It's Not Tomorrow until I Go to Bed

I have to admit to a small cheat on the previous post – I did need to adjust the posting time, because otherwise it would have to say something like Friday 7am. And no, I did not get up early to catch up on the blogging challenge. This is an unfortunate side-effect of functioning in a different time zone than I’m living in.

Since about last January I have been pretty much living in the US time zone. It started with a bunch of webinars that tended to go on until quite late, and since by then I was already working from home, I thought why not. Weird sleeping patterns have been something of an interest a long time ago. However various activities that require standard daytime hours like University or work, duh, have always been in the way. Hence I never got to try out polyphasic sleep…

Being a night owl I have always stayed up late (and hated getting up in the morning), so the extra hours easily crept into my schedule taking me from a usual (one could say normal-ish) bedtime at 1am to often 6am. Living in a different time zone than everyone around you (and without a jetlag) can be pretty fun, but it does have its downsides. The least of which is the fact that I have to backdate the time on my blog posts so they don’t completely confuse people.

Especially in the winter with short daylight hours it can feel quite strange when it gets dark by the time you’ve finished “breakfast”. As a teenager I used to have goth tendencies, and never really was a the type of person that would go sunbathing, so in theory it shouldn’t bother me much. However it does mean even less vitamin D for someone who already avoids leaving the house if possible…

Getting up late also means that shopping can be tricky (gasp). The supermarkets are open quite late, but a lot of other shops can close around six or even earlier. This means that with cooking, reading the news and doing various house chores taking up most of the afternoon I wouldn’t get much work done before the evening. Then it’s nice to spend some time with the family, one thing leads to another and suddenly I don’t really start working before midnight unless my boyfriend decided to play video games in the evening… One of my New Year’s resolutions is actually to get a minimum of 4 work hours in a day – it’s so easy to get distracted by little chores and overlook the big ticket items that actually are income related.

Oh, and don’t get me even started on the nightmare that is getting up really early on the rare occasion that I actually have an appointment in the morning or there is something time sensitive that needs to be done. I’ve been more than happy to not use an alarm clock for over a year, thank you very much. It’s really nice to let your body dictate how much sleep you need, however breaking out from that routine is a major pain.

Relying on your body clock unfortunately has a downside. I have been trying to scale back my bedtime hours to something between 1 and 3 a.m. – that would make mornings is a bit more manageable. However being a bit spoiled my body doesn’t like going to sleep unless it is tired and done for the day. And that in turn means that if I’ve got work it’s hard to just stop in the middle and go to bed. My brain just ends up still working on the problems and trying to find solutions, which leads to a bit of an insomnia problem. I’m hoping more exercise during the day might help a bit with this problem.

But even before the change in my sleeping patterns I always linked “today” to the day when I woke up, at least outside of documents or other “official” places. Hence the title, and I don’t really think I’ve been cheating of the posts considering they are published (and written) on the day they were meant to – just not quite in the right time zone. So, if you see 23:59 on a post you know what’s going on…

Over to you, what are your sleeping patterns like? Anything you would like to change, or you struggle with?