Wednesday, January 22, 2014

morning has broken. or is broken. or something.

You know, I am just not a morning person. Never have been. I'm actually waaaaay better now than I used to be. In times past, you didn't even want to speak with me until about 10 a.m. because I would bite your head off, just because you existed and it was before 10 a.m. I rarely sleep later than about 7:30 or so, but my brain isn't functional for.... let's just say some time later. That's still true, but I've learned over the years to at least keep my grumpiness to myself. Mostly.

So now that I'm out of school and I still don't have a job, I'm faced with a small dilemma. It's a rare day that I have to get up and be somewhere before 10. So what do I do with my morning aversion? Do I fight it? go with it?

If I go with what feels like my "natural" bedtime--about 12:30--I usually wake up when the garage door closes as MadMax is leaving, which is about 7:30. Then either I lie there and think for awhile and get up around 8, or I grab a book and read and get up around 8:30. But I'm still lethargic until about 10, and since I'm off caffeine, I can't get a boost that way (although to be entirely honest, having a cup off coffee never made much difference in my morning mood). I might throw in a load of laundry, empty the dishwasher, or go through the mail, but I'm not very productive until 10.

If I get up and get started earlier, I am more likely to go to bed sometime in the same vicinity as Dean (10 or 10:30), although usually I am still reading when he falls asleep. If I go to sleep earlier, I wake up earlier, maybe around 6 or 6:30 while he is getting ready for work--which, on the plus side, gives me more time to read before I feel like I need to get out of bed. And also, if I can get my exercising/shower/etc done before 9, it makes organizing my day about 100% easier.

But, on the other hand, when I was keeping student's hours in grad school, my most productive hours of the day were between about 9 and 12:30 (at night). So if I go to bed at 10:30, I'm losing my most productive time of day. And I enjoy being up late. Also, although I usually wake up about 7:30, on the days when I manage to go back to sleep for an hour after MadMax leaves, I wake up feeling like I really slept, if you know what I mean. As opposed to waking up feeling like I wish I could have another three hours of sleep, which is how I usually feel.

So what do you think? I know Julie is a night owl and Debbie and MMM are morning people, but I'm still curious. Should I work on becoming more of a morning person? Or should I go with my personal inclination, stay up late, and kick into gear around 10?

(For the record, that cold got considerably worse before it got better, but I seem to have recovered from it and from the caffeine withdrawal at about the same time and I've been feeling pretty good the last couple of days.)(yay!)

6 comments:

  1. Feeling better = yipee!!!

    And now, for your query. Keep in mind that I'm not just saying this because I am nocturnal. Here's the deal, we have internal clocks. We wake and sleep at what feels natural to us. When we're FORCED to adhere to someone else's schedule, we are crabby, not well rested, and tend to get sicker faster and more often.

    All of this (it's backed by science and everything) is to say, go with what your body tells you. Which, it sounds like, is to get your good work done during your good hours. Not other people's hours.

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  2. I'm with Julie on this - if you have the luxury of planning your own time, enjoy making the most of your best hours.

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  3. And just for the record, I do realize that this is not only a first world problem, but also a problem of someone who is lucky enough to be in the situation to even have the choice of when I'm going to start my day. I realized while I was driving around this afternoon what a totally asinine post this is.

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    1. And thank you, Julie and Eva, for chiming in. But Eva is right, it is definitely a luxury.

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  4. I wrote a comment. I swear I did. *shakes fist at Blogger*

    Not sure exactly what I said, but it was along the lines of what Julie said. If you can schedule your day so that it works best for your internal clock, than that is what you should do.

    And, no it's not whining to try to figure out what works best for you. Did you get punished a lot for whining as a child? Or were you not allowed to complain? Because really, you don't go all on and on about how terrible it is (not just this but other things as well) you just set it out as "this is a current problem I'm having and this is why it's a problem for me and what do you think if I worked it out this way?" Not whining. Just saying.

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    1. Oh. Um, thank you. I remember myself as a whiny child (there were reasons for it, but still--unpleasant trait in a child), so maybe that is why I get so irritated at myself when I detect a whiff of it now. Because really it's hard to imagine anyone who is more privileged than me. Unless I were male, I guess. But then Dean has to get up and go to work every morning, so who's the lucky one? that's a more complex question than it sounds at first, of course, but it's something I try not to forget.

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