Wanted: people with a functioning body clock

[baratron]

Okay, I have a question. How do you know it's time to get up?

Don't say "because my alarm goes off". Let's assume it isn't a work day, and you can get up at whatever time you like. How do you know when that is?

Also, if you have morning meds to take before food, how do you make sure they get taken at the same time each day?

I actually have no idea. Between the chronic fatigue and the delayed sleep phase syndrome, I usually get up either because I have to be somewhere, or because I'm hungry.

I could have got up today at 11, but I was still tired. I fell back to sleep and slept until 2, and was still tired then, but thought it might be because of low blood sugar. So I ate half a protein bar, and then thought "shit, I should have taken my thyroxine first". Now I'm sitting around exhausted and brain-dead, waiting until it's been long enough after eating that I can take the thyroxine, and then until it's long enough after taking the thyroxine that I can have my hot chocolate and vitamin pills and something decidedly more meal-like than the protein bar.

I have an alarm that goes off at 4pm for one med, but lately that hasn't been much use as it's a "take with food" med and I haven't been awake.

Apparently, based on brain biopsies, people with "severe depression" are not synchronised to the usual solar day in terms of gene activity. NEWSFLASH! I wonder if there are any studies that I can enrol in before I'm dead?

Comments

[tiger-spot.livejournal.com]

These days usually the baby wakes me up, but that's like an alarm so it doesn't count. If someone else gets up with the baby, or if she goes back to sleep after the morning nursing session and I don't, usually it is the quality of the light, combined with the sounds of day filtering in (birds, the chickens, other people banging around making breakfast, neighbors with lawn equipment, etc.), that convinces me to get up. In hotels with blackout curtains, I get very disoriented waking up to complete darkness when the clock says it's supposed to be morning.

At times in my life when I have routinely been getting up closer to noon than to sunrise, I lose the response to light. But if I get up to an alarm that is at or before sunrise for, I dunno, about a month, maybe two, I get entrained to dawn and it becomes much harder to sleep through it even without the alarm.

One thing that is key to actually getting me out of bed rather than repeatedly waking up and going back to sleep is having something I'm looking forward to. Something I want to do (e.g. cleaning something, writing an important email, going to the beach) doesn't seem to cut it, but something I want to experience (Andres made French toast, the baby will smile at me, it's supposed to be a lovely day outside today) does. That seems weird and backward to me, but there you are.

I take my vitamins first thing in the morning, when I brush my teeth. This is easy to remember because my teeth taste nasty in the morning, so I want to brush them and therefore can easily hang another habit on that. In general, I find that adding habits is easiest if I do them right before or right after something that's already part of my daily schedule. Adding something to the getting up or going to bed or after dinner routines is much easier than adding something at random 2:00 in the afternoon.