Sleep Well

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It’s scary, actually.  How you think depends on how you sleep.  I suspect that the degree of this differs individual by individual, but I recently had a couple of consecutive nights where the differences were striking.  To put this in context, it was after ending Daylight Saving Time (it should be kept all year but with Republicans in the House unable to pick a speaker, what chance do we have of them ever passing a simple, but necessary measure?).  Mondays, for some of us, we naturally awake earlier since, well, work.  I happened to wake excessively early that morning and couldn’t get back to sleep, no how.  I functioned alright during the day, but those who work 9-2-5 aren’t allowed naps and some of us aren’t young anymore.  I thought it was a fairly normal day.  That night I slept well.

Photo by Kate Stone Matheson on Unsplash

The next morning it was like my thoughts were supercharged.  I was thinking things I’d failed to pick up on the previous morning.  I was efficient and energized.  What a difference a good night’s sleep makes!  But the herd mentality—work must be eight hours and those hours must be from nine to five (if you work more, that’s great!)—doesn’t allow for bad nights.  It’s ageist, really.  Once you reach a certain age, you don’t sleep as well at night.  Work times are non-negotiable, so you’re forced to keep going through the yawns that a good nap would take care of.  So much depends on a good night’s sleep.

In reading about the history of holidays (I’ve been doing this for years, as The Wicker Man demonstrates), it’s clear that the United States stands out in the dearth of its holidays.  It’s been that way from the beginning.  Most employers don’t give Veteran’s Day off.  None note May Day, which is Labor Day in many parts of the world.  No time to sleep in in this country!  Work while you’re tired, work while you’re wakeful, just as long as you work those sacred eight hours and more.  Of course, all of this may come from that grouchy feeling a poor night’s sleep bestows.  I don’t keep a sleep diary, but I do wonder how many social ills are brought about by a bad night’s slumber.  It’s the darkening time of the year.  Nature’s telling us that reasonable animals hibernate.  The rest of us set alarm clocks to wake us before it’s light, no matter how we fared the night before.

Whence Dawn?

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It’s rare, but that’s often what makes things so special.  Because of the way my mind works, I can’t have background music on when I work.  My concentration suffers.  The only real exception is when I have a mindless, repetitive work task that I have to do that lasts for an hour or more.  Then I can slip on the phones and start up Spotify.  I can only afford so many premium accounts, so I have the free version.  That means ads.  The thing about Spotify ads is that they too are repetitive.  I guess that’s how marketing people try to get things stuck in your head.  I can remember many jingles from childhood.  Mostly for products I never use, and a few from products that no longer exist.  They live on in memory.

The other day I had a repetitive task to do that was aided by a lack of early emails at work, so I was able to begin shortly after login.  You see, I tend to start work before seven.  An early riser, I like to work when I’m still able to concentrate well.  I had the headphones on and was listening to Spotify.  One of the ads, about insomnia (ahem), started out by stating they had to choose between a daytime ad and a nighttime ad.  They said something like “obviously we chose nighttime.”  It was seven a.m.  The sun was up.  Some of us were already at work.  Since my task took several hours, I was still at it after nine a.m. when the ad switched to its daytime version.  So night now lasts until work starts?  Whatever happened to dawn?

Perhaps the ads come from a different time zone.  Some of them are regionally specific, though.  Work defines much of our lives, and it also seems to dictate when Spotify switches to its daytime advertising.  For those of us who wake early, dawn is an almost magical time.  It has been many years now since I’ve awoken to find it light outside.  Although I get quite a lot of my personal work done before starting my paid job, I still keep an eye out for the first lightening of the sky.  At some times of the year, before the autumnal equinox sets in, it signals the time for my jog to start.  In September that gets delayed to 6:30 when many others are out and my work’s about to begin.  If I happen to be listening to Spotify when I start work, they’ll confirm I should still be sleeping.  Instead, I embrace the dawn.