This week has been one of the hardest ones of the semester for me, not for some overabundance of work or any change in course loads but simply for the fact that we just had a time change on Sunday. It should be better right? I got a whole extra hour of sleep on Sunday, that should be a bonus right? WRONG!

It gets dark so early now. It hits 5:00pm and it’s as if it were 8:00pm. My body was slowly adjusting to the gradual oncoming darkness, maybe getting tired a little earlier than normal, but the second the time changed over I felt like I got body slammed by sleep deprivation. I’m still sleeping a full 10 hours a night, but my schedule is all out of whack. My late afternoon classes feel like they’re happening late in the evening and staying up past 7:00pm to finish homework feels impossible. The hours at which I am a functional human being have been severely altered and reduced, meaning I have less time in the day to be productive and complete tasks. 

There is an additional factor that we are given no time to adjust to this change. Yes, it occurs over the weekend, but a single day to readjust an entire sleeping schedule? To reorient your body against its own circadian rhythm? You better be up and working by Monday, able to slog through another day of work and not fall asleep at your desk when it gets dark at 4:30pm! You need to ignore whatever your body feels about how sudden this change is and power through it! 

In writing this out I was reminded of a book I had to read once for a freshman seminar class called Einstein’s Dreams. It turned theories of relativity into little fictional worlds to better explain these concepts of time, and one world really stuck with me. This chapter introduced the concept of mechanical time versus bodily time. People in this world were split into two categories: those who operated by mechanical time and those who operated by bodily time. The people who ran by mechanical time woke up when their alarm went off (5:00am perhaps), ate breakfast at 8:00am, opened and closed their shops on the exact hour, their lives were dictated by the ticking of the clock and the structures established to dictate the passage of time. But the other camp ran based on biological clocks; they ate when they were hungry, they slept when they were tired, they got up when they got up. I was amazed by this! How lovely to live a life dictated by your own body instead of having to force yourself into the mold of marching mechanical time! But this chapter really struck me in how absurd it is that we restrict certain events to occur in a certain time frame rather than doing what our body says we need to do as it happens. “Oh I can’t have a snack even though I am hungry, it’s 3:00pm and it will ruin my dinner at 6:00pm,” “I can’t go to bed now even though it’s super dark, it’s only 7:30pm!” Do we need some structure of time to keep things running, so people can make meetings and trains run on time? Yeah, probably, but it’s fun to imagine a world where I can get up when my body has said I’ve had enough sleep and eat when I’m hungry and still be able to participate in the regular goings on of school and society at large. I wonder if it would really be that much more work to just make hours change externally while letting people retain their sleep schedules, for this half of the year your 9-5 is now a 10-6!

Even time is a social construct, we really cannot escape!