Dr. Matt Walker

and they are wide awake and they cannot fall asleep.

And this is the principle reason that I will get evening types coming to me and they'll say, look, I think I've got terrible insomnia.

I just have, and there are, you know, you can think about insomnia in lots of different ways, but there may be two broad categories.

One is that you have sleep onset insomnia.

I can't fall asleep.

Or the second is I have sleep maintenance insomnia, which is

the sort of the thing that you were describing, which is where, and you don't have, I don't think you have insomnia, but just as an example, you fall asleep quickly, but you can't stay asleep.

That's sleep maintenance insomnia.

So they will come to me with the opposite of your concern, which is that they say, I just cannot fall asleep.

And I say, okay, let me just ask you a few questions.

And we go through the chronotype questionnaire and it's very clear that they are an evening type.

And there's lots of different things that you would want to exclude to make sure they don't have insomnia.

And then you can say, you actually don't have insomnia.

You're just an evening type.

And you're going to bed at the wrong moment in time.

And if you were to try to go to bed at midnight,

you're not going to suffer from the problems that you have and you'll sleep through later but of course their response is well i need to be in work by you know 8 a.m and i've got an hour commute so i have to be awake at 6 30. so i need to be in bed by 10. so on both of these ends you can see that the morning type who goes to bed too late falls asleep easily but can't stay asleep the

evening type who is forced to go to bed too early, they can't fall asleep, but then they stay asleep.

And when the alarm goes off at 6.30 AM, they don't want to wake up.

So this is why when you sleep out of synchrony,