I’m recovering from a lousy week, thanks to $#@%ing Daylight “Saving” Time.
To explain, let’s start with a conversation I had some years back with a sleep specialist at Vanderbilt. This was during a year when I was trying to corkscrew myself into a morning-person’s schedule, and I was battling frequent bouts of insomnia. Strangely — or so I thought at the time — I was more likely to have insomnia when I hadn’t slept well the night before.
I’m paraphrasing, but this is what the doctor told me: there are three chronotypes. Type ones easily fall asleep around 10:00 PM and wake up at 6:00 AM. That’s the majority of the population, so it’s like being right-handed; the world is built for them. Type twos more easily fall asleep around midnight and wake up at 8:00 AM or so. Then there are the type threes, which happen to include a lot of writers, actors, musicians, comedians, artists, etc. Their bodies don’t really want to fall asleep until 2:00 AM or so.
A type one or type two can usually adjust to staying up later and sleeping later, but it’s difficult for a type three to adjust to going to bed earlier and waking up earlier. He told me the bottom line is this: your body is never going to be happy trying to fall asleep at 10:00 PM and waking up at 6:00 AM. The best thing you can do is find a work schedule that respects your body’s clock.
When I was a standup comedian for a living, my work schedule did respect my body’s clock. When you walk off stage at midnight with your adrenaline pumping from performing for an audience, you’re not going to go back to the hotel, crawl in bed and immediately fall asleep. I never went to bed before 2:00 AM. And guess what? I wasn’t troubled by insomnia either. I slept until 10:30 AM or so, woke up naturally, and felt great all day.
That’s never been the case whenever I’ve tried to be a morning person. My first year out of college, I lived in the western suburbs of Chicago and had to wake up at 6:45 AM to catch a train downtown to get to my job as a magazine editor. Each day of the work week, I felt a little more exhausted than the day before. I managed to get through it because I was a whopping 23 years old and still blessed with a young man’s endurance. But almost every Friday night, I would go to bed and sleep for at least 12 hours. Some Saturdays, I didn’t wake up until afternoon.
Lack of good sleep affects me more now than when I was 23 years old. If I sleep for 8 1/2 hours and wake up naturally, that’s one kind of day. If an alarm pulls me off the dark side of the moon, that’s a very different day. I don’t have nearly the same amount of physical or mental energy. And quite often it’s that day that leads to insomnia that night.
I asked the sleep doctor about that. Why am I more likely to have insomnia when I’m already tired? Seems if anything, I ought to be able to fall asleep more easily.
He explained that “tired” and “sleepy” are related and often go together, but they’re not really the same. It’s entirely possible to be exhausted but not sleepy. When you’re tired because you didn’t sleep well the night before but have to get through a workday, your body pumps out hormones to keep you awake. When you try to go to bed that night — probably at a time that doesn’t fit your natural cycle — your body doesn’t know it’s time to shut off those hormones. So you can’t sleep.
Now it all made sense. I’ve had bouts of insomnia that lasted three or four days, and the more exhausted I became, the worse the insomnia became. I once barely slept for a week. Near the end of that week, I was standing on the curb waiting to cross a busy intersection near my apartment in Chicago. I looked to my right, saw a green light, thought that meant something about “go,” and started to walk forward. Some angel in human form standing behind me grabbed my belt and yanked me backwards just as a car sped through the spot in the street I’d stepped into. I muttered a “thank you.”
At the time I saw the Vanderbilt doctor, my employer didn’t have a work-at-home policy. In fact, upper management was pretty much against the whole idea. But the doctor understood the corporate game. He wrote a letter describing my sleep issues as a medical condition, and said that for the sake of my health, I needed to be allowed to work at home two or three days per week and manage my own sleep schedule. My supervisor agreed.
Then COVID came along and suddenly everybody was working at home. I’ve been working at home ever since.
For the most part, it’s been ideal. I usually start getting ready for bed around 12:30 AM, and I’m usually asleep by 1:00 AM. There’s a daily zoom meeting at 10:00 AM, so I have an alarm set for 9:30 AM, but I usually wake up 10 or 15 minutes before it goes off. Eight-plus hours of sleep, waking up naturally. Perfect.
Then every spring, $#@%ing Daylight “Saving” Time comes around. And yes, I’ve heard from plenty of people who just love those “longer” days. And I always think, FFS, the day didn’t get any longer. You just woke up an hour earlier, went to work an hour earlier, left work an hour earlier, had dinner an hour earlier, then enjoyed your “longer” day. How about you do that on your own and leave the rest of us out of it?
So just like most years after the godawful “spring forward,” I tried to get ready for bed around 12:30 AM, but my body knew damned good and well it was actually 11:30 PM and did not want to cooperate. I tossed and turned a long time before sleeping. The morning alarm pulled me off the dark side of the moon. I went through the workday feeling tired. That night the insomnia kicked in, and it lasted most of the week. Today (Saturday) is the first day since screwing around with the clock that I’ve felt kind of normal-ish.
That’s why I hate $#@%ing Daylight “Saving” Time. The good news is, I retire in July. I’ll almost certainly revert to going to bed at 2:00 AM, which is the sleep schedule that feels most natural to me, and also the sleep schedule that has never triggered insomnia.
And then I’m never letting this backward-forward nonsense with the clock screw with my sleep again.
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