Like your average, everyday University student, I tried giving up on a fixed sleep schedule. The results were…interesting, to say the least.
First of all, I blame my friends and their romanticization of the night:
“I sat all by myself in the darkness, cut away from my daytime responsibilities, free to be the most uninhibited and wildest form of me. Nobody could tell me what to do, or what to see and how to live my own life.”
“It was breathtaking, to see the city sustain its light through the worst hours of the gloom and let me be a part of its neon secrets, as I strolled around the skyscraper’s pitch black shadows, with nothing but a cup of coffee in my hand.”
Ethereal photos of cherry blossoms and fall leaves illuminated by moon shine and fairy light, cups of coffee waiting by a rainy evening window, blazing sunsets…these all made me believe that living through the night was a more alluring experience than the plain old day.
I do have friends who wax lyrical about the glory of the daytime, but I somehow never relate to what they’re saying.
“It was a beautiful feeling, to take my breakfast out to the garden and watch the sunrise as I sipped on hot tea. You could hear the world go from deathly silence to the happy chatter of morning life and I loved being part of that.”
“I always wake up early and do some Yoga with the birds for company. I like being awake before everyone else, and having that silence and peace to myself before I’m dragged back to all my commitments. It’s good to establish your autonomy over the day before going off to work or school.”
Night, I decided. Factors like a noisy neighbour who did his laundry at midnight, a couple that squabbled loudly over dinner and my own afternoon and evening classes let me take reign over the dark hours and I found myself staying up later and later every night and well into the morning hours, sometimes only getting to bed at around three or four before waking up close to noon, just in time for a brunch, and heading to classes and Karate practice. After my daytime (read: evening) commitments, I came home to prepare a dinner and begin homework assignments and correspondence that usually took until midnight. Midnight to three was spent reading, scrolling through internet articles, watching documentaries or listening to music.
The changes were profound. In some ways, I felt as if I were walking right beside classmates, but from a flipped version of our current universe. I mistook the five o’clock winter sunset for dawn and had to constantly wear a watch as my system was convinced that the time was two or three hours earlier than it really was. While friends lay their heads on their desk in the late afternoon and called out to their beds, I was bouncing with energy and proposing dinner plans. My social life was at its best and I soon grew too accustomed to sunset walks and late night grocery shopping.
It all fell apart before I could even react.
Comments about my appearance went from “Your shirt is super cute today!” and “I love your lipstick color!” to “Are you hungover?” and “You look a bit high.” People started asking me if I was recovering from a sickness and I stopped wearing contacts entirely thanks to the dark circles under my eyes. I missed morning and afternoon package deliveries and also started eating more than usual. A dinner at eight o’clock vanished by midnight and by one thirty, I needed another mini-meal. In the mornings, I winced at the thought of breakfast and picked at flakes of cereal but gorged on lunch. A trail of coffee cups followed me wherever I went. While my grades were consistent, it took a lot more work on my side to keep it that way as what I studied when my eyes were burning and the moon was high looked completely new in the light of the day (read: afternoon).
Time went from being something clean, boxed and structured into a gooey mess of socially constructed words and intervals. I really didn’t need the confines of ‘day’ and ‘night’ anymore and dates confused me as I saw them all blur together and eventually lose meaning. While telling someone a story, I increasingly found myself referring to time with hours instead of days and referring to anything before noon as ‘in the middle of the night’. Most people’s lives were composed of five weekdays and a weekend of two days punctuated by strict periods of rest, but mine was an unstoppable train wreck of 168 hours where I only regenerated when I felt like I was on the verge of collapse because getting out of bed had become ten times harder than before. Not surprisingly, I was cranky for most of my waking hours and got into double the number of confrontations I usually did.
Truth be told, I didn’t have too many romantic moments where I could commune with nature. Sunset photos aside, I was too scared to lean out of my balcony after ten in the night or even open the curtains, lest I saw something better locked in my imagination, be it demons scampering across the backyard or burglars with their faces pressed to windows.
A vacation back home more or less fixed my terrible lifestyle. My 3-11 AM sleep time shifted back to a relatively decent 12-8 AM cycle. Getting glasses with lenses that blocked computer blue light rays and drinking copious amounts of tea after dinner helped me sleep better and wake up refreshed. I realized that the sunrise wasn’t so diabolical after all, that I could finally go back to eating breakfast and that I made for a (slightly better) conversationalist with higher reserves of patience and energy.
I’m still not your infuriating early morning jogger who eats entire forests of salads and snorts at people who yawn at nine o’clock, looking back on their previous life of indulgence with distaste. I admit that the experiment was an intriguing one and a necessary experce to improve my lifestyle. Of course, this isn’t a judgment of lifestyle by any stretch of imagination. There are night people out there, who live perfectly healthy and functional lives even though they’re practically nocturnal but it was made painfully clear to me that I’m not one of them.
All in all, my personal experience in becoming a night person was a surreal one, but surrealism isn’t sustainable and in my case, I found that too much of it is terribly isolating.
My takeaway from this is that a simple shift of sleeping and living hours can trasnform you into someone who doesn’t quite live in the same world as everyone else.
(Photo Credits: All images are the property of the HC Waseda author)