RRM wrote:Please tell me, why dont you change your sleeping habits? What keeps you from doing so?
You need to create a sleeping plan and stick to that, even if you cant sleep; simply stick to the routine. Eventually, your psyche will adjust to the routine.
Hi RRM!
It's a good question, and I don't even know the full answer myself. That's why this post became quite long.
I really don't have any problems falling asleep when I actually try to sleep. The problem is to allow myself to leave the computer and actually go to sleep during the times I truly want to sleep.
Some reasons for staying up late are obvious: I have close friends that also stay up late, and that I sometimes talk to during night (over MSN, phone etc), though I should be able to keep contact with them during the day if I choose to. I also get more creative and my brain seems to be more focused during the night and when I'm tired. Still, I believe I could be the same even if I moved my sleep four hours earlier, and kept it regular. However, I admit there's a certain calmness over the night that's hard to come by during other hours, but I think (hope) I could manage without that as well. These are some obvious habits that keep me up, but I believe these could be changed if I wanted to strong enough, and I actually believe that I do want it strong enough.
Now, there are some more complex psychological reasons that I'm just beginning to understand, and that I believe can be traced back to my youth.
For me, night has at times been an obvious escape from tomorrow - the longer I stay up, the longer before I have to get up. When I was in school I used this reasoning extensively, staying up late playing computer games because I didn't want to go to school the next day. The more I did like this, the harder it became, because I was always extremely tired in the morning (it really hurt to get up) so it became even harder to go to sleep because I knew I had suffering to expect.
Another aspect of school, maybe that which somehow caused the above, was school's tendency to occupy so much of my time. The only time of day I was really able to feel free and in control of my life was during the night, as I had no expectations on me except my own need to sleep, which apparently wasn't strong enough.
Though I believe it to be partly true, I cannot say that school is the only culprit in this drama. It is surely also habits passed on to me by my parents in various ways - my father, for example, always had late sleeping habits - and also other aspects of my life where I've felt lack of control, that my body has been trying to solve on its own.
Society also plays its role, as people with late sleeping habits are often looked down on as having strange problems, causing them to feel even more guilty over their situation, making it harder for them to admit it and really change.
In the end, I have some kind of inherent fear or dislike of allowing myself to go to sleep. Not really the sleeping itself, but the choice of going to bed. Unconscious reflexes tell me I will lose something, maybe time, if I go to sleep, though my mind knows the opposite and that staying up will only hurt me.
Well, we'll see where I end up. I've had some successful attempts lately, and some positive additions in my everyday life, and I just recently got rid of a source that's been causing a lot of stress. I've also been thinking more about it as a problem, and tried to understand why it is the way it is, so at least I'm going in the right direction.
I hope everything is well with all of you.
). Still, there are many other aspects to this that I haven't mentioned, and which are really the cause to my problems, and they make things so much easier said than done. 
For me, it's not really a physiological problem but a psychological one, related to society, my social life and my younger years. It's a problem that's causing me a lot of struggle, though some find it hard to understand.