Longer days and my sleep rhythm

A feature of being in the temperate zones is that you actually have changing seasons, as opposed to merely rainy and not-so-rainy in the tropical zones.  With the arrival of spring came an event I have not observed in more than a decade and a half - the moving of the clocks forward for daylight saving time (DST).

I actually love DST, when I am somewhere it makes sense.  I remember as a very young child when Jamaica still observed it, that I would be awoken at an unconscionably dark hour of morning, assured it was 6:00 a.m. and told I needed to get ready for school.  Where the diurnal difference in sunrise and sunset varies only about 1.5 - 2 hours at most during the year, DST was doing no-one in Jamaica any favours.  As it is, we did away with it sometime during my primary school years, and I was none the poorer for it.

Here in the northern climes, though, DST makes all the sense in the world.  The diurnal difference in sunrise and sunset can get up to as much as 22 hours (in the extreme north, or Arctic regions), but here in northern ON it is about 5 hours (by my inexpert reckoning).  And it is wonderful!  I wake at 5:30 a.m. most days, and don't go to bed until say 11:00 p.m. usually, and here in Canada, that means it's only been dark for about an hour by the time I am crawling between the sheets.

Of course, all this daylight has caused a shift in my sleep rhythms.  My mother has often referred to me as her  "chicken" child, because with the coming of sunset I am ready to find a nest and roost.  At this time of year, with sunset in Jamaica sometime around 7:00 p.m., I am yawning my head off by 8:00 p.m. and ready to settle in by 9:00 p.m. at the latest.  It makes it hard to stay current with any TV programmes that come on at primetime, because by then I am falling asleep.  If I force myself to stay awake, I usually crash by the end of the show and miss the best part, when all is revealed in the last ten minutes.

On the contrary, here in Canada I find myself staying up as late as midnight before I feel sufficiently sleepy enough to get into bed.  This is brought on by the fact that the days seem to go by quickly, and it is still light out at "late" times of night, so much so that I feel little to no tiredness, and feel distinctly odd to think of going to bed before it is dark out.

This change in my sleep rhythms has me quite interested to see what it will be like in the wintertime.  I recall that in NY I suffered perhaps a mild form of seasonal affective disorder (SAD) and hated being indoors during the winter.  This time around I am preparing myself to be more outgoing, to enjoy winter rather than endure it, to revel as much in the early sunsets as I do now in the late ones.