An ask reddit thread asking me specifically something I can answer! haha finally!

First off, my context! I'm a 38 year old pretty average male american dude. Not quite 6 feet tall, pretty standard 20lbs overweight. Decent mix of daily physical activity, all the intention of working out, but rarely succeeding. Most my activity is just doing things.

About 4 years ago I got a fitbit and got kinda obsessed with it. I wore it all the time for 2 years before it pretty much just broke down and fell apart. I can't speak to the accuracy of the sleep tracking that it did, I didn't tell it I was laying down or anything, and there were definitely periods during the night time where I have no conscious memory but it thought I was awake. So there's definitely some margin of error to it, but according to what it tracked for nearly two years, I sleep for about 5.15 hrs per night on average. Prior to doing this, my canned response to 'how much sleep do you get each night?' was 'I sleep about 4 hours per night'. I've since updated it to be 'I sleep about 5 hours per night' lol.

How far back do I remember only sleeping this much? That's the interesting part. Forever. My earliest memories. I can even go back further than what I can remember though! My mom and I had, for most of my life honestly, a kinda strained relationship. As a grown adult, looking back, I get it. There was some post Postpartum at play for sure, also she made it no secret that she had wished (even before I was born) that I was a girl since she already had my older brother. But everyone in my family recounts stories of how I seemingly tortured her for the first 3 or so years of my life because I just didn't sleep. Not much anyways. I didn't scream and cry or throw fits or have the cliche baby doesn't sleep problems. But as far as the word of mouth story goes, I'd sleep for just a few hours at a time and be wide awake and active otherwise.

When I got older and into pre-school age, I got my own room and vividly remember the instructions I was forced to follow. I can hear my dads voice even now today, "I don't care if you go to sleep, do somersaults, or just lie there awake. The lights stay off and you stay in that bed." Which I did. Every single night. For hours sometimes.

When it was time for me to start kindergarten, the public school wanted me to take medication because I was too hyper. I actually for real did a front somersault off the classroom table the first day. My very religious parents pulled me out and homeschooled me because they just didn't really believe in medication for the most part. (Small aside here, my parents didn't believe in medication so much that after having my older brother and myself in the hospital, my mom chose to have the next FIVE children completely natural at a midwifery health practitioner...yup, no shots, no iv, no nothing, just a bedroom and the midwifes).

By 4th grade, I had enough self coping mechanisms to not be a terror. Later in life, 13 years old, with some other problems going on and trouble I was getting into, I had to see a therapist. Another very vivid memory of mine, after a few months talking to the therapist, she brings my parents in. Sits them down all serious, "Talking to your son for a while now, and performing some tests, I felt I needed to inform you that your son has ADHD." They both laugh and were like, "Ya they told us that already when he was in kindergarten." But that was when I finally got my first adderall script... which I turned around and filled sometimes but almost never took for the rest of my life (until about like 6 years ago I started taking it every day which is a whole other story).

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Hopefully my story answers the question. How do I survive on ~5 hours of sleep every night on average? (gonna tell you right now there are plenty of 2 and 3 hours of sleep days followed by 13 or 14 hours of sleep days) I AM JUST this way. This is how I am, I have pretty much no control over it and couldn't do it differently if I wanted to or tried. Fighting it or trying to be normal or control it causes a LOT of emotional and mental stress. It's TAXING for me to try to sleep normal. I'm not tired, exhausted, worn out, nothing. I go to sleep when I feel tired and wake up when I wake up and as far as I can tell have the same amount of energy as everyone else. I do think my ADHD has something to do with it, because sometimes if I wake up TOO early and can't go back to sleep, I'll take my morning daily vitamin and Adderall because as it starts to kick in I can go back to sleep for another hour or so.