I have a problem. I refuse to sleep.

I don't mean I can't sleep. I've done experiments where I go to bed with some audio playing that I know, from say a movie, and the next morning I do not remember anything past 5-10 minutes into it. I mean that I just don't sleep. If I have nothing going on in the morning I will stay up until the wee hours of the morning shortly before sunrise regardless of how much sleep I have gotten lately or when I woke up. The only thing that drives me to go to bed is the knowledge that I simply cannot function and feel horrible on less than three hours of sleep. I can also tell after the fact that I am quite foggy on less than 7 hours, but at the time it doesn't feel terribly odd.

I've been tracking my sleep with a tablet under my pillow for over a year now and I average between just under and just over 5 hours a night, depending on the particular month, but the standard deviation is at least two hours and it varies from 2 to 9 hours a night chaotically with no apparent pattern. Worse, in the last six months I think my age (25) is catching up to me - my productivity on low-sleep days has dropped precipitously, and nights that I used to go with 3 or 4 hours of sleep I have a tendency to oversleep through six alarms and wind up with just under 8. I think my body simply can't get by on as little sleep as I used to give it. This leads to me getting into work late (as a grad student done with class-style instruction and just doing my research and talking with faculty my schedule is quite flexible as long as I put in my time) and staying quite late, phase shifting my schedule and screwing up social aspects of my life and encouraging me to go to bed far too late and repeat the cycle.

Again the problem is not with sleeping itself, the problem is with letting myself stop doing things and actually go to bed. There is always something else I want to be doing, be it more research in the lab or reading or internetisms or talking to people 3 time zones west in California. I used to get by but now it is affecting my work and social life.

Any ideas on how to help fix this? I tried going to my university's counseling services but all they did was make sure I wasn't psychotic and suggest ritalin at which point I cancelled the followup appointment.