In high school I was always exhausted. I had trouble staying awake during class and as soon as Redmond High got out at 2:01 p.m., I rushed home and passed out, not waking up until dinner.

I failed to fall asleep until after 2 or 3 in the morning and yet had to wake up every day at 6:20 a.m. to make it to school on time. I was little more than a zombie of a student, and yet, many of my classmates followed similar sleep schedules. While we thought this was normal, we actually suffered from one of the most common sleep disorders: Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome.

One of the forces that keeps us awake and attentive during the day is our circadian rhythms, brought about by our biological clocks. Our brain uses clock-dependent alerting to tell our bodies what times to be active and what times to be tired. While some people have their circadian rhythms slightly advanced, “early birds,” or delayed, “night owls,” as long as the person is obtaining adequate sleep this is not a problem.

The issue is that some people have their biological clocks so delayed or advanced that they are forced into a sleep schedule that interferes with their lives. Advanced Sleep Phase Syndrome is the advancement of the biological clock so that a person will be forced into sleep at an inappropriately early hour. Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome is an inability to sleep until very late, resulting in a lack of sleep. The easy way to advance the biological clock, for someone with Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome, it is best to go out into the bright sunlight early in the morning and avoid exposure to bright lights later in the day. The converse of this is also true. This deceives the biological clock about the time of day changing periods of clock-dependent alerting to times that are more appropriate.

Sleep is a topic that is rarely talked about and yet it is incredibly important to our overall health. For more information I suggest looking at http://www.end-your-sleep-deprivation.com/ – the Web site of the Sleep and Dreams class at Stanford University, where I was first exposed to this information. With adequate sleep education we can all experience the world as we should; awake and alert in the daytime and peacefully dreaming the night away.

Noah Cort, Stanford University freshman and 2009 Redmond High graduate