For most of my life I had trouble waking up in the morning. Not the kind where you hit snooze twice and grumble. The kind where your sleep schedule has a mind of its own and drifts later every single day until eventually you are waking up at noon and still feel like you could sleep another four hours.

I tried everything. Alarms across the room. Wake-up lights. Caffeine timing strategies. Willpower. None of it fixed the deeper problem. My schedule would stabilize for a while, then quietly start sliding again.

What finally helped was something I almost ignored when I first read it. And once I understood why it worked, it made complete sense.