Try to lose your alarm clock with all its obnoxious buzzing, lights, and sounds to wake you up. In lockdown I bet the use of alarms to get up in the morning has already massively fallen. And for good reason… what do you have to wake up for that can’t wait ’til after brunch? You’ve been given sweet, sweet freedom from the usual 8 am lectures. For better, or for worse, the body gets a new sleep groove.
For the better…
There’s REM sleep. You likely know about REM sleep already, you may also know that’s where the best dreams come from. Putting the alarm clock away means there are more minutes of REM to enjoy as you wake in your own time. This is seriously the best protective factor for mental health. The positive power of creative association with REM has even been independently used in awake trauma treatments where lucid rapid eye movement heals sick brains. The eye movements help generate creative associations and start to unblock frightful memories. How awesome is that? It’s like the mind can actively heal itself with the free association present in the later hours of sleep! Without a rude alarm clock interruption, you can capture more of these dreams – some of you may have noticed this during lockdown already. Things might be getting crazy up in your brain.
For the worse…
Could it be those guilty pleasure TV binges that carry you into the small hours of the night? These leave you husked, emptied of narrative desire, but in desperate need of a half-made couch cocoon. There’s no doubting this screws with an early sleep. Really, it shits on the sacredness of any childlike bedtime routine. But you actually can lose the “guilty” in guilty pleasure binge. Lean in – it’s normal to want long-lasting stories to be satisfied. Again, what could you possibly need to do before brunch the next day, anyway?
For these two examples above, maybe we shouldn’t assume that only problems come from going to sleep late and that all the solutions come from how to wake up early. Two lessons we can take out of lockdown is that alarm clocks may not be the solution for healthy sleep, and binge-watching may not be the evil it’s often portrayed in popular culture. There could be some good in the way we’d genuinely rather go to sleep and some unhealthy parts in the wakeup our busy schedules usually demand.
Now, you friggin’ panic because there are Zoom tutorials set for 9 am. It’s not quite as bad as an 8 am lecture – but your tutor has passively-aggressively created a no PJs policy (boooooo), and you need to be feeling and looking fresh. The alarm clock comes back! It rams an obstructive accent onto your blissful dreams and knocks the fun visuals out of your eyes. For better or for worse, your body obliges to another sleep regime.
For the worse…
You’ve missed out on REM, sure, but there’s a sick road ahead with heart problems, metabolic problems, infection susceptibility, etc. I’m sure you get the drill. It’s a bad vibe. Like, a really bad vibe. Sleep cut short is never cool, and it didn’t get any cooler when Tim Cook or any other CEO told the world they should get up before 4 am for a productive morning.
For the better…
There’s a higher proportion of deep sleep the following night after that dreadfully early start. You have exhausted yourself and relaxing becomes necessarily easier. You don’t need to “actively relax your eye muscles” or use a new method to fall asleep because you can passively let go – you literally have less energy. With less REM sleep, the body’s focus is on repairing and relaxing. It doesn’t even really matter if there’s another alarm set because frankly, you’re too exhausted from waking up early to give a shit. Worrisome thoughts are left by the wayside so the natural stresses of breathing and heart rate in the body sync up together. This resting state “sync up” is how the heart and nerves throughout the body become chemically in tune with each other. This is literally a protective factor against overwhelming stress the next day (the technical concept is called heart rate variability).
All together, there are consequences to our sleep/wake cycle. The way that some science can either inform a sleep habit as negative for your health or positive for your health shows me that there’s hope in trying something different. The best thing is to be honest with yourself about sleep. There are good reasons not to play into any early riser stereotypes just as there are good reasons to accept some later bedtimes. If after 40 minutes of trying to have a “healthy” early night, it’s just not happening for ya, listen to that body of yours. Get up, enjoy your own wakefulness and rest when it feels right for you. Sweet dreams…