Friday, February 12, 2010

Morning's here... The morning's here! Sunshine is here...


I love mornings. :D To observe my behaviour, you'd never conclude such a thing. For instance, my last couple weeks have gone more or less like so:

Sunday: wake at 3 pm
Monday: sleep at 7 am; wake at 2 pm
Tuesday: sleep at 11 am; wake at 5 pm
Wednesday: sleep at 4 pm; wake at 6 pm
Thursday: sleep at 6 am; wake at 3 pm
Friday: sleep at 3 am; wake at 12 pm
Saturday: sleep at 7 am; wake at 3 pm
Sunday: sleep at 6 am; wake at 3 pm
Monday: sleep at 5 am; wake at 7 am; sleep at 5 pm; wake at 7 pm
Tuesday: sleep at 8 am; wake at 9 am; sleep at 6 pm; wake at 8 pm
Wednesday: sleep at 5 am; wake at 5:10 am; sleep at 9 pm (!!)
Thursday: wake at 6 am (!!)
Friday: sleep at 1 am; wake at 8 am

I don't quite understand why I always tend to stay up forever into the night, eventually giving in to exhaustion and sleeping sometime in the morning... I guess there's something about the quiet, when everyone else is asleep, that I like, but I most of the time I don't get much (or anything) done when I'm awake really late anyway. Sometimes there's something specific I'm doing such that I stay up forever (e.g., playing guitar), but other times time just somehow elapses, and suddenly it's 6 am, and I wouldn't even be able to describe what I was doing the whole time if you asked me.

I think I need to get into the habit of sticking to a behavioural curfew. Something like "no computer after 10 pm". I really like early mornings, when it's just getting light out (or even before it starts to get light). They're so much better than evenings. They feel so much happier...

I watched a TED Talk yesterday, about lifestyles that are associated with longevity, and (in addition to making me think about what a ridiculously high proportion of the time my body must be under stress -- due to my sleeping habits alone) the speaker talks about the Japanese concept of ikigai, which he, perhaps rather inaccurately, translates as "the reason for which you wake up in the morning"... Now, maybe what he really meant by this description was something closer to a raison d'ĂȘtre, or broader sense of purpose in life (which surely would be a great thing), but even taking it literally: for me it makes such a huge difference simply to have something specific that I want to do when I wake up each day. It's such a great feeling to wake up and to not be able to stay in bed because there are things that you can't wait to do right away. Which is another reason to set a curfew for myself, even (or especially) when there are things I really want to do right that moment, at night.

It's odd... I saw this personality quiz recently (a Which Typeface Are You? quiz, hehe) in which the following question was asked "Are you relaxed -- do you take any chocolate from the box, whether it's orange cream or hazelnut crunch? Or are you disciplined -- do you first suffer the orange cream so you can later enjoy the hazelnut crunch?" I would never think of myself as disciplined (like, at *all*), but I always do the latter. I always eat things I don't like first, saving the best things for last. If this is indeed some kind of manifestation of discipline, maybe there's hope for me yet -- maybe I can make a habit of not only to holding off on enjoyable activities until morning (so I can sleep and wake early :D), but maybe even first doing tasks I don't want to do, getting them over with right away so I can enjoy other things fully afterwards. Wouldn't that be something...

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