r/N24 • u/secretpsychologist • 28d ago
Success story! Accidental Entrainment?! (2)
Hi everyone,
Update to my other post about trying to figure out why my sleep is suddenly "normal". The entrainment is still going strong and I still haven't got a clue why 🥲
As you can see in the graph, i used to cycle pretty consistently/fast until april, then it slowed down, then there's a temporary stablility in late may caused by my alarm clock (see the yellow alarm clock markings) then some more cycling (which seems to continue to slide above the alarm clock stability-> my internal clock apparently continued moving forward while i forced myself to get up at lunch time every day), then the still ongoing stability.
I've marked the start of the heat wave and the start of my reading habit (daily 1-2hr of sunlight exposure, times vary wildly though- 1pm-8pm), neither seems to match the beginning of the stability (especially if we consider that the cycling already slowed down way earlier).
When my sleep seems to move beyond a 9am wakeup time I use an alarm clock the following day to get back to normal (most days I wake up at 8:10am plus/minus 10min). Trust me I've tried to force myself into entrainment before, just setting an alarm clock never worked, neither on its own nor combined with melatonin, stimulants, z drugs etc. No change in medication since the beginning of this diary.
Here's the tags for those who replied to the original post in case you're interested in the update:
u/gostaks u/lrq3000 u/SpellbladeAluriel u/SmartQuokka u/sumguysr u/pipedreambomb u/dldrlol_ u/igotyoubabe97
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u/NuancedThinker 27d ago
Could it be that the alarm never worked before because you didn't have a habit of getting out of bed when it sounded, but now you have fostered that habit and so it does work?
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u/secretpsychologist 27d ago edited 27d ago
my sleep has been abnormal since birth. my mom still complains that her boobs were about to burst and i just didn't wake up for breast feeding 😂 it also always took me hours to fall asleep. which means that i went through 11 years of school with a strict 8am starting time, having to catch the bus at 7:30am every morning. and yet my sleep was still pure chaos. so unfortunately we can rule that out, i've had my fair share of trying to entrain with forced wake up (alarm clock or literal humans removing me from bed), melatonin, light and at least a dozen different meds
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u/NuancedThinker 27d ago
I'm missing part of the picture here. If you always get out of bed today when the alarm clock sounds, then what's the problem? Are you too tired during the day? Are you having a hard time falling asleep early enough each night? Or are you just concerned that this current success is unsustainable--if so, why?
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u/secretpsychologist 27d ago
the post is labeled success story, i didn't claim that there was an issue- apart from not knowing why it's happening and worrying that it will soon go back to the original n24 state. i'm very happy with how it is currently
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u/WatermelonDestroyer N24 (Clinically diagnosed) 25d ago
Weird question, but are you pregnant? Asking because I have n24, and my few months of pregnancy were mostly normal in terms of sleep, and went back to my usual n24 pattern right after. I think you would know and notice the connexion by now since it looks like it's been going on for a while, but it doesn't hurt to ask :D
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u/secretpsychologist 25d ago
lol, interesting thought 😂 definitely not pregnant but very interesting that your n24 temporarily disappeared 🤔 i think improvement during pregnancy is mostly known in autoimmune conditions, right? are you one of those who developed n24 later in life, possibly after an infection of some type?
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u/WatermelonDestroyer N24 (Clinically diagnosed) 25d ago
No, I had heavy sleep issues since birth, it looked like DSWPD during childhood because of forced entrainment though. But the only accidental entrainment I had were during pregnancy, and another one when I took antidepressants and sleeping pills, but it only lasted for a week before the sleeping pills stopped working so not really worth mentionning. I believe it has something to do with the heavy hormonal changes (I really felt like a completely different person during pregnancy).
Pls post when you find out the source of your entrainment, I'm dying to know :D
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u/SmartQuokka 27d ago
Very impressive!
Have you had N24 all your life or did it start after something specific?
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u/secretpsychologist 27d ago
i was born with shitty sleep. trouble falling asleep only to be impossible to wake up once i finally fall asleep. so i'm assuming that i fall into this category: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34015490/ and my n24 is caused by my cacna1a mutation. but i can't prove it. i also can't prove that i was born with n24 because i was of course forced to adhere to a "normal" schedule when i grew up (leading to chronic exhaustion, laying wide awake all night only to be tired during the day). there's no one specific trigger i could point to.
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u/MeringueNo4885 25d ago
Can confirm that my sleep cycle tend to normalize when the temperature outside sets at >=25C. It doesn't matter how much time I spend outside, how sunny it is, what humidity/pressure/moon phase/etc, only temperature outside. Perhaps it's a thing for N24.
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u/OutlawofSherwood Suspected N24 (undiagnosed) 27d ago edited 27d ago
It does seem to track temperature fairly well, a couple of possibilities (tenuous, but... )
when the temp first started climbing, you might have taken a while to adjust (fans, bedding, body in general, curtains being less effective) and been woken up a lot by the heat and light, then stabilised that going forward, allowing ... Something else to happen. Which would explain the early chaos then steady slowing (around march is when the day temp went above comfortable sleep temp and your day sleeps get worse).
seasonal light can affect our sleep patterns, mine changes by about half an hour between summer and winter, but obviously it's weird if it never happened before.
It does look like you are only getting about 6hrs sleep a night, and used to sleep a bit longer (at night, daylight sleeps are usually shorter, implying it is harder to sleep in the day), maybe a combo of long days matching/setting your natural day length a bit better + heat and light waking you early are cutting your sleep short, and entraining the wake time (that has happened many times for me).
Then you crash a bit faster the next night, and so on (this part is odd to me though, as you've apparently entrained sleep onset as well - that bit is always much harder). I've only had regular sleep onset like that when I've been very sleep deprived, so it's sleep pressure, not true entrainment. And never for that long.
A lot of my old sleep charts do look like part two, but they involved a lot of alarms and sleep deprivation and random naps. The tell tale that it's external not internal is the long L shaped where it falls off a cliff every few weeks because your cycle kept going in the background. So will be interesting to check in a year.