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Comment by taneq | Hacker News Reader

> I fit the pattern of "Non-24 Sleep-Wake Disorder", with my sleep and waking times drifting progressively later at semi-regular intervals.

This is a disorder now? I thought that's just how humans worked. It's how I work, anyway - if nothing else (like work, or children waking up at 5:30am) forces me to get up at a set time, I'll slowly cycle through until I'm going to bed at sun-up and waking up at 3pm.

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I also thought it was normal.

Once for a couple of weeks I worked and slept as I felt like it. I ended up doing ~30h days. It was the best I’ve ever felt while being quite productive.

Unfortunately it’s not an option to do that long term.

It's great as long as you have no need to deal synchronously with any other humans.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circadian_rhythm_sleep_disorde... that affects about 3% of the population.

The most cited paper on this is "Stability, Precision, and Near-24-Hour Period of the Human Circadian Pacemaker" (Czeisler, et al., 1999), which found that their 24 subjects between ages 13 and 65 had a mean circadian rhythm of 24 hours 10 minutes with a standard deviation of 8 minutes. Earlier studies were affected by artificial light lengthening cycles. Non-24 sleep-wake disorder in sighted people is not researched well enough to have accurate rates: there are only about a hundred cases in the existing studies and the disorder is not well known and probably underdiagnosed.

I think there have been studies where people in sleep labs without any natural light, clocks or other cues mostly tended toward ~25-hour days. The "disorder" part is when you can't help but do this, despite having access to all those cues and despite all efforts to the contrary.

No this isn’t typical. Are you particulary good at coping with jetlag?

Depends which way I'm flying. :) Flying westwards is fine, I can absorb the extra hours without much noticing them. Flying eastwards is awful.

Out of curiosity: Assume the answer is yes?

I identify with the parent, and I've always been fine with "jet lag" to the point where I often don't even notice it or it only lasts until I go to bed the first night.

(IE; Sweden->Los Angeles, the inverse is harder but not as hard as most people seem to have it, it knocks some colleagues out for an entire week)

A week? Yeah I'm scragged for a day if I'm losing hours on a flight (although this is exacerbated by the fact that if I'm flying east I'm usually going from my 'starts around 9ish' desk job to 'be on site by 6am' minesite commissioning, so I'm effectively waking up at 2am when I'm used to waking up at 8:30am) but after that I'm fine.

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