Tag Archives: sleep

Interest Withdrawl From My Account At Daylight Savings

This Sunday is one of my two least favorite days of the year*. At 0200 (2:00 AM) my part of the world shifts to “Daylight Saving Time” and the clocks leap a full hour ahead (a perverse form of time travel with no perceivable benefit). This means I lose an hour of sleep and a great deal of value in my various “Emotional Savings Accounts” with others as it usually takes a couple of weeks before my anger and aggravation drops to near-normal levels.

I don’t remember exactly when the shift first began in my experience (the Wiki entry on Daylight Saving Time gives sometime in the 1970’s) but I do remember it being a real pain. Had to get up earlier for school, it stayed light longer in the evening, so it didn’t seem like time to go in (sunset moved later in time so dark came later at night… and who wants to go to bed if it’s not ‘night’ yet?). Eventually, we got acclimated to the change, usually just about the time for the shift back in the fall (back then the changes took place closer together, about 6 months long) when the cycle of adjustment started over again. I think there was a couple of years of debate and votes to approve the change before it was accepted by accident (the wording was to vote NO if you wanted to use DST… most people didn’t like it at first).

Now it doesn’t really matter anymore. Everyone has been subjected to the condition for so long it has become customary. You just “do it” and use the time change as a reminder to check the batteries in your smoke detectors (the method we used to do was wait for the crickets chirp to become so annoying that SOMEONE HAD to drag the ladder in and change the stupid things). Even though your biannual event does not halve the year evenly. In fact, we spend nearly double the  time with the clocks wrong (ahead of solar time) than matching the real world. I suppose this is “better” because when the change took place in April or May, commuting into the rising sun became a hazardous adventure twice each spring. By changing so early in the year, most drivers are going into work while it is still dark before the change, thus endangering each other only one month rather than two, but that’s a small gain.

If we were living in a primarily agrarian society, I might  buy the benefit of the change, but living by the electric time master (who doesn’t care if the sun even exists, for that matter… take serving on a nuclear sub for 90 days without surfacing for example) makes the change pointless for many and painful for some. A close friend of mine suffers from SAD (Seasonal Affect Disorder) and his depression in the dark months is terrifying. DST makes the day start earlier, so he awakens with more darkness ahead than behind, and suffers more severely. My depression is not so sensitive to light/dark cycles, but it is affected by my relationships with others, so the enemy of my friend is my enemy, too. (Maybe ‘enemy’ is too strong a term. Perhaps ‘tormenter’ is more appropriate.)

In any case, I desperately need to spend the next two days being extra nice to as many people as I possibly can.

Because, for most of the month of March, I will be a real jerk…

Phred

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(* For the record, the other worst day is the change back in the late fall. In theory we get an extra hour sleep, but it seldom works out that way…normally we can “stay up an extra hour” and sleep still suffers. HATE HATE HATE DST.)

Sleep Deprevation For DUMMIES

I am currently on a road trip to the sub-tropical area of the mid-west known as Indianapolis, Indiana (temperatures when we left mid-Michigan was -11F and it was 18F when we arrived, a tropical heatwave by comparison). My traveling companion and I spent the day in conversation with several to many people, and eventually departed company to go to our assigned places of repose for the evening. After reading for about a half hour (a typical evening experience for me, to wind down from the day’s activities) I turned out the light about 10:45 in the evening and looked to enjoy a restful slumber.

HA! The best estimate I could come up with was a total of about 3 and a half hours of actual sleep by the time the alarm went off at 8:00 the next morning. The bulk of the night was spent lying motionless and listening to the sound of my sleep program. Rain, distant thunder, wind chimes, and camp fires crackling are all soothing sounds eminating from my i-Pad. As I use this every night, it was as much of my normal night routine as brushing my teeth and wearing my CPAP machine for my sleep apnea. Then why the disruption in my nightly experience.

I have noticed over the last 40 years that travel and sleeping in locations other than my normal bed would yield inconsistant results. Some nights would be the equivelant of being at home while others were extensive periods of torture, ending only when I could again place body upon the lumpy mattress at home (it may be lumpy, but the lumps are in the right places). Further contemplation revealed some times of torment could be reduced or eliminated by flipping end-for-end on the bed, putting my feet against the headboard and my head at the foot. Restorative sleep would result. Other locales resisted any satisfaction in any alignment.

Eventually I have determined I appear to be sensitive to the actual compass direction I am lying while attempting to sleep. If my bed at home is such that my head points to the West, then while traveling my best nights of sleep occur when my lodgings also have a bed running East and West. I am not sure if it has to do with magnetic lines of force or the rotational movement of the Earth, or some yet undiscovered organic GPS system locked deep within my brain, but this sensation of sleep vs. failure to launch has occurred more times than not.Even when moving to a new location would require abut a month to reset the compass direction before I would be able to sleep soundly at a new house.

Indeed, if this is the culprit, I fear my trip will be characterized by another three nights of restlessness and wistful awaiting the dawn. My current appartment is located in such a way that the walls do not align with the cardinal compass points, but are nearly 30 degrees out of line. Looking out the window of my living room allows me to see WSW (West by South West). To actually look to the west, I must lean over and look to the extreme right from my chair, allowing me to glimpse the sun setting.  Short of creating havoc by massive furnature repositioning, this bed will never align with home. Sleep deprevation awaits.

Then again, having five times the usual coffee consumption (and regular rather than decaf) may have played a minor part in thes struggle…

Phred

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