terrie01
Wow, that makes you the only other person I know with both ADHD and advanced phase sleep disorder (I generally sleep 8:30 pm - 4:30 am).
I’m not sure you could even call it a sleep disorder in my case, although...IDK, maybe. I was always an early riser as a kid -- my father had to hang a sign in my bedroom with an image of a clock set to something like 6am, and I knew I wasn’t allowed to get out of bed until my clock looked like the one in the picture. (I couldn’t tell time until I was six or seven, so I needed the reference.) Otherwise my parents would walk into my bedroom in the morning and find I’d already been out of bed two or three hours by the time they woke up. I’m not sure why they bothered with the sign; all I did when I woke up early was read or play quietly, but I suppose they were worried I’d get into some kind of trouble while they were sleeping.
In any case I am capable of a great deal of adjustment to my sleep schedule if I have the time in which to do it. It takes a while to calibrate but I can move my bedtime and wake time within a pretty broad window. For most of my teens and twenties I had a very “normal” sleep schedule, and there were periods where I’d go to bed around midnight and get up around seven. I started going to bed earlier and earlier simply because I found I wasn’t doing anything worthwhile or helpful when I stayed up late, and because I liked having quiet early-morning time.
So...I prefer the early bedtime and early wake time, but it’s more pragmatism than comfort. I simply don’t get much shit done after about 8pm and I get a ton of shit done at 4am. I guess we could consider that part of the sleep cycle, but because I can shift it around with a little work, I’m not sure it counts, you know?
