Shift Change
I enjoy staying up late. I’d read in bed until (gasp!) 8:30 or 9 as a little kid, with nothing more than a red night light (one reason I think my night vision got pretty good, and why I have to wear sunglasses a lot during the days). As a teenager and young adult, my preferred sleep schedule was 2am – 10am, with the occasional 4am – noon if I got into something really worthy of my tunnel-focused attention.
These days, though, I’m up between 5:45 and 6 every morning, and just being able to drive to work without major injury means I’d better be in bed by 11. 10 would be better; 9:30’s been known to happen. It made this year’s New Year’s Eve a little duller than I’d planned, let me tell you.
Well, my quasi-conscious train of thought upon leaving REM sleep this morning went as follows:
Voice 1: Dude, why on earth did we put the clock where we can’t easily see it without moving? It’s gotta be about 5:40, the alarm’s gonna hit any minute.
Voice 2: No, no, this is our semi-regular 3:30 Brief Moment of Pseudo-Lucidity. Just roll over and go back to sleep.
Voice 1: Yeah, you’re probably right. But let’s wiggle over and get Line-of-Sight on the clock just to be sure.
Voice 2: Uh-oh. 6:30? We didn’t set the alarm, did we?
Voice 1: Dude, and you were the one who wanted to go back to sleep.
Funny thing is, since I awoke naturally, I felt much better this morning. And I still managed to get to work on time.
Supposedly if you wake up on your own at the end of one of your sleep cycles, you feel better. The snooze button is supposed to be bad for sleep as you don’t get properly back to sleep and tend to wake up in the middle of your sleep cycle which makes you more sleepy. So it’s better to wake up naturally a bit earlier or slightly later at the end of one of your sleep cycles than it is to pick an arbitrary time and use the alarm. I hardly ever use an alarm unless i really need to be up and then I usually just get up before it goes off so I don’t go into zombie mode.
congrats on still getting to work on time and not breaking your neck!
Please email your message to Jodi. She is a snooze button fiend, and I am convinced it robs us both of a good 30 minutes of sleep.
Heh, it’s a hard habit to break as it seems counterintuitive to wake up earlier to feel more rested.
Oh, we *must* watch the MLS draft on Friday. Don’t let me forget.