Circadian Alignment in Higher Education: Documenting Student Demand, Time Blindness, and Early Feasibility for Body Clock Coaching

A pilot documenting student demand and early feasibility for circadian-aligned coaching at UC San Diego — built around focus, mood, academic performance, and student flourishing.

Royan Kamyar, M.D., MBA · Gayle Valensky, MPH
Owaves, Inc., Encinitas, California · Correspondence: royan@owaves.com

Executive Summary

Between September 2024 and February 2025, UC San Diego (UCSD) students were invited to join a waitlist for one-on-one coaching paired with Owaves: My BodyClock, a free visual day-planning app built on circadian-rhythm science. The invitation was framed around a term many students recognized instantly — time blindness, the difficulty of sensing how time passes. Twenty-eight students completed the interest survey, and eight signed up for live coaching. The pattern in their answers was unusually clear. Every respondent wanted help improving focus, and nearly all wanted a higher GPA. Interest concentrated on the academic and cognitive side of student life rather than on any single health metric. Among the students who moved from interest into actual coaching, half described themselves as living with ADHD — the population for whom time blindness is most acute. This paper reports demand and feasibility, not clinical efficacy: what UCSD students asked for and how they engaged, drawn from self-reported surveys and coaching records rather than controlled outcomes. The efficacy question that demand raises is now being tested directly, in a UCSD-sponsored randomized controlled trial of student flourishing that closed enrollment at 795 undergraduates — nearly double its original target of 400.

The bottom line: UCSD students are not asking for one more wellness app. They are asking for help getting a grip on time, focus, and their grades — and they will engage with a body-clock tool plus a coach to get it. Whether that appetite translates into measurable gains is the exact question the new UCSD trial is designed to answer.

At a glance: Of the 28 respondents, 100% wanted to improve focus — the single most-requested goal. 93% wanted to boost their GPA. 96% already use an iPhone, the platform the app runs on today. And 795 undergraduates are now enrolled in the UC San Diego randomized trial testing the approach.

A Time Problem Hiding Inside a Mental-Health Crisis

Anxiety, depression, and sleep disruption among young adults have risen sharply over the past decade, and college students carry an outsized share of that burden while facing real barriers to care — stigma, cost, long counseling wait times, and limited campus capacity. A growing body of work in chronobiology points to one under-recognized contributor: the mismatch between students’ internal biological timing and the schedules they actually keep. The evidence that timing matters academically is striking. In an analysis of roughly 15,000 students, those whose biological rhythms were most out of sync with their class schedule — a “social jet lag” — earned grade point averages about half a letter grade lower than their better-aligned peers. Circadian misalignment has since been linked not only to academic performance but to mood and metabolic health as well. Students rarely describe this in the language of chronobiology. They describe it as time blindness: losing track of hours, misjudging how long tasks take, missing deadlines that felt far away until they weren’t. The experience is closely associated with ADHD, where an unreliable internal sense of time is a core feature. One practical insight from that literature is that external, visual representations of time — calendars, timers, a laid-out plan for the day — can partly compensate for the internal clock that isn’t keeping time well. That is precisely the gap a visual, circadian day-planner is built to fill, and it is the language this pilot deliberately used to reach students.

A Visual Body Clock, Plus a Human in the Loop

Owaves: My BodyClock is a free iOS application that presents the day as a circular, 24-hour wheel rather than a vertical list. Users lay out sleep, meals, study, movement, work, and social time as segments around the dial, making the shape of a day — and the proportion given to each part of life — visible at a glance. The design reflects circadian-rhythm science, the same field recognized with the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. The company reports more than a million downloads and top rankings in the health-and-wellness category across many countries. The pilot paired that app with something apps alone rarely provide: a person. Interested students were offered access to a coach for one-on-one support — scheduling sessions, working through a specific hard day, and building routines that stuck. Coaching in this UCSD pilot was delivered through direct conversation, primarily over Discord, and centered on translating the app’s structure into a student’s real week. Research on digital well-being tools consistently finds that this combination — a structured digital platform plus human guidance and accountability — outperforms self-guided apps, which tend to see steep drop-off.

What We Did

This pilot was run as a program-development and market-discovery activity, not as a formal research study under an Institutional Review Board. It generated two distinct kinds of information, which we analyze separately rather than blending:

• An interest survey. A short intake form asked students what they wanted help with, what they would pay for coaching, which devices they use, their year, and (in the confidential version) gender and major. Twenty-eight UCSD students submitted valid responses. The campaign itself ran from September 2024 through February 2025, when the invitations came down; the intake form remained live afterward, and a handful of later responses are included.
• A coaching-engagement log. A separate record tracked the students who moved beyond the form into actual coaching contact — how they found the program, their presenting concerns, whether they identified with ADHD, and how many sessions took place. Eight students entered this pipeline.

Recruitment ran through a “Time Blind?” campaign — a campus flyer inviting students to a coaching waitlist, amplified on Reddit and through intern and word-of-mouth outreach. Because survey respondents and coached students are overlapping but distinct groups, we report them under their own denominators throughout, and we treat all figures as self-reported. A short data-and-methods note appears at the end of this paper.

What Students Told Us: The Ask Was Focus and Grades — Not Weight

When 28 students said what they wanted help with, focus was universal and GPA nearly so. Mood and energy followed closely. Weight — the goal most consumer wellness products lead with — came last, chosen by fewer than half. The demand clustered squarely on the cognitive and academic side of student life.

Who Raised Their Hand

Respondents spanned every year of study, with graduate students and the sophomore–junior middle years most represented. A small majority were women. Where students reported a major, the mix leaned toward science, engineering, and computing — the pattern one would expect from grassroots, online-amplified recruiting, and a useful caveat when reading these results.

What They Carry

On hardware, the picture was nearly uniform: virtually every respondent uses an iPhone, and more than half also use an iPad. For a product that ships on iOS today, the audience is already equipped — there is no device barrier to deployment. On price, students anchored low, as students reliably do; that points the sustainable model toward campus-, payer-, and family-sponsored access rather than student-paid subscriptions — while roughly one in seven still signaled willingness to pay $20–$50 a month for a premium tier.

From Interest to Engagement

Eight students signed up for live coaching through the campaign — six via Reddit, plus intern-network and word-of-mouth referrals — and six of the eight went on to substantive coaching conversations. Students who began sessions averaged roughly two documented sessions each, and the coaching met students where they already were: much of it ran as an ongoing back-and-forth over Discord rather than formal appointments, working through a specific hard week, a study system, or a morning routine. The ADHD thread ran straight through the group. Half of the eight explicitly identified with ADHD, and their presenting concerns were overwhelmingly academic. One graduate engineering student, preparing for a midterm and “wanting solutions” for time management, said it was the phrase time blindness itself that made him reach out. The coaching notes read like the daily reality behind the diagnosis: a first-year determined to keep a 4.0 while falling behind in a class with weekly assignments — owning Canvas and Google Calendar but not actually using either; a junior who had already tried time-blocking and other systems, still shopping for one that finally works; a graduate student trying to protect research time, and his exercise routine, while building his first chatbot. Two students who signed up never made it to a first conversation — a gap between intention and follow-through that anyone who identifies with time blindness will recognize, and one that no amount of program design fully closes. It is part of the phenomenon itself, and it is one reason the coaching layer has since evolved beyond scheduled human sessions toward AI coaching built directly into the app — available the moment a student opens it, with nothing to book and no one to keep waiting. What this stage established is simple: framed in the right language, students with the most acute time problems reach out, engage, and come back.

What This Means

For campus wellness and student-affairs leaders, this is pre-qualified demand: students self-identifying a need — time, focus, grades — that sits upstream of the counseling caseload, and engaging with a low-stigma, preventive offer that complements clinical services rather than competing with them. For students and faculty, the appeal matches how learning actually works: the academic-timing literature ties schedule–biology mismatch to lower performance, and a tool that makes time visible — paired with a person for accountability — meets that problem in the language students themselves use.

What We Are Not Claiming

This pilot measured demand and feasibility, not efficacy: no outcome measures, no control group, a small and self-selected sample reached through grassroots outreach, and self-reported data throughout — run as a quality-improvement activity rather than IRB-supervised research. Those limits are precisely why its proper role is to motivate a rigorous test — which now exists.

From Demand to Evidence: The UC San Diego Student Flourishing Trial

The demand this pilot surfaced is being tested where it originated. Beginning in January 2026, UC San Diego enrolled a randomized controlled trial evaluating whether aligning students’ daily activities to their circadian rhythm — using Owaves: My BodyClock, provided free — improves student flourishing. Enrollment closed in April 2026 at 795 undergraduates, nearly double the original target of 400. The trial is sponsored by UC San Diego and co-led by Karen Dobkins, PhD, a professor of psychology; Benjamin Smarr, PhD, a professor of bioengineering whose work first quantified the academic cost of circadian misalignment; and Sophia North, a PhD candidate in the Dobkins Lab.

Two details connect the trial directly back to this pilot. Its measure of focus includes the inattention subscale of the Barkley Adult ADHD Rating Scale and an academic time-management measure — the very constructs UCSD students named when they asked for help with focus and time blindness. And happiness, energy, and mindfulness are assessed with established scales at baseline and again at the end of the intervention. Where this white paper shows what students want and that they will engage, the trial is built to show whether the approach delivers. With enrollment closed, initial results are expected later in 2026.

Students Told Us What They Need. The Evidence Is Coming Next.

The message from UC San Diego students was consistent: they want help with focus, grades, and the everyday experience of time — and they respond to a body-clock tool paired with a coach and framed in language they recognize. That is a real, specific, and pre-qualified appetite for what Owaves offers, expressed by the students themselves. We report it here without overclaiming. This pilot demonstrates demand and early feasibility; it does not prove that the program works. That question — does aligning the day to the body clock actually move focus, mood, and student flourishing? — is now in the hands of a rigorous, UCSD-run randomized trial. The appetite is documented. The proof is being built. Both belong in the same conversation, and both are underway at UC San Diego.

Data & Methods Note

1. Sample and window. N = 28 valid interest-survey respondents. The recruiting campaign ran September 13, 2024 – February 2025; the intake form remained live afterward, and later responses received through October 30, 2025 are included. One submission with placeholder contact details was excluded as invalid.
2. Two datasets. Survey respondents (N = 28) and the coaching pipeline (n = 8) are overlapping but distinct groups — some coached students reached the coach directly without completing the form — so they are never merged, and every statistic is reported against its own denominator. This paper covers 2024–2025 UCSD activity only, reported separately from Owaves’ earlier pilots at other campuses.
3. Self-report. Goals, willingness to pay, device use, year, gender, major, and ADHD identification are self-reported and unverified. Majors were reported by 18 of 28 respondents.
4. Coaching counts. Session figures reflect the documented engagement log and are conservative; the two-session average is computed across the four students with documented sessions.
5. Ethics. The pilot was a quality-improvement and program-development activity, not conducted under IRB oversight; no personally identifying data appear in this paper.

References

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