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Narcolepsy is often misunderstood and mistaken for laziness or disengagement.

Invisible symptoms can erode self-worth when they are treated as character flaws.

Diagnosis can transform shame into self-understanding and self-compassion.

Rest is not weakness, despite a culture that glorifies constant productivity.

You wake up exhausted. You glance at the clock and realize the meeting you were supposed to be at started 15 minutes ago. Instantly, shame floods in. You imagine what your coworkers will think when you arrive late yet again, having missed something important.

For many people living with narcolepsy, this is not an occasional inconvenience. It is daily life.

Narcolepsy is a chronic neurological disorder that disrupts the brain’s regulation of sleep and wakefulness. While popular culture often portrays narcolepsy as someone suddenly collapsing asleep mid-sentence, the reality is usually far more subtle—and significantly misunderstood. People with narcolepsy may experience overwhelming daytime sleepiness, fragmented nighttime sleep, sleep paralysis, hallucinations, cognitive fog, and in some cases cataplexy, a sudden loss of muscle tone often triggered by emotion.

But one of the most psychologically painful aspects of narcolepsy is not the symptoms themselves. It is what those symptoms can come to mean about a person’s character.

I saw this firsthand through my friend Meredith, who lives with narcolepsy and now works for a biotechnology company in the sleep medicine space. Before receiving a diagnosis, she spent years blaming herself for symptoms she........

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