
is a disorder
when a person’s
sleep - wake
cycle is delayed
from the usual
day - night cycle
In the last six months, after
trying out all combinations of sleep-
hours, I have decided that while I
sleep best between 5am and 2pm, a
more sustainable life solution would
be to slowly advance my sleep/wake
cycle to a more reasonable 2am to
10 am. To do this, I have to sleep and
wake up at the same time day after
day, including weekends, which
hasn’t been easy to do. Dr Breus also
suggests giving that snooze button a
rest: “You shouldn’t use the snooze
button more than once because you
end up shocking yourself awake
multiple times and the sleep you get
in the bargain is not restorative.” So,
instead, I’ve been trying to pull back
my sleep time by 10 minutes every
week, and waking up at the same
time every day irrespective of the
actual sleep I got. It’s a WIP and I
haven’t given up yet, so wish me luck
and in return I wish you a lifetime of
sweet sleep. At the right time.Apart from trying to regularise your
sleep/wake cycle, try a melatonin supplement.
Melatonin is a hormone that gives the body
a signal for sleep, and seems to have no
side-effects or dependency, but do consult
your GP first.Basic sleep hygiene—low lights, comfortable
temperature, no screen time, food or exercise
for two hours before sleep—is not a cure but is
still good practice.Avoid caffeine after 2pm and don’t take
afternoon naps.Follow the hashtags
#delayedsleepphasesyndrome
#delayedsleepphasedisorder and #DSPS on
Twitter and Instagram for community support.DEALING WITH DSPS