Take desperate to a new level

“Green is the color of balance, harmony and growth”

#EvenWeek | day seven: free choice

Even Appreciation Week Day 7 » free choice

henrik: even’s denim jacket has a green sketchbook and a rainbow bouncy ball

skamdom:

henrik: :)

skamdom:

According to the International Classification of Sleep Disorders (ICSD), the circadian rhythm sleep disorders share a common underlying chronophysiologic basis:

The major feature of these disorders is a misalignment between the patient’s sleep pattern and the sleep pattern that is desired or regarded as the societal norm… In most circadian rhythm sleep disorders, the underlying problem is that the patient cannot sleep when sleep is desired, needed or expected.

The ICSD (page 128-133) diagnostic criteria for delayed sleep-phase disorder are:

There is an intractable delay in the phase of the major sleep period in relation to the desired clock time, as evidenced by a chronic or recurrent complaint of inability to fall asleep at a desired conventional clock time together with the inability to awaken at a desired and socially acceptable time.

When not required to maintain a strict schedule, patients will exhibit normal sleep quality and duration for their age and maintain a delayed, but stable, phase of entrainment to local time.

Patients have little or no reported difficulty in maintaining sleep once sleep has begun.

Patients have a relatively severe to absolute inability to advance the sleep phase to earlier hours by enforcing conventional sleep and wake times.

Sleep–wake logs and/or actigraphy monitoring for at least two weeks document a consistent habitual pattern of sleep onsets, usually later than 2 a.m., and lengthy sleeps.

Occasional noncircadian days may occur (i.e., sleep is “skipped” for an entire day and night plus some portion of the following day), followed by a sleep period lasting 12 to 18 hours.

The symptoms do not meet the criteria for any other sleep disorder causing inability to initiate sleep or excessive sleepiness.

Some features of DSPD which distinguish it from other sleep disorders are:

People with DSPD have at least a normal—and often much greater than normal—ability to sleep during the morning, and sometimes in the afternoon as well. In contrast, those with chronic insomnia do not find it much easier to sleep during the morning than at night.

People with DSPD fall asleep at more or less the same time every night, and sleep comes quite rapidly if the person goes to bed near the time he or she usually falls asleep.

DSPD patients can sleep well and regularly when they can follow their own sleep schedule, e.g. on weekends and during vacations.

DSPD is a chronic condition. Symptoms must have been present for at least one month before a diagnosis of DSPD can be made.

it’s often mistaken for insomnia, however they are two separate sleep disorders which are totally different from eachother.

insomnia is when people have a hard time falling asleep at all no matter what time it is or how tired they are. people claim to have insomnia when they’re up late and can’t sleep for some hours and end up falling asleep at like 2am. however that also is not insomnia. a true insomniac would be awake for at least a week straight and be getting drivin insane by their sleep deprivation.

DSPD however, is nowhere near. people with DSPD sleep the same amount of hours a person without it would sleep, with just as good quality. the only difference is the time.

for example a normal person would be asleep from 9pm to 6am right? let’s say their friend is also asleep for the same amount of hours. from 11pm to 8am. get it? same amount of hours asleep, just a few hours off.

now a person with DSPD is the same way, except with hours deemed “unreasonable” by society. for example falling asleep at 6am and waking up at 3pm. or 7am-4pm. same amount of sleep. just at the wrong time.

this is where this becomes a problem. because as you know, the world runs on a schedule including school and work where people have to wake up around 6 and 7am.

imagine falling asleep at 6am and waking up at 7am every day 5 times in a row. or a lot of the time getting barely any sleep at all. like falling asleep at 6:50 and getting up at 7.

imagine going a whole buisness week on about 3 hours worth of sleep.

that is where people would mix up dspd for insomnia. “you were up all night again? you must have insomnia”.

however, if you were allowed to do things on your own schedule, for example on weekends and during school vacations, you’d sleep perfectly fine although untimely, where a person with insomnia would not still not get any sleep at all.

not only do you get a tiny bit of sleep during the school week, but you have to read boring books and fill out work sheets and do math problems and write essays at what feels like 12 midnight to you every day. they also want you to do physical excersize. and youre surrounded by people who dont like you and make fun of you. and then the school expects you to go home and do even more work sheets and reading and math problems and essays. and if you don’t do this you’re labeled a problem child or a bad person and a failure and stupid. and you fail at life with no education and no career and no success whatsoever.

then imagine being told you’re not even allowed to drink coffee or energy drinks in the morning to try helping because it’s either not good for you or too expensive.

DSPD cannot be simply solved with “going to bed earlier”. it has nothing absolutely NOTHING to do with what you’re doing “instead of sleeping.”. trust me it’s not a choice. you dont decide for this to happen to you. you dont want this. it’s a terrible thing that i do not want. its horribly lonely and stressful. thats like telling someone who got hit by a drunk driver that they wanted to get hit by a car because they had to cross the street. exactly. it’s just mean and doesn’t make any sense.

it’s not a matter of refusing sleep. it’s not “fighting your tiredness because you choose to stay up”. its not an excuse.

“you’re up all night because you’re too interested in your phone” this is not true. if you were to take away the phone and laptop and video games, i would still be wide awake way untill the sun comes up. unless i cry myself to sleep. I’ve been like this since around 6th grade. and back then i didnt have a phone screen to stare it. i had a microwave with a digital clock on it and a window. so where does the “awake because of phone” part kick in??

but yes. while I’m awake, I’m on my phone or computer or video game because why revert to staring at the wall and ceiling (because i no longer have the microwave and window) when i can at least watch a tv show online or play a game, something to entertain myself while I’m stuck awake because it feels like 2 in the afternoon to me. not only does it entertain me but it distracts me from the thoughts that would otherwise tear me apart. and a lot of the times crying yourself to sleep doesnt work and now you’re just awake and sad with wet hair and pillows and a runny/stuffed nose. which makes it even harder to sleep. lets not even get into the mysophonia part when i dont even have my headphones at least.

there’s nothing online that wont be there in the morning. it’s not like I’m staying up on my phone because i think I’d miss out on something otherwise. it’s actually really really lonely. imagine being awake for the majority of hours that your friends are sleeping. nobody is posting anything new to look at or read for the rest of the night. you can message them all you want but they wont see it until you’re already asleep. and vice versa. imagine waking up too late for plans to be made. imagine waking up wanting to go outside with your friends but the place you want to go to closes in 3 or 4 hours and even if it doesnt, your metro card expires at that time. or imagine waking up when the freaking sun is going down. nobody understands how upsetting that is. you feel like you only have a certain amount of days to live and you just spent another one sleeping. you didnt even get to see the sun today.

to add onto it, on non-school days, have everyone insisting you go to sleep at 10 or 11 when you’ve only been awake for 4 or 5 hours and a school session is at least 8 hours. and then they say “you’re tired you’re just fighting the sleepiness because you want to be on your phone”. __ it cannot easily be fixed by staying up all night. but it has helped some people to stay up more than 78 or more hours to the point of exhaustion and passing out at a “reasonable hour”. but simply being tired does not mean you can fall asleep at a decent hour. it’s much more than when you’re tired and arent tired. its not as simple as “go to bed early wake up early”. there’s actually chemicals in your brain that are released at “sleep time” that makes you tired at a certain time.

biological clock exists. hormones are released at night that make people tired. you’re trained to this routine from a baby. up at day, sleep at night. up at day, sleep at night. your brain picks up the pattern. like how you automatically know which song lyrics are coming next to a song you’ve heard a bazillion times. its automatic. but for people with dspd, it gets messed up somehow. it can be anything from training yourself, for example if you work a night shift for a long time. it can also be caused by puberty. which is why DSPD affects 17% of adolescents and sometimes begins in childhood. for people with dspd, your brain releases this hormone at the wrong time. like your obnoxious ringtone blairing loudly at a movie theater. feeling a sudden strong urge to go to sleep in the middle of math class. ___

My family is rampant with sleep disorders. My brother has narcolepsy, my other brother has insomnia, my mom appears to have narcolepsy, my sister struggles back and forth with sleep apnea, and I have delayed sleep phase disorder.

Let’s talk about mine. Delayed Sleep Phase Disorder. DSPD.

No one has ever heard of it, then they hear about it and are like, “Oh, yeah, I’m a night owl too!” You may also have it. Or not. I can’t tell you. Go to a doctor. 

Let’s talk about what it’s like.

DSPD means my body’s clock is different. It runs longer than 24 hours, and it goes through the preparing for wakefulness and preparing for sleep at different times than the societal norms. This means that my body starts to cool down for sleep in the early hours of the morning (4 or 5am), and to warm up for awake in the evening (4pm or so). It means my body reacts to sunlight by becoming tired for bed, and reacts to night time by wanting to become alert. I am literally nocturnal.

ALL OF THIS SUCKS LIVING IN A DIURNAL WORLD.

I basically live in perpetual jet lag. I am always exhausted and can sleep anywhere at anytime. I am forced to sleep out of my cycle, so my sleep is low quality, which makes me more tired, then I get sleepy during the day and all I can have is more low quality sleep at night. I keep a “normal” sleep schedule (9/10pm to 5am–a majority of my prime wakefulness time) so I can hold a job, but I feel like garbage. The longer I have to do this, the worse it gets. During a work week, by Thursday or Friday, I am painfully and breathlessly exhausted by 2pm and falling asleep around my house by 7pm. I use days off to sleep in until 3 or 5pm, getting some of the quality sleep a person needs to survive. The long term effects are that eventually I can’t get up as early as I need to. I get up at 5am for work but after doing that every week for 3 months, I physically can’t get up until 6am now. In my normal sleep cycle, that’s all bedtime. I would be going to bed but I am getting up.

Not everyone with DSPD has their clock set that late. Some are earlier in the night, like 1am. If you stick to a strict schedule and never ever waver, you can usually adjust your clock by an hour, but if you don’t maintain it, it will return to its normal times pretty much immediately.

Additionally, there is actually no cure or treatment. There are no drugs, exercise won’t help, weight loss won’t affect it, changing time zones won’t circumvent it (boy did I consider that). You just have to live like this. On top of that, normal jobs don’t exist for us in the desired wakefulness time. We can have low income night shift jobs as security or toll guards, or the like. And the normal jobs we force ourselves into don’t understand this disorder can disrupt your expected normal behavior, so you’ll struggle with being late and not being at full capacity for work, all of which only gets worse the longer you do it. And try to explain all of this to people. If I tell you I’m exhausted and that I have DSPD, don’t try to tell me you understand because you also get tired. Nothing feels worse than people trying to tell you that it’s normal, telling you that you just need to go to bed earlier or get some caffeine. I already feel like a societal failure because I can’t function.

I feel like people need to know this little known sleep disorder is super real. It’s not just being a night owl, it’s not just being a sleepy person, it’s not just staying up too late. It’s permanent exhaustion, diminished mental capacity, mental illness (depression, anxiety, etc) from sleep deprivation, and inescapable. 

Okay we need to address this, because it’s been kind of stuck in my mind ever since the last clip happened. I may be putting WAY too much thought into this, but that’s just how I am when it comes to SKAM…

The thing Even said, when Isak asked him if he wanted to go on a vacation. Even said: “Yeah, but I’m so impulsive, I can’t plan anything.” He didn’t look sad or worried, it was just a statement. But it still kind of bugged me. Is this really how Even still sees himself? As someone who is so impulsive that he can’t plan ahead? I know being manic makes you very impulsive, and being impulsive doesn’t necessary means you’re manic. But I still fear that Even very much let himself define by his diagnose. We know he still thinks he is a burden to Isak!

How will this affect his future plans and dreams, if he doesn’t think he can plan stuff. If he thinks he only acts on impulses?

I really hope he someday realize that being impulsive doesn’t mean you are incapable of planning stuff. And planning small trips and stuff with Isak will be such a healthy thing for him!

Even you planned Isak birthday party! And you did perfect!! But he was also so nervous about it. Maybe this was really one of the first things he planned totally on his own. Organizing people and making plans days ahead. This was such a big deal for him. Maybe not just because Isak means the world to him and he wants to show him more love than he ever thinks he is capable of, but maybe also because Even doesn’t see himself as a guy who can organize and plan stuff. He was freaking out over ketchup!!

I love you Even, and I hope you one day will realize how much you are capable of. And that your diagnose does not define you or what you can or cannot do.

Cr:penguinodrawino

They’re more comfortable, still form fitting, and best of all: THE POCKETS. THEY HAVE ACTUAL POCKETS.

don’t believe me? look:

these are boys pants, and they look just as good on me as any other skinny jeans I own

See that phone? I’m going to put it in the pocket. Must be so small right??

Ah yes, girl pants length. Probably can’t fit any further than that-

what? what’s this?

Good god. Oh good lord in heaven. This is blasphemous.

Look at how much room is still there. There’s chaos in the streets. Babies are crying. Fashion designers are screaming out of fear of the unknown.

Tall ladies: men’s pants are easier to find in longer lengths than women’s pants are.

Trans ladies: Wanna get on this gravy train, but afraid people will misgender you for wearing clothes off the men’s racks? Step one: tell me who these people are and I will punch them in the face. Step two: if it doesn’t make you dysphoric, please don’t feel obligated to wear pants off the women’s racks if pants off the men’s racks are more comfy/useful to you. I’m a cis woman who’s been wearing pants from the boys’ section and, later, the men’s section, ever since I hit puberty and in thirteen years maybe, maybe half a dozen people have noticed. And it’s always women asking the oh-my-god-pockets question. You’re all good. <3

Fat ladies: you will pay the same for a pair of 42x32 jeans as for a pair of 34x32 jeans, instead of having to pay some kind of Fat Penance Tax by way of being in the “plus size” section. Also, did I mention more room in the butt?

Ladies concerned about modesty: For obvious reasons, there is more crotch space in men’s pants. Embrace it and enjoy a life free from cameltoe worries and spontaneous labia-wedgies when you squat down.

All ladies: I swear to god the waists in women’s pants these days are made specifically to fit exactly nobody so that no matter what you do, your underwear will show. Men’s pants do not do this. The waists sit where they’re supposed to and will actually lay flat against the small of your back instead of flopping open to show your unmentionables to the world. If you want hiphugger jeans, buy one leg-length too small and one waist-size too large and let them hang, and they still won’t accidentally show your undies. Men’s pants will last longer. They cost less, in a lot of cases. Embrace the men’s jeans. Buy the men’s jeans. Stop buying shitty flimsy women’s jeans that wear out in six months.

And I said yeah, I’d seen it, I’ve been through the Trying To Fit Clothes On My Stupid Body wars, and this post really only applied to skinny jeans because they’re so stretchy. It couldn’t possibly work for regular jeans! I have TRIED SO MANY TIMES. I’ve always shopped in the men’s department because women’s clothes are like 90% bullshit and 10% fake pockets.

But I hadn’t seen the second addition, which gave me more hope, and I decided to just try on a few pairs when I was at Old Navy the other day. They have some “classic” jeans with no give to them at all, which is what I was trying on years ago that convinced me it just wasn’t possible. (Jeans in my price range didn’t really come with any form of stretch back then, as I recall. Textile technology is bad-ass.) But these days they mostly have “flex” jeans that have some give to them. (Women’s jeans are usually labeled “stretch” but apparently men’s have to be “flex” like they need stretchy garments so their HUGE MUSCLES don’t just TEAR THEIR CLOTHES!)

This was totally an impulse decision so I couldn’t measure myself, but I grabbed a few sizes based on what I vaguely thought my measurements probably were and decided it couldn’t possibly be worse than the endless cycle of regret, dissatisfaction, and recrimination that is trying on women’s clothing.

The first pair I tried on fit like a DREAM. I’ve been gaining weight lately which is a whole separate nightmare (mainly centered around “but I don’t WANT to buy new bras, this is bullshit!”) and the reason I need to buy new jeans because nothing freaking fits me, and I was sure these wouldn’t either, but DAMN. They’re the best pair of jeans I own. Twice as thick, pockets twice as big, legs nice and loose (they don’t even sell women’s jeans with a cut remotely similar to this), and contrary to my super dumb opinion from before this experience, they’ve got my plenty of room for all my womanly curvey bits. AND because they’re actually a relaxed fit instead of trying to cling to every inch of me, they don’t show my weight nearly as much as my women’s jeans do, they’re easier to move in, they’re not constantly inching down my hips with every move I make, and overall they just make me feel GOOD about how I look which is a strange new sensation I could definitely get used to.

Athletic cut jeans have more room in the butt. I repeat. Athletic cut jeans have more room in the butt. You don’t need to go to the dress pants to fit your lovely curvy self in there. Go to the regular section or big and tall if you’re a bit taller and/or wider, and there’ll be a little section of athletic style jeans. They’ve still got the giant blessed pockets and the room in the crotch and if you’re really curvy with a large bone structure like I am you can get yourself some quality pants.

All that pain and misery… and loneliness… and it just made it him kind. - Amelia Pond, Doctor Who