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My Rare 'Disorder'

2025-05-30 · letter vlog · Hank · 8:27 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Health (also: Personal life) · mode: Personal essay · tags: self promotion

Hank says he is pretty sure he has delayed sleep-wake phase disorder, a late natural sleep phase that was a disorder at school, not while he worked for himself, and is again since he had a child; he argues that a disorder can depend on the world around a person, since the DSM-5 defines it by impairment, and names three responses: change yourself, change your world, or grin and bear it.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — Hank introduces his likely delayed sleep-wake phase disorder that came, went and came back

  • ★★ Hank is not diagnosed and feels he is handling it well, but is pretty sure he has delayed sleep-wake phase disorder. (hedged) — 00:00:00
  • ★★★ Hank says he had the disorder for many years, then didn't, and now has it again, though nothing about him changed: the world around him changed. — 00:00:00

00:00:29 — Last chance to buy a Crash Course coin

  • ★★ Hank says this is the last chance to get a Crash Course coin and asks viewers who have $100 to spare and think Crash Course could do good with it to go to CrashCourseCoin.com. — 00:00:29 · Crash Course coin, Crash Course

00:00:58 — Early birds and night owls: preference, self-control and inborn sleep phases; Hank's 2 a.m. to 10 a.m. sleep

  • ★★ Hank says we tend to treat being an early bird or night owl as personal preference, with a tinge of morality: driven people and CEOs get up early, lazy slackers stay up late. — 00:00:58
  • ★★ Hank thinks there is a population-wide self-control aspect, but mostly about putting down the phone and not letting Instagram hijack your amygdala, which all sleep phases struggle with. (playful) — 00:01:27 · Instagram
  • ★★★ Hank says sleep scientists find that early birds and night owls are often, though not always, pre-programmed to have different sleep phases. — 00:01:27
  • ★★ Hank explains that mixed sleep phases helped evolving human groups cover night hours for caregiving or keeping watch; perfectly matched phases would have been a liability. — 00:01:56
  • ★★ Hank says some people, likely including him, have a sleep phase starting more than a couple hours after average; this is fairly rare among adults and more common in young people. (hedged) — 00:01:56
  • ★★★ Hank naturally falls asleep around 2 a.m. and wakes around 10 whenever left to his own devices; it is not staying up late, which is different from scrolling TikTok. — 00:02:26 · TikTok
  • ★★ Hank says he has no disordered sleep or insomnia and good sleep hygiene, just a sleep phase on the later edge of the bell curve. — 00:02:26
  • ★★ Hank's late sleep phase was very hard for him during school, a significant challenge to his social and academic life. — 00:02:26

00:03:03 — Hank's sleep phase through school, college, self-employment, fatherhood and a recent vacation

  • ★★ Hank says there is no easy fix: kids must attend school at the same time and adults work together, and matched schedules help people cooperate and use each other's scarce time and energy. — 00:03:03
  • ★★★ Hank says at school his delayed sleep phase became a disorder because it made his life worse inside a cultural optimization that could not allow his natural variation. — 00:03:32
  • ★★ Hank says college got easier as he chose classes, and working for himself as a blogger and YouTuber let him live his delayed-sleep-phase life from about 2000 to 2016, which was awesome. — 00:03:32
  • ★★ Hank reminds John that he lived in the Mountain time zone and woke at 10, noon for John, leaving little overlapping work time. — 00:04:02 · John Green
  • ★★ Hank says that while self-employed he had the same sleep phase but no longer had a disorder, because the phase was not causing him problems. — 00:04:31
  • ★★★ Hank says that then he had a child: beyond infancy, kids wake early and their activities, especially school, run on a rigid schedule. — 00:04:31 · Orin Green
  • ★★ Hank says the importance of having a child made it easier to push himself into a different sleep schedule, which he did; the obligation is high and the relationship rewarding. — 00:05:00
  • ★ Hank says that, possibly, getting older helps too, since age sometimes brings earlier bedtimes. (hedged) — 00:05:00
  • ★★ Hank still feels it: travelling alone he slips into his natural schedule and must work back against it at home, as he is doing now after a lovely vacation, which is why he made this video. — 00:05:29
  • ★ Hank says his son Orin is starting to wake up and go to bed later, letting Hank slip back into his former ways. — 00:05:29 · Orin Green

00:06:11 — What a disorder is: the DSM-5 definition, the problem that just is, and three ways to cope; thanks for AFC Wimbledon

  • ★★★ Hank says his natural inclination can become an impairment, and so be classified a disorder, because society has to function for other purposes. — 00:06:11 · mental disorder

  • ★★★ Hank says a disorder need not be a mechanical failure: psychiatry's diagnostic manual (quoted by name) defines it by clinically significant distress or impairment in functioning, without asking whether the impairment would exist in a different world. — 00:06:40 · mental disorder

    “a clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning”

  • ★★★ Hank says he used to think the problem was with him, then with society, but suggests a third option: the problem just is. (hedged) — 00:06:40

  • ★★ Hank says his son's school can't start later for him and that is no reason not to try to solve the problem; it is just a part of his life harder than average, as everyone has, and not that hard. — 00:07:09 · Orin Green
  • ★★ Hank says he has done all three usual things: built a more forgiving world, used light therapy and sleep hygiene, and lived with the discomfort; change yourself, change your world, or grin and bear it. — 00:07:09
  • ★★ Hank thanks John for inviting him into his beautiful, risky and terrifying love of AFC Wimbledon and can't believe it turned out so well after he thought they had blown it. — 00:07:38 · John Green, AFC Wimbledon

00:08:06 — AFC Wimbledon reaction, last Crash Course coin reminder and sign-off

  • ★★ Hank says he doesn't know how John loves sports: it is too scary, too much risk to invest in something he can't control. — 00:08:06 · John Green

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: Chronotype · Delayed sleep phase disorder · mental disorder

Also: People: Orin Green

Projects: Crash Course

Works: Crash Course coin · DSM-5

Organizations: AFC Wimbledon · Instagram · TikTok

Concepts: Insomnia · normal distribution · parenting · self-control · smartphone · time zone · Youth

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