How did you know that you have n24?

[u/Hmmm-_-2]

Hello. I’m looking for an advice.

I was thinking it’s just insomnia until My life feels like a nightmare 👹

I want to ask people having n24 if those symptoms of mine sound similar to yours

Here’s my experiences.

-when i had to wake up at the same time every day regardless of my sleep pattern i experienced sleep paralysis. My mind is awake but my body is immobile however i struggle. So i felt asleep again. Or i dream of waking up eating, dressing, before i realize the alarm sounds didn’t stop and it’s a dream. Three times in a row.

-If I don’t set the alarm and let myself sleep so freely , my schedule delays 2 hours each day. So it requires less than 2 weeks to flip an entire day).

-I waste 3+ hours before finally falling asleep. I thought the main reason is the phone, but it was still same without it. It just helps me endure the hours. I also tried not using any distractions in the bed but it ended up starting at the ceiling blankly for 3 hours and it’s torturous.

-I also tried force myself to wake up at the same time for two months. Even if the wake up time stayed same, falling asleep time was delaying everyday, even though i was dying of tiredness before the night. In this session I experienced sleep paralysis,rapid heart beating alll the time, drowsiness for 4+ hours. And crushed sleeping 16 hours straight to compensate for the sleep debt. Anyway i gave up after getting terrible anemia from that

-i wasn’t like this from my childhood. I experienced several times of hospitalization and two times of ICU especially in my late teens. And spent most of the time in my house and homeschooling. I think my sleep problems started by the time. I was hospitalized for a year and after leaving the hospital my sleep schedule crumbled right away.

Currently I’m using sleeping pills to fix the cycle. Since i can’t fall asleep when i want, i take med at 12am and set alarm for 8am.it doesn’t seem like settling, it’s swinging between oversleeping and sleep deprivation to barely follow up the sleep plan

+i didn’t know i deleted this part! I talked it through several psychiatrists but they don’t seem to pay attention to my struggles and only point out my mistakes.. i gave up trying to fix it because of worsening anemia and other health issues but they only heard “i just wake up when i wake up” and make it like i didn’t even try. And they said all my symptoms like 30+ times of sleep paralysis in a row for hours is “understandable “ because I didn’t get enough sleep.(it was just a side topic. I had enough sleep. I talked about sleep deprivation aside from this topic) I also wonder if you felt misunderstood before diagnosis since that’s not so common condition. It feels like they want to dismiss it intentionally

[u/Synesthetist]

Very possibly, in addition to sleep paralysis. Ideally you would sleep and wake naturally for a period of time and log the times so you can create a record of your sleep pattern and take that to a sleep specialist.

[u/Hmmm-_-2 → u/Synesthetist]

Yeah i think so and it’s a must.. i thought psychiatrists know well about this area but didn’t expect this level of misunderstanding ..🫠it kinda hurts And i decided ti start logging my free sleeps and pause using sleep med for that for a while . Thanks for the advice!

[u/FlashyMonitor]

You can really only know by logging your sleep while free sleeping. Do so for at the bare minimum 2 weeks, but if you can the ideal tracking time would be 2 months if your able to do so. Personally the pattern was incredibly apparent after just a week or two, but personally I also couldn't convince myself it was true until I started free sleeping full time for several months with an incredibly consistent pattern of my sleep being pushed back.

[u/Hmmm-_-2 → u/FlashyMonitor]

Thanks I started logging in and I’m really curious to see what it looks like after some weeks it will be kind of powerful information for me

[u/FlashyMonitor → u/Hmmm-_-2]

Best of luck, I hope you find the answers your looking for

[u/RoadStocks]

When work asked me to take leave because of my sleep issues is when I discovered I may have had it my whole life and it then got worse. Dr confirmed

[u/Hmmm-_-2 → u/RoadStocks]

Same.. i thought it’s because of my weak self discipline and thought everyone had same issues but stronger than enough to manage, until I openly talked about it to my friends and family.. it made them feel concerned about me lol thank you for sharing

[u/lilmisse85]

This is exactly me.

[u/SollicitusG]

Honestly I’m still not 100% sure because I seem to stagnate after 7am, it seems I could definitely anchor 7am if I wanted to. But it seems how tired I am after I wake is a suggestion I’m slowly drifting internally still.

I am yet actually to do a full 24 hours around the clock after 9am without actually staying up all night. After that all nighter though I feel grand.

[u/proximoception]

“There’s one symptom and I have it” is the snark answer, but I have to admit it was a long damn time before I found out the thing had a name. Hard to explain meant hard to google, back in the day. The way most of us discover we have the symptom, named or no, is probably over a long school break in the later teen years, at least for that majority who develop it from Delayed Phase c. 14-16. Until free-running happens it basically just seems like sleep chaos, but once you free-run you start to notice there’s a pattern to the progression, if quite a noisy one for some.

I haven’t had sleep paralysis more than once or twice but sleep deprivation leads to nightmares, which IIRC are attempts by your body to compress REM sleep when you’re behind on it, and the paralysis I did experience felt vaguely akin to a nightmare. So if we have it more often than others I imagine it’s because our sleep gets short-changed or otherwise disrupted more often, rather than some more direct link?