A version of this post was published on the author’s Substack, Earnestly American.
Mayor Muriel Bowser’s administration is putting parking ahead of people, again. On September 24, the Office of Planning (OP) released a 188-page Robert F. Kennedy Campus Master Plan draft. Others have rightly pointed out the plan’s shortcomings on transit, and many neighbors are mad about specific amenities around the future stadium.
But most media coverage is missing that this plan is deliberately shortchanging housing in ways that undermine the project’s high-minded goals and hurt the District’s financial bottom line.
DC’s current plan is to build 6,000 parking spaces before we build a single home. Bowser’s vision for “Day One” in 2030 is that the vast majority of the “planned” residential areas are “interim surface parking” instead of housing. The plan has pretty visualizations of what the development will look like at some uncommitted point in the future, but the only commitment in the plan is for a ton of parking like this:
Left: Rendering from the RFK Campus Master Plan. Right: Illustration by the author to match the plan’s Day One phasing map. 
The RFK plan is just the latest example of how DC’s planning process under our so-called “pro-growth” administration has prioritized everything but maximizing timely housing production.
The DC Council’s economic analysis found that the planned housing and non-stadium commercial development around the stadium produces 76% of the project’s tax revenue and that maximizing housing instead of building a stadium would have led to more economic growth. While we’re stuck with a stadium, it still matters on the margin how much housing we get and how fast.
The Council voted for this deal on the assumption that it would result in 6,500 housing units, and “the team is promising to complete the entire development by 2036.”
Each year of delay or shrinkage in the number of homes results in millions of dollars in foregone economic growth and tax revenue. But delay and shrinkage are exactly what is happening:
Image on the left from the RFK Campus Master Plan, annotations by the author. 
As much as we rightly gripe about the Congressionally-imposed Height Act harming DC, we often do more damage to ourselves through locally-imposed restrictions. The DC Office of Planning created these height and setback restrictions without any calculation of how this hurts the plan’s housing and economic impact.
The plan is very clear these restrictions are for aesthetic reasons (emphasis my own):
The height strategy for the RFK Campus organizes the tallest buildings along the perimeter of the stadium and along the river, with gradual reduction in height adjacent to the lower-scale surrounding neighborhoods.
Buildings should utilize a combination of design strategies to further break down the scale and reduce visual impact, including stepbacks, changes in plane, or changes in material.
Obviously some people really hate looking at tall buildings, especially next to their neighborhood. This came out in public input sessions that shaped the plan (emphasis my own):
Many commenters expressed excitement about the proposed building heights and mixed-use development program, emphasizing the importance of maximizing housing production. A similar number of commenters, mostly neighboring residents from Kingman Park and Hill East, expressed concern about building heights adjacent to existing low-rise residential neighborhoods and modern architecture that might feel out of character.
The Office of Planning congratulates itself for taking a “balanced approach” that ultimately removes about 1,500 homes from the site through these height and setback restrictions. Note that the scale of these self-imposed housing losses is in the same ballpark as how much housing we might lose from OP silently revising the goal from 6,500 to “5,500 to 6,500” housing units.
OP doesn’t acknowledge the costs of these aesthetics concessions or the delays from prioritizing parking before housing. If we’re serious about reigniting DC’s stalled economy, we have to be honest about these costs.
I used Claude to model the impacts of less and delayed housing at RFK under different scenarios. Even under conservative assumptions, we’re in danger of losing a huge share of the promised tax revenue because our economic planners are more concerned with parking and aesthetics:
My estimates, not the Budget Office’s. Based on the Council Budget Office’s July 2025 RFK revenue projections (read off its published charts), which assumed 6,500 homes finished by 2037. Low end counts only income tax as housing revenue; high end counts all non-stadium revenue. Present value through 2060, discounted 5% a year (the discounting is my addition; the Budget Office reports undiscounted nominal dollars). Delayed revenue is scaled for 2.5% annual inflation; revenue pushed past 2060 is not counted. The 8-year row is an alternative to the 5-year row. The last two rows combine the lower floor with each delay. Image by the author.
In an era of high interest rates, delays have enormous costs. Pushing out the promised tax revenues well into the 2040s dramatically reduces the benefit of this deal.
Conversely, a truly pro-growth mayor would be pushing to maximize housing on site, as fast as possible. Reversing these aesthetic restrictions on housing to add about 1,500 homes would provide approximately $0.9 billion to $1.4 billion in tax revenue and create an additional 450 affordable housing units.
As a geographically-tiny city, our limited land is an enormous constraint for growth. Every square foot is a scarce, precious resource and waterfront property like the RFK plot is even rarer. Our planners should be trying to maximize the economic potential of this site, not artificially restrict it.
Increasing the housing supply would also do more to prevent displacement by offsetting the increased housing demand from the areas’ new amenities. The plan acknowledges that “These new homes can help reduce displacement pressures,” but then instead limits housing on the site while doing almost nothing to accelerate housing construction.
Ward 7 Councilmember Wendell Felder raised concerns over displacement at the September 30 hearing on the plan: “Did we create the conditions that will help prevent displacement, or did we unintentionally contribute to it?” Unfortunately, Felder appears to be focusing on displacement as a problem to address with subsidies, rather than addressing the root cause and building more homes. From The Washington Sun (emphasis added):
Felder pointed to a $60 million community reinvestment fund established in addition to the team’s contributions, designed specifically to focus on displacement prevention like rental assistance and property tax relief for long-term homeowners.
Previously, Felder voted against amendments to the RFK deal that would have done more to force the Commanders to actually build housing on schedule. Every politician that claims to care about displacement needs to be pushing the mayor and Commanders to build as much housing as they can, as fast as they can.
This isn’t the only recent project where our ostensibly “pro-growth” administration is hindering housing production. At North Michigan Park, one DC agency chose to exercise discretion to block 166 units of housing, as UrbanTurf reported (emphasis added):
the DC Surveyor, the office that finalizes those lot divisions, read the older rules narrowly and stopped the developer’s application, even though the Office of Planning, DDOT, and other city agencies have signed off on the project. Urban Atlantic says it spent roughly six months looking for a workaround with city officials before concluding there wasn’t one.
This kind of delay actively undermines investment in DC and hurts job growth and tax revenue. We have an entire economic development infrastructure under the Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development (DMPED) which is supposed to streamline growth but is too often asleep at the wheel for anything other than the mayor’s obsessions with sporting events.
I encourage everyone to read Axios’ interview with Bowser to truly appreciate how much her focus on sports has warped economic policy in DC:
Her legacy, as she sees it: “All professional sports teams will be in the District of Columbia by 2030.”
Sports have been part of Bowser’s economic development strategy since her first year as mayor in 2015, when she pitched them as a way to develop neighborhoods and counteract D.C.’s dependence on federal jobs.
- That was before the pandemic fueled remote work, emptying downtown, and DOGE took a buzzsaw to the federal workforce.
What she’s saying: “It seems clairvoyant, right?”
It’s shocking that the mayor looks at DC’s economy losing over 80,000 jobs since the pandemic and wants to take a victory lap.
COVID and DOGE aren’t Bowser’s fault, but one would think that a leader with the gift of foresight could have done more to diversify DC’s economy. Notably, the RFK deal hasn’t created any permanent jobs so far, and the rest of her “All professional sports teams will be in the District of Columbia by 2030” “legacy” is just maintaining what we already have. And her administration nearly lost the Capitals and Wizards to Virginia!
Axios tries to give Bowser credit for helping keep the Wizards and Capitals in DC, but in reality it was Virginia State Senator Louise Lucas who blocked the deal and forced Monumental Sports & Entertainment to renegotiate with DC.
The mayor ultimately didn’t lose the Capitals and Wizards, but that was because she was bailed out by Virginia Democrats, not any “clairvoyant” action. In the same interview, Bowser talks a good game of balancing sports with other priorities:
“It’s not, ‘Do you invest in sports, or do you invest in this other thing?’” she says. “You have to invest in both.”
But her RFK plan makes it clear what her priorities are. Parking and a football stadium get exempted from zoning and are ready for the “Day One” launch. Most of the promised housing will instead be “temporary” surface parking lots and the housing plan gets bled by a thousand cuts to satisfy aesthetic considerations.
We have the money for a football stadium and parking garages, but not for a desperately needed Metrorail station. Even the mayor’s fiscal priorities take a backseat to football. The RFK plan risks billions in future tax revenues by delaying and minimizing housing while the commitments to the Commanders are treated as sacrosanct.
Obviously our next mayor needs to do better. We’re in an economic, fiscal and housing crisis; and in response Democratic nominee Janeese Lewis George has promised to build 72,000 new homes in five years. That will only happen if every level of government is seeking to maximize housing production throughout the city and using every tool we have to make it easier to build cheaper, faster and denser.
How our next mayor staffs these critical District agencies and works with the Council will determine if RFK and other smaller deals deliver the housing we desperately need. This post’s analysis shows how relatively minor staff decisions can quietly remove or add thousands of homes. Business as usual in our planning process doesn’t even bother estimating the economic and fiscal costs of slowing and shrinking housing; it instead treats delays and shrinkage as “free.”
These costs add up and would be treated as an outrage if anyone proposed them as a tax or fee, but we quietly accept them as just the “cost of doing business in DC” under our “pro business” mayor. The same culture of “No” in our planning agencies that produced this RFK plan hurts housing production across dozens of lower-profile deals, and everyday Washingtonians pay the price in higher housing costs. One of the reasons I support Greater Greater Washington is that it’s often a lonely voice highlighting the impact of these decisions and trying to push housing policy in a better direction.
Democratic mayoral nominee Janeese Lewis George has a chance to be a wildly more “pro-growth” mayor than her predecessor. Often our local political class treats “hating Progressives and Socialists” as synonymous with “pro-growth” but the failures of the Bowser administration to reform our planning system and zoning show there’s plenty of low-hanging fruit for her successor. Fixing the technocratic nitty-gritty of development in DC is the crown lying in the gutter for a future mayor.
Disclaimer: I’m married to Ward 1 Councilmember Brianne Nadeau, who voted against the RFK deal and for most of the amendments discussed above that would have strengthened it. She was right. I also serve on the board of Greater Greater Washington. The views here are my own. I used Claude to help with research and graphics.
Top image: A mural at Northwest Stadium in Landover. Fighting for DC means putting people above parking. Image by All-Pro Reels licensed under Creative Commons.
Mayor Muriel Bowser’s administration is putting parking ahead of people, again. On September 24, the Office of Planning (OP) released a 188-page Robert F. Kennedy Campus Master Plan draft. Others have rightly pointed out the plan’s shortcomings on transit, and many neighbors are mad about specific amenities around the future stadium. But most media coverage is missing that this plan is deliberately shortchanging housing in ways that undermine the project’s high-minded goals and hurt the District’s financial bottom line.
DC’s current plan is to build 6,000 parking spaces before we build a single home. Mayor Bowser’s vision for “Day One” in 2030 is that the vast majority of the “planned” residential areas are “interim surface parking” instead of housing. The plan has pretty visualizations of what the development will look like at some uncommitted point in the future, but the only commitment in the plan is for a ton of parking like this:
This is just the latest example of how DC’s planning process under our so-called “pro-growth” administration has prioritized everything but maximizing timely housing production.
The RFK deal explicitly exempted the stadium and parking garages from zoning to speed up construction, but didn’t extend the same relief to housing at the site.
The plan prioritizes parking spaces that sit vacant more than 300 days a year over housing for full-time residents.
The plan makes numerous trade-offs that prioritize aesthetics over maximizing housing on scarce waterfront property.
The DC Council’s economic analysis found that the housing and non-stadium commercial development around the stadium produces 76% of the project’s tax revenue and that maximizing housing instead of building a stadium would have led to more economic growth. While we’re stuck with a stadium, it still matters on the margin how much housing we get and how fast.
The Council voted for this deal on the assumption that it would result in 6,500 housing units, and “the team is promising to complete the entire development by 2036.”
Each year of delay or shrinkage in the number of homes results in millions of dollars in foregone economic growth and tax revenue. But delay and shrinkage are exactly what is happening:
The plan quietly shifts the goalposts to “5,500 to 6,500” housing units, potentially losing up to 1,000 housing units.
The plan caps the size of the residential buildings for aesthetic reasons, which costs us about 1,500 housing units vs. what the Height Act would allow.
Because the deal requires 30% of housing units to be income-restricted “affordable” housing, this scale of shrinkage would eliminate hundreds of dedicated affordable units.
Axios reported that “the campus could build out gradually into the 2040s” instead of the promised 2036 deadline.
As much as we rightly gripe about the Congressionally-imposed Height Act harming DC, we often do more damage to ourselves through locally-imposed restrictions. The DC Office of Planning created these height and setback restrictions without any calculation of how this hurts the plan’s housing and economic impact.
The plan is very clear these restrictions are for aesthetic reasons (emphasis added):
The height strategy for the RFK Campus organizes the tallest buildings along the perimeter of the stadium and along the river, with gradual reduction in height adjacent to the lower-scale surrounding neighborhoods.
Buildings should utilize a combination of design strategies to further break down the scale and reduce visual impact, including stepbacks, changes in plane, or changes in material.
Obviously some people really hate looking at tall buildings, especially next to their neighborhood. This came out in public input sessions that shaped the plan:
Many commenters expressed excitement about the proposed building heights and mixed-use development program, emphasizing the importance of maximizing housing production. A similar number of commenters, mostly neighboring residents from Kingman Park and Hill East, expressed concern about building heights adjacent to existing low-rise residential neighborhoods and modern architecture that might feel out of character.
The Office of Planning congratulates itself for taking a “balanced approach” that ultimately removes about 1,500 homes from the site through these height and setback restrictions. Note that the scale of these self-imposed housing losses is in the same ballpark as how much housing we might lose from OP silently revising the goal from 6,500 to “5,500 to 6,500” housing units.
OP doesn’t acknowledge the costs of these aesthetics concessions or the delays from prioritizing parking before housing. If we’re serious about reigniting DC’s stalled economy, we have to be honest about these costs.
I used Claude to model the impacts of less and delayed housing at RFK under different scenarios. Even under conservative assumptions, we’re in danger of losing a huge share of the promised tax revenue because our economic planners are more concerned with parking and aesthetics:
In an era of high interest rates, delays have enormous costs. Pushing out the promised tax revenues well into the 2040s dramatically reduces the benefit of this deal.
Conversely, a truly pro-growth mayor would be pushing to maximize housing on site, as fast as possible. Reversing these aesthetic restrictions on housing to add about 1,500 homes would provide approximately $0.9 billion to $1.4 billion in tax revenue and create an additional 450 affordable housing units.
As a geographically-tiny city, our limited land is an enormous constraint for growth. Every square foot is a scarce, precious resource and waterfront property like the RFK plot is even rarer. Our planners should be trying to maximize the economic potential of this site, not artificially restrict it.
Increasing the housing supply would also do more to prevent displacement by offsetting the increased housing demand from the areas’ new amenities. The plan acknowledges that “These new homes can help reduce displacement pressures,” but then instead limits housing on the site while doing almost nothing to accelerate housing construction.
Ward 7 Councilmember Wendell Felder raised concerns over displacement at the September 30 hearing on the plan: “Did we create the conditions that will help prevent displacement, or did we unintentionally contribute to it?” Unfortunately, CM Felder appears to be focusing on displacement as a problem to address with subsidies, rather than addressing the root cause and building more homes. From The Washington Sun (emphasis added):
Felder pointed to a $60 million community reinvestment fund established in addition to the team’s contributions, designed specifically to focus on displacement prevention like rental assistance and property tax relief for long-term homeowners.
Previously, CM Felder voted against amendments to the RFK deal that would have done more to force the Commanders to actually build housing on schedule. Every politician that claims to care about displacement needs to be pushing the mayor and Commanders to build as much housing as they can, as fast as they can.
This isn’t the only recent project where our ostensibly “pro-growth” administration is hindering housing production. At North Michigan Park, one DC agency chose to exercise discretion to block 166 units of housing (emphasis added):
the DC Surveyor, the office that finalizes those lot divisions, read the older rules narrowly and stopped the developer's application, even though the Office of Planning, DDOT, and other city agencies have signed off on the project. Urban Atlantic says it spent roughly six months looking for a workaround with city officials before concluding there wasn't one.
This kind of delay actively undermines investment in DC and hurts job growth and tax revenue. We have an entire economic development infrastructure under the Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development (DMPED) which is supposed to streamline growth but is too often asleep at the wheel for anything other than the mayor’s obsessions with sporting events.
I encourage everyone to read Axios’ interview with Mayor Bowser to truly appreciate how much her focus on sports has warped economic policy in DC:
Her legacy, as she sees it: "All professional sports teams will be in the District of Columbia by 2030."
Sports have been part of Bowser’s economic development strategy since her first year as mayor in 2015, when she pitched them as a way to develop neighborhoods and counteract D.C.’s dependence on federal jobs.
That was before the pandemic fueled remote work, emptying downtown, and DOGE took a buzzsaw to the federal workforce.
What she’s saying: “It seems clairvoyant, right?”
It’s shocking that the Mayor looks at DC’s economy losing over 80,000 jobs since the pandemic and wants to take a victory lap.
COVID and DOGE aren’t Mayor Bowser’s fault, but one would think that a leader with the gift of foresight could have done more to diversify DC’s economy. Notably, the RFK deal hasn’t created any permanent jobs so far, and the rest of her “All professional sports teams will be in the District of Columbia by 2030” “legacy” is just maintaining what we already have. And her administration nearly lost the Capitals and Wizards to Virginia!
Axios tries to give Mayor Bowser credit for helping keep the Wizards and Capitals in DC, but in reality it was Virginia State Senator Louise Lucas who blocked the deal and forced Monumental Sports & Entertainment to renegotiate with DC.
The mayor ultimately didn’t lose the Capitals and Wizards, but that was because she was bailed out by Virginia Democrats, not any “clairvoyant” action. In the same interview, Mayor Bowser talks a good game of balancing sports with other priorities:
“It’s not, ‘Do you invest in sports, or do you invest in this other thing?’” she says. “You have to invest in both.”
But her RFK plan makes it clear what her priorities are. Parking and a football stadium get exempted from zoning and are ready for the “Day One” launch. Most of the promised housing will instead be “temporary” surface parking lots and the housing plan gets bled by a thousand cuts to satisfy aesthetic considerations.
We have the money for a football stadium and parking garages, but not for a desperately needed Metrorail station. Even the mayor’s fiscal priorities take a backseat to football. The RFK plan risks billions in future tax revenues by delaying and minimizing housing while the commitments to the Commanders are treated as sacrosanct.
Obviously our next mayor needs to do better. We’re in an economic, fiscal and housing crisis; and in response Democratic nominee Janeese Lewis George has promised to build 72,000 new homes in five years. That will only happen if every level of government is seeking to maximize housing production throughout the city and using every tool we have to make it easier to build cheaper, faster and denser.
How our next mayor staffs these critical District agencies and works with the Council will determine if RFK and other smaller deals deliver the housing we desperately need. This post’s analysis shows how relatively minor staff decisions can quietly remove or add thousands of homes. Business as usual in our planning process doesn’t even bother estimating the economic and fiscal costs of slowing and shrinking housing; it instead treats delays and shrinkage as “free.”
These costs add up and would be treated as an outrage if anyone proposed them as a tax or fee, but we quietly accept them as just the “cost of doing business in DC” under our “pro business” mayor. The same culture of “No” in our planning agencies that produced this RFK plan hurts housing production across dozens of lower-profile deals, and everyday Washingtonians pay the price in higher housing costs. One of the reasons I support Greater Greater Washington is that it’s often a lonely voice highlighting the impact of these decisions and trying to push housing policy in a better direction.
Democratic mayoral nominee Janeese Lewis George has a chance to be a wildly more “pro-growth” mayor than her predecessor. Often our local political class treats “hating Progressives and Socialists” as synonymous with “pro-growth” but the failures of the Bowser administration to reform our planning system and zoning show there’s plenty of low-hanging fruit for her successor. Fixing the technocratic nitty-gritty of development in DC is the crown lying in the gutter for a future mayor.
Disclaimer: I'm married to Ward 1 Councilmember Brianne Nadeau, who voted against the RFK deal and for most of the amendments discussed above that would have strengthened it. She was right. I also serve on the board of Greater Greater Washington. The views here are my own. I used Claude to help with research and graphics.
Brandon Luu began thinking about the body’s circadian machinery as a teenager, when he was routinely unable to fall asleep until late, sometimes well past 2 a.m. The schedule made mornings miserable and school harder.
But it also left him with a question: What happens when the body’s sense of time falls out of sync with the world around it?
Fifteen years later, Luu is exploring that question through one of psychiatry’s most common disorders: attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Sleep problems have long been seen as a consequence of the condition. But now researchers are looking at the possibility that the relationship might run in reverse: that disruptions to circadian rhythms — the biological machinery governing when we sleep and wake — might be a cause.
“Our society is not good at supporting good circadian health,” said Luu, now a physician and fellow at Queen’s University in Canada.
Luu and his co-author, Nicholas Fabiano, a psychiatry resident and researcher at the University of Ottawa, recently laid out this theory in a perspective paper in Frontiers of Psychiatry, arguing that “convergent lines of evidence” point to strong associations between people whose bodies’ internal clocks shifted later than usual and ADHD. They called on clinicians to start routine screening for sleep/circadian disturbances and recommend sleep tracking for people with ADHD as a potentially low-effort, low-risk, low-cost measure to help people with the condition.
To understand their case, it helps to separate sleep from the circadian system that tells us when to sleep in the first place.
Scientists once thought largely in terms of a master clock in the brain, synchronized to the 24-hour cycle of light and darkness. The reality is stranger: Nearly every organ, and virtually every cell, keeps time. Together, these clocks regulate not just sleep but also metabolism, hormones, body temperature, cognition, mood and many other processes.
Sleep is simply the part we notice, especially these days, as it has become somewhat of a cultural obsession, tracked and scored by Apple Watches, Fitbits and Oura rings. Yet even as we try to perfect our nights, modern life — with its glowing screens, jet lag, shift work and erratic schedules — has become a vast, uncontrolled experiment in disrupting the clocks beneath them.
Meanwhile, the study of circadian biology is reaching beyond whether we feel well-rested. Cancer researchers are studying whether disrupted clocks can trigger tumors to grow. Longevity researchers are asking whether keeping the body’s clocks aligned might affect how we age.
Some of the most provocative questions, however, are now being asked in psychiatry.
For at least some patients, disrupted sleep and daily rhythms may not simply follow from mental illness. Researchers studying depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, ADHD and more are asking whether something may be going wrong with the body’s timing system itself.
Internal clocks do not run identically in everyone. In some people, the circadian system runs relatively early: They become sleepy earlier in the evening and naturally wake earlier in the morning. In others, the entire cycle runs later.
Research points to these night owls as those associated more with ADHD.
Studies have long suggested that sleep and circadian disruptions are very common in ADHD. One recent review estimates that 73 to 78 percent of children and adults with ADHD have delayed sleep-wake timing. Studies also indicate that melatonin onset tends to occur later in people with ADHD, by about 45 minutes in children and 90 minutes in adults. Insomnia and other sleep disturbances have also been reported in up to 80 percent of adults with ADHD and at similarly high rates in children.
There are other signs the body’s internal clocks may be altered in people with ADHD. Studies show the daily cycle of cortisol, a hormone involved in alertness, energy use and the stress response, can be delayed and blunted compared with people without ADHD. An MRI imaging study found that the pineal gland, which makes melatonin, is smaller in volume. And research into cells collected from adults and children show that certain so-called “clock genes” throughout the body show less distinct daily rhythms.
These differences in the timing of our internal clocks are known as chronotype, and they are partly influenced by genetics. Chronotype describes where a person naturally falls along the spectrum from earlier to later sleep and wake timing.
There are at least 10 known genes associated with sleep conditions such as short sleep, advanced sleep phase and delayed sleep phase. But it also changes over a lifetime. Children’s chronotypes tend to be relatively early. The clock shifts later during adolescence, reaching its latest point around the end of the teenage years, before gradually moving earlier again with age.
The familiar distinction between larks and owls can make this sound like a division into two kinds of people. It isn’t. Chronotype looks more like a continuum, with most people clustered somewhere around the middle.
A large U.S. study published in PLOS One in 2017 gives some sense of that distribution. Among 53,689 people, about 40 percent qualified as early chronotypes, defined as having the midpoint of their sleep before 3 a.m. Another 44 percent fell in the middle, with a sleep midpoint between 3 and 5 a.m. Sixteen percent were late chronotypes, with a midpoint after 5 a.m. And the distribution shifted dramatically with age.
In the lab, scientists ask patients to track their sleep, use questionnaires or run simple tests to find someone’s chronotype, involving having someone in dim light provide a saliva sample to assess their melatonin levels every 30 minutes. There’s no easy way a primary care doctor can order that, although researchers are working on it.
Long before scientists could measure the body clock through hormones, they had to find more inventive ways to prove it existed.
Some of the earliest evidence for an internal clock came from people who disappeared underground. In 1938, sleep researcher Nathaniel Kleitman and his graduate student Bruce Richardson spent 32 days in Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave, cut off from the ordinary signals of day and night, while attempting to live on a 28-hour schedule. Richardson, who was younger, partly adapted; Kleitman’s body remained stubbornly close to a 24-hour rhythm.
Two decades later, French geologist Michel Siffre took the experiment further, spending roughly two months in a cave without sunlight or a clock. He ate and slept when his body told him to, while a team aboveground secretly kept track of the time. Even without knowing whether it was day or night, Siffre’s new schedule continued to produce something resembling days, though his cycle ran more like 24 hours 30 minutes.
Experiments like these helped establish a fundamental principle of circadian biology: The body generates a rhythm of its own, while signals from the outside world — most powerfully light — continually reset it.
Our internal clocks do not always align with the schedules we are expected to keep in today’s society.
A person whose body does not want to fall asleep until 3 a.m. may struggle desperately to wake at 7. But allow that same person to sleep from 3 a.m. until 11 a.m., and they may sleep perfectly well. Their body can do what it is supposed to do. It is simply doing it several hours later than the world expects.
When that mismatch becomes severe enough, it can receive a diagnosis. The DSM groups these conditions under circadian rhythm sleep-wake disorders, which include delayed and advanced sleep phase types.
Being out of sync affects more than sleep.
“Cognitive ability across multiple different domains has a very dynamic pattern across the day,” said Adriane Soehner, an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine’s Center for Sleep and Circadian Science. “And when circadian rhythm is disrupted it has a sweeping impact on most aspects of how our brain is functioning.”
Soehner is studying this question in teenagers ages 13 to 15 by putting them on ultrashort cycles of 80 minutes awake and 40 minutes asleep, allowing researchers to tease apart the effects of time awake from those of the circadian clock.
The results aren’t out yet, but another study that looked at cognition in 2019 of late chronotypes showed that shifting their wake time by about two hours was associated with better mental health and there was also some cognitive (reaction time) and performance improvement (grip strength).
Mood appears to have a rhythm, too.
Jonathan Emens, a professor of psychiatry at Oregon Health & Science University, has found that both positive and negative moods vary with circadian timing.
“Our positive moods peak during the daytime and our negative moods are the worst in the middle of the night,” Emens said. “And so you could imagine, if there’s a mismatch when we are awake and our body clock is giving us our worst moods, that could cause problems.”
Shift work makes the consequences of that mismatch particularly clear. Emens compares it to a car with wheels that are out of alignment: Each part may work, but when they point in different directions, the whole system suffers.
That raises a larger question: When does biological variation become pathology? And how much of the impairment attributed to a late-running clock comes from the environment in which that clock has to function? There are questions that echoes debates around conditions such as autism and ADHD, where researchers and advocates have similarly asked how much disability arises from underlying biology and how much from a mismatch with the surrounding world.
Philip Gehrman, a professor of clinical psychology in psychiatry at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, directs the school’s Sleep, Neurobiology and Psychopathology Lab and researches sleep/circadian dysregulation in mental health disorders. He said while there has historically not been a lot of interaction between people who study circadian rhythm and those who study psychiatry, that’s changing, and he predicts it will influence patient care.
“There are people getting health treatments, whereas a sleep or circadian treatment may be more appropriate,” he said.
For now that means existing treatments and recommendations such as light therapy, melatonin supplements and avoiding screens before bedtime could be augmented with looking at ways to “phase shift” the body clock to be closer to what society expects.
Luu recounts how his own circadian delay caused his grades to slip and the appearance of what he calls ADHD-like symptoms. But he really wanted to go to medical school, so he decided to apply the science he was learning to himself.
He now forces himself to wake up at the same time each day, even when he doesn’t want to.
Another key has been bright light first thing in the morning; ideally, sunlight is the best, but if not he has a winter depression lamp about 12 to 14 inches from him for the first 20 to 30 minutes. He also makes sure to exercise at that time.
Luu said exercise may be one way to shift circadian rhythms, with some research suggesting if you’re an owl you have more flexibility to choose an exercise time, but if you are a lark you should prioritize exercise earlier in the day.
At night, he dims the lights, avoids blue light whenever possible and avoids other stimulating activities.
When he travels, he tries not to shift too aggressively at one time, opting instead for 15 minutes every few days.
“That really helped me turn my life around,” Luu said.
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