RandomPalaver: Falling Back

There is no greater gift in life than the gift of an extra hour's sleep.  Whatever you do, don't forget to set your clocks back tonight.

And if you want to know why you've had trouble getting up in recent weeks, or have otherwise been out of sorts, check out this interesting article by Rick Weiss from last Tuesday's Washington Post: "Seeing the Light of Day: Artificial Illumination Can Affect More Than Your Mental Health. As Daylight Saving Time Comes to an End, What Happens to Our Internal Clocks?"  Here are the opening paragraphs:

Oh, the light! The autumn light! Is there anything more glorious than an October day, awash in the sun's low-slung amber rays?

And yet . . . perhaps you feel the dread, too. The looming inkiness that, like the tide, crawls up your legs a little higher each day, turning that honeyed light to molasses and molasses to muck until you realize, too late, that the birds have left and the world has gone dark. Dark when you wake up, dark when you go home.

In simpler times we slept more in winter, but modern living denies us that luxury. So increasingly each day, soft-white lights from yonder windows break -- along with halogens, tungstens and compact fluorescents. And when we can't stand it anymore, we resort to manipulation, declaring that 6 in the morning is now 5.

You got a problem with that, take it up in the spring.

Now science is finding that our manhandling of light and time is making us sick.

Artificial illumination is fooling the body's biological clock into releasing key wakefulness hormones at the wrong times, contributing to seasonal fatigue and depression. And daylight saving time, extended by Congress this year for an extra four weeks, risks dragging even more Americans into a winter funk.

Comments

[contessa]

One thing leads to another: next thing you know, someone you dated briefly 15 yrs. ago and haven't seen since is going to come up to you at a party and say he didn't call back because he had SAD.