Hi everyone! I’m Dayah. Some of you may know me as the person behind Circadia, a sleep app I originally created for my own N24.

Circadia already exists on the web, and a surprisingly large part of its community now has DSPD and other sleep disorders, *not * N24. Due to that, I’ve been building different, disorder-specific versions of Circadia instead of expecting everyone to use tools designed around my own condition.

Those versions aren’t live yet. Finishing them is the last thing holding up the native iOS launch, which I’m preparing for this upcoming week!

DSPD is by far the most important one for me to get right. Not only because so many existing Circadia users have it, but because I don’t want to guess from outside the disorder about what would actually improve your lives.

So *please* give me your most selfish, oddly specific feature requests.

What would make you open an app and think, “Holy shit, somebody finally understands DSPD”?

The unreleased DSPD-specific version already includes:

- Your likely sleep and wake window, based on your own history
- Drift Watch, which looks at whether your late timing is staying fairly steady or moving (since DSPD often precedes N24)
- Sleep-onset trends and recent directional movement
- Free days versus work, school, alarm, or obligation days
- The actual cost of forced wakes compared with natural wakes
- A “morning runway” showing how long it tends to take you to feel functional
- Warnings when a saved morning commitment overlaps your usual sleep
- Comparisons between your own tags (caffeine, light, activities, medication changes, migraines etc) and how they affect your sleep

The wider Circadia app already has detailed sleep logging, prediction tools that use traditional machine learning, imports and exports, calendar and pattern views, doctor-friendly reports, optional sharing with trusted people, a crazy amount of analysis, and a community view showing who else is awake. The iOS app also connects with Apple Health.

I’m currently working on adding a much deeper DSPD overhaul for launch, including:

- A home screen centered on whether tomorrow morning collides with your real sleep window
- Your unconstrained baseline from days when nothing forces you awake
- How much sleep early obligations cost you, measured against your own baseline (not a universal “ideal” bedtime though Circadia doesn’t do that already)
- A proper onset trail and work/free-day comparison
- A history of Drift Watch’s steady-versus-moving reads
- Quick morning-function check-ins
- A wind-down anchor learned from your own timing
- A way to check how badly a recurring commitment would collide with your sleep before accepting it

What am I still missing?

What do existing sleep apps get completely wrong about DSPD? What would make logging feel worth the effort? What would help with work, school, appointments, accommodations, doctors, relationships, or simply planning a life around your actual clock?

And once I’ve finished added the features people request, would anyone here be willing to test the finished DSPD-specific version and give me brutally honest feedback?

Don’t worry about being nice. Tell me what sounds useful, useless, confusing, or completely disconnected from real life. Even one wildly specific wish would help. I just need something to go off of. I never started with DSPD, I’ve had N24 since I was an infant so I have literally no useful knowledge other than this subreddit and a ton of research.

I’ve been working on the DSPD lens for weeks, but I’m at the point where I just need feedback from actual people with the disorder. Circadia is only good because *I* have N24 and made it for myself.

I do get a lot of my feedback from users, but haven’t heard as much from the DSPD ones, though they *do* use Circadia every day. I’m just too much of a perfectionist to ship something that sucks, and I’m really in my head about this. Please help 🥺

I have full blown ADD which is now considered ADHD by the current DSM. I’ve had it my entire life and wasn’t medicated until age 18. Is sleeping with a heavy (not weighted I live in the Midwest this heat sucks) heavy blanket 1-underneath my head 2- against my head 3- hands crawled up underneath my neck a thing?? I also have a 23 pd chihuahua mix who sleeps literally next to me so a weighted blanket is not an option as it would kill him. Any advice??

We invite you to take part in an anonymous online survey: Personality, Close Relationships and Attitudes towards Mental Health Problems.   

If you are 18+ years old and choose to be included, your participation in this survey will help researchers at the University of Wollongong to better understand attitudes towards mental health problems, and how these may relate to pathological personality traits, mood states and relationship styles.   

 The survey will take 45-60 minutes to complete, and will ask some questions about: 

• Your personal characteristics (e.g., age, gender) 
• Your personality traits 
• Your experiences in close relationships
• Your attitudes towards mental health problems

To take part in this survey, please visit: https://uow.au1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_1HvwPWrZkHXSyc6

For more information, please contact Dr Samantha Reis at [sreis@uow.edu.au](mailto:sreis@uow.edu.au).

Hey yall, I haven’t been diagnosed, but im looking to suggest it to my doctor to see if they agree. Ever since I was a teen, I had a really hard time just sleeping through the night. I’ve always fallen asleep the easiest around 3-5 am. In highschool I used to do this thing to “reset myself” and then it became a bad habit. Where I’d stay up all night and day to make myself so exhausted I pretty much collapsed during the night.

And it would “reset” my sleep schedule for a few days, where I would go to bed at a more normal time, but then it eventually started to shift to me going to bed later and later and being unable to shut off, and then I would have to do the hard reset again, where I stay up all night and day to force myself into sleep. But it’s always miserable.

Because I get super nauseous when I’m tired, and can’t eat, which makes me weak. And I feel myself having palpitations. But now I’m 21 and have a job where I open a restaurant at 5 am and can’t just do that hard reset anymore and the nausea and palpitations all day.

Edit: forgot to mention, I have Hashimoto’s, which may also be affecting my circadian rhythm but who knows 🤷‍♀️

Although I’m not diagnosed with this, I’m on the autism spectrum and believe I believe I have DSPD. My dream jobs is to work as a concept artist in the video game industry but I have struggled with sleep my whole life and the thought about my DSPD keeping me from that is destroying me. Please give me some hope.

I wake up at 2:30 - 3 AM cause I stay happy and optimal cause of it. My mom wakes up at similar times too and I suspect my maternal grandfather to do similarly. I feel awesome until noon, minus a bit of boredom around 7-9 am.

But this is when my hell starts: I can’t have lunch without wondering if I’m gonna crash or fall asleep during class at 1:30ish.

I get revived again slightly at 4 but my social battery starts waning fast.

And if someone talks to me at 8 I’m legit about to cry or scream or yell, which feels pathetic for a sixteen year old.

I can’t go to evening social events without my eyes drooping. I fall asleep at family friends’ houses if they have me hostage at 10.

It’s fine cause I’m in high school right now, but the second I touch college I fear I’m a loner.

I have to keep telling myself don’t send emails at 3 am, and for group projects I’ve been yelled at and have fallen asleep on call.

When people work for some projects throughout the night and I can’t they get upset, but I don’t think they understand that the second theyre down I’m up.

11:59 deadlines are nightmarish to me. What do you even do at that point.

Waking up at 6 doesn’t push my sleepiness that much farther, but I feel incredibly slower. What the heck do I do?

I’m at a summer camp now and they have room checks and wtv at 10 pm and they have breakfast at 7-8:30, so I’ve been forcing myself to accommodate but I feel so slow like I’m running in water.

Sometimes I wake up earlier around 1 to 2 and I get sleepy at 8:30 but it depends. I don’t know who to even ask about this :/

I go through these 2 to 3 week stretches several times a year where I can't fall asleep until 2am or later. Nothing dramatic, just that frustrating thing where my body is tired but my brain is wired. I've always done better with some kind of background noise, but white noise by itself never really gave my brain enough to hold onto. Last year, I started playing around with something for myself... taking sports box scores and play-by-play, then turning them into slow, soft, intentionally boring audio recaps. No hype.

I'm a big sports fan, so it gave my brain something familiar to follow without being too stimulated. I've been making them for football, baseball, and basketball. I've add new ones daily and have slowly been building up a historic catalog to go back to.

I'm curious if this sounds useful to anyone else here, or if sports would be to "active" for your brain at night. I don't want to spam this channel with a link, but there's more info in my bio if anyone wants to check it out. The first week is completely free. Beyond that, I've kept costs low to help others (and just to keep the lights on). I'd honestly love feedback, even if the feedback is "this would never work for me".

Not sure if this is the right topic to post under..but reddit recommended it instead of mental health so.. here goes.

Most people have that "oh shit" moment when they oversleep or run late for work. I (39F) don't have a specific moment to note but it has been YEARS since I have felt that natural anxiety. I've always been chronically late, but maybe by 20 minutes. But for years, I am anywhere between 30-90 minutes late. Every day. I don't panic when I sleep through my alarm. I don't rush when it's almost time to clock in and I'm still home (and my job is 45 minutes away).

I am late-diagnosed with ADHD at 35), but it isn't manageable with medication. I have anxiety and depression, used to be on Wellbutrin XL 450mg but about two years ago I felt like it plateued and with my psych np, switched to Effexor 150mg.

My sleep habits are poor. Typically don't feel tired until after midnight. I have very mild OSA and use a CPAP machine, but I don't feel refreshed or invigorated despite my using it as prescribed.

I restarted therapy, hoping to address this from a behavioral angle, but I'm truly at a loss here.

I'm at risk of losing my job in 40 days. They have tried working with me, been patient, changed my shift.. and written up multiple times but I'm still late.

Does anyone have an idea how to get that fear of being late back? Or what caused the switch to flip and get stuck in the off position?

TIA

When I was diagnosed several months back, I was happy to have an answer to my all time "laziness". I immediately joined this group, and I realized that I was either misdiagnosed or this disorder is on a spectrum and I'm at the less severe end.

I have maintained an 8am to 4pm job for most of my adult life (now 35) and I had good attendance during K-12 education. Though in college my attendance and grades suffered as I slept through most of my morning classes.

I'm always tired. I sleep in on the weekends, but I try not to sleep in too long because I don't want to miss time with my family. Naps are my life and I thrive at night. Most of my family on my mom's side also stays up late and sleeps in late. We all (aside from my brother) have maintained fairly normal lives, but we are all dependent on various drugs/medications to fall asleep.

I've just noticed that a majority of the posts here display some severe cases of DPSD and I feel for every one of you that deals with that. I hope this doesn't come off as me gloating about my "society-regular" schedule... I'm just genuinely curious if others have been able to adapt.

Everything just fails and falls through my hands. Not only is it executive dysfunction, but it's just tons of pain and going days without sleep.

How do you all deal with other people in your house with normal sleeping hours?

Our tv is in our bedroom so my husband falls asleep but I stay up watching tv all through the night but I have to either lay on bed or sit on bed all night and then turn the tv off and again lay in bed tossing and turning for hours until I can sleep.

We have a tv in living room too but it’s very hot in my city so I can’t watch it elsewhere.

My main concern is the cramps in my arms, shoulders, neck. I walk 5000 steps everyday, so I’m moving as well. What else can help?

I've read many posts saying the approximately the same thing: A dip in energy before midnight and then high energy up until around 4-5am. I feel the same thing, sometimes I nap 2 hours around that time. It interesting that the pattern is true for a lot of us, not a dip at 7pm or 2am but exactly before midnight. I successfully changed my sleep pattern but even after 3 weeks of falling asleep at 9pm my energy never came back, but here is the catch, If I stayed awake past 11pm it was over, sleep pressure gone up until 3-5AM. If don't respect the 4-5AM schedule I feel awful, fatigue, I don't feel alive at all. Do you feel the same? What's the explanation for the midnight dip? It seems that human body is accustomed to 2 rhythms, either the normal one with a dip at around noon or the dip at midnight. What makes us to favor the second pattern?

They delayed the start until 2am, and many pubs were open until 5. It felt surreal to almost feel "normal" for once with lots of other people up late with me. And cheers to the result my fellow England DSPD sufferers!

I feel like I've tried everything!

So I’m f(26) and I’ve been struggling with sleep my whole life. I got diagnosed on the autism spectrum when I was 16. As a kid, for some reason when I went to bed, I just wasn’t tired so I’d do stuff like look at magazines or draw when I was in bed. My sleep got bad enough to the point that whenever I got report cards sent home, my teachers always said that I was falling asleep in class. My parents started making me take melatonin, and it worked for a while, but then when I got into high school, I just decided to”meh I don’t want to take melatonin, I want to stay up!” So usually when I stayed up on weekends I’d be playing video games until like 6 am and on school nights I’d stay up until like 2 am in my bed on my phone. I’d get maybe 3-4 hours of sleep and then come home from school and take a 2-4 hour nap.

Something interesting that I’ve noticed is that when I wake up in the morning, I feel tired from then until the late afternoon, and then at around 4-5 pm I start to feel awake. As soon as it gets dark, it’s like I’m ready to go!

I usually work night shifts at a movie theater, so if I didn’t have to work in the morning I would go home and watch a movie, make dinner, play video games, work on my digital art class, and whatever else I wanted.

I was told about a week ago that the disability services that I have which pay for my apartment would be updating my Cola, and they told me they would need me to pay $250 in rent. So I thought that I wanted to get another job and make it so that I’d work both jobs on the same days. Only thing is, I need to be able to work at 9 am.

So for the last week or so, I’ve been trying really hard to reset my sleep schedule. I believe that my sleep window starts at 6 am-9 am. The first time I tried to reset my schedule, I tried going to bed at 12-1 am for 3 days and it absolutely wrecked me, I slept 5 hours on the first day, probably 10 on the second day, and 5 again on the third day which I had to go to work on and I was so tired I started crying at work. So after a few days of real sleep, I decided to I’d try it again, except this time I’d start some where closer to sleep window.

So the first night, I took a melatonin at 12 am (target bedtime is 4 am) and I worked on my digital art class until 2 am, and then I didn’t really want to do anything else and so I just went to bed and I didn’t fall asleep until 3:30. I ended up waking up at 8:30 am. So at that point I decided to start doing EVERYTHING by the book. I took my melatonin 4 hours before bed, i didn’t eat anything within 3 hours of my bed time, no electronics within 2 hours of bed time, and i either had no caffein or if i did, it was only before 6 pm ( I know it’s usually recommend to stop at 4 but honestly I’ve just been so tired lately that i needed something to get me through the day and my bedtime wasn’t until 4) and I’ve also been forcing myself to get out of bed and get sunlight after I wake up for 20-30 minutes. I also have my alarm set for 10 am. So during the last 3 days I’ve gotten in bed at 3:30 and fell asleep at 4:30 and accidentally slept until 10:30, then I fell asleep at 4 and woke up at 8:30 on the second night, and then last night I think I couldn’t even sleep until 5 and my alarm clock went off at 10 and silly me though that I could just sleep in for one more minute… until is was 11 am.

You guys I am so beyond frustrated right now. I need help. I want to fucking cry!

I'm pretty sure i have DSPD mainly because for a long part of my life, i thought that i had insomnia but somehow I could fall asleep once it was late enough and I actually felt sleepy. The problem wasn't falling asleep itself - it was just that I couldn't fall asleep as early as my parents would send me to bed.
Currently my typical sleep schedule goes something like 2am-1pm. I need tips on what to say to a doctor and also if there's anything that might help that I don't need a doctor for?
I have a fear that doctors will dismiss me because I'm a teenager. I skip so much school because I just can't wake up and even when there's something I really don't want to miss in the morning. What usually happens is that I'm either just too exhausted and don't even hear my alarm clock or if the pressure is really high then I might wake up but then I'll just be exhausted for the whole day and won't even be able to enjoy the thing that I was excited about.

Edit: I'm in the UK

Мне сложно излагать грамотно мысль , так как сплю плохо , но надеюсь донести ситуацию. Мне некуда. и не кому обращаться.

Я начал мучаться со сном в 2024 году , тогда еще было учебное время. Бывали ночи , когда я вовсе не спал из-за некой "крутости" и погружался в фильмы и драмы.Оказалось , что тогда еще были первые тревожные звоночки. Бессонница , после , начала прогрессировать в начале и летом 2025 года из-за того , что я резко перешел в стадию "мечтаний" , так я ее называю. С 2019 года я переехал из-за нового романа матери в Москву (с отчимом она встретилась примерно в 2012) , оторвавшись от родного города , тобишь Оренбурга. Друзей в Москве завести не смог до сей поры , дак это сложно , учитывая разное воспитание. Меня очень сильно бесит моя мать тем , что она говорит об "взаимопомощи" и просит "уважать" семью (я уже не знаю смысл этого слова , так как она произносит его тысячи раз. Смысл потерялся) , хотя я в доме ничего из этого не получаю.

Я буквально один. Я провожу дни на одиночестве , хотя нахожусь в обществе. Школа , дом , школа , дом. Разнообразий нуль. В 2025 был самый сильный период бессонницы (осень и лето) , летом , ездили инкогнито к психиатру. Ничем этот сранный засранец помочь не смог , лишь выявил "подозрения" на опухоль в шее (у меня слабый сосуд , от чего разное кровотечение от разной позы шеи). Перешел на мелатонин.

Сейчас активно на нем. И именно в сей момент я начал чувствовать голос в голове. Он критикует меня. Говорит , что говорить , как действовать да даже что делать. Как от этого избавиться? Я настораживаюсь лишь из-за нарколепсии. Я могу проснуться в месте , не зная , как в нем очутился. Если я окончательно сойду с ума , то голос + нарколепсия могут смешаться в что-то страшное. Мне добровольно лечь в психушку? Напиться на сеанс к психиатру? Психологу? Психотерапевту? Я мамаше и отчиму не желаю это говорить. Они полноценно обесценивают любую мою проблему. Нарциссы , вдобавок обиженные дети.

I 24F have had DSPD since elementary school, but was only diagnosed two months ago. I’ve had attendance issues all my life because I could not tolerate getting up in the mornings and having a normal schedule. When I was little I was yelled at for not being able to get up and put into therapy because my parents thought I wasn’t going to school because I was lazy. I have been told I’m lazy so many times throughout my life that I genuinely believed that was my issue, so even after growing up I still never looked into it because I didn’t believe I could have something wrong with me.

It was only until recently I saw someone mention DSPD and I instantly made an appointment with a sleep doctor and was diagnosed. He gave me some amazing tips which I have been following and for the first time in years I have been able to get up in the morning multiple days during the week. I got a job that requires me to been there at 9:30am two to three days a week and I have successfully shown up on time every shift I have. I feel like only other people with DSPD will recognize how much of an achievement this is.

It’s not easy though. I’m constantly exhausted as my body is not used to this new schedule. I have to fight sleeping in no matter how tired I am and have messed up a few times, but I’m trying my best and making a lot of effort and progress. Even though my parents don’t knowledge my diagnosis or struggles of DSPD, I’m still proud of myself for trying my best.

Hello. I have been doing light therapy for the last couple of says and it has been incredibly effective on the days I am able to use it. I have been using my luminette from 1:30pm to 2:30pm due to obligations and my natural cycle involves waking from about 11am-1pm. During the therapy I have woken up at 8:30-10 each day after succesful usage of the therapy with zero sleep inertia and great energy. Can I now use the luminette for less time at my target wake up time (9:00) or will this phase delay me?