Past the Alarm

Some divided research conclusions have explored how well, or even whether, we can change our sleep patterns.  Fundamentally people are programmed to be diurnal, get up in daylight, retire for the night when it's dark.  Many religions, mine among them, time what we are expected to do when by these cycles of day and night.

In our modern world we have rush hours morning and evening when people accommodate their working times.  Marketers know when prime time is to maximize media advertising revenue.  And for a lot of us who struggle to be asleep when we think we should, a variety of chemical time readjustments are available for purchase.

But we still have people who work the dark hours, sometimes as rotating shifts, sometimes as their careers.  And we take care of our little ones whose internal clocks have not yet been settled.  We party to the wee hours sometimes.  And whatever time it is in my house, it is shifted by 12 hours someplace else.

I have the good fortune to have been primarily a day worker with some periodic after dark responsibilities.  Now I am past that, retired, with few external impositions of what I must do when.  That makes my wake times something of a box of hours to be filled with activities largely of my choosing.  I want to be productive, but I also don't want to be dragging myself to my next undertaking that I might find more enjoyable if fully alert and energetic.

I thought I would expand that box of wakefulness by forty minutes, twenty at the start of the day and twenty at the end of the day.  My sleep would be the same, I thought, as I don't actually sleep during all the dark hours allotted for it.  What I wanted was two more twenty minute sessions of work time.  I could do some very useful, or at least pleasant things in twenty minutes.  And I have resources to assist me, unlike hour hunter-gatherer ancestors our Rabbis who depend on looking at the sky.  My cell phone has a sleep tracker app installed, which includes a wake-up time.  My smartwatch can buzz my wrist at a time coordinated with its cell phone app.  Just set the alarm and get up when it nudges me.

The end of the day is a little harder to regulate.  I can use the clock to decide whether I am in bed or out.  Coordinating rigid lights out time with my wife whose biological clock is shifted later than mine has less consistency.  And when watching TV, my own internal clock often goes on snooze.  So while I can get that twenty minutes of bed is off-limits time, I cannot necessarily make it productive.

So work with what I can, the morning.  Set the smartwatch for the desired time.  Got up at the buzz for a while.  Then middle of the night insomnia returned, wakefulness when I didn't want to be awake.  The buzz started coming right as I returned to effective sleep.  That left a dilemma, force myself to arise at the signal or follow my internal signal to not interrupt those deeper stages of sleep that are often elusive.  So far, I've compromised.  Sleep through the wrist alarm but listen to the radio behind the bed.  Arise after the emcee plays the daily march.  That leaves me reasonably awake.  It also leaves me without those extra twenty minutes of focus each morning, which was the purpose of resetting the sleep times.  And I really want those twenty minutes at each end of my day.