Finding the Groove

This has been a great month, schedule-wise! No travel, and I've generally been able to sleep and work on a cycle that works for me. Of course, I've still had the occasional setback - a lunch meeting, early teleconference, neighbors doing construction, Superman running sprints above my head, or some other pre-afternoon event. Overall though, it's been great and I've settled into a routine that's been very productive.

What I've noticed is that I basically flip my day upside down. "Normal" people get up, head to work, then come home and have a few hours of wind-down time before bed. I get up, have a few hours of wind-up time, work, then relax for a bit before bed. My morning is spent doing things most people do in the evening.

I've settled pretty consistently into a 2:00am to 10:30am sleep schedule. The first two or three hours of my day are spent sipping coffee, checking for important work e-mails, catching up on personal reading, the news, and of course, Facebook. Around 12:30 or 1:00, I eat breakfast, shower, and prepare to really dig into work around 2:00pm.

My peak time of productivity doesn't really come until around 7:00pm though. I spend the early afternoon doing organizational stuff, making phone calls to clients who work "regular" hours, catching up on job-related reading and news, and other things that don't take a whole lot of intense brainpower and focus. Around 6:00 or 7:00 though, I start writing. My best time to actually complete projects is from 7:00pm to 10:00pm. This is where I get in The Zone and don't even notice time passing. I'm always shocked when I look up and see how late it is, and I often work well past 10pm.

There's a downside (or two) to this schedule though. My social life suffers. In order to spend time with my friends - who get together in the evening after their work hours - I have to sacrifice my own productive work hours. I have to interact with clients during times my brain is toast. I don't get much relaxing "me" time either. Mornings are spent trying to gear up and so I do work-like things that prep my brain for work later in the day. I have a few hours between the time I stop working and bedtime - but everything in the world outside is closed, so I'm limited to relaxing in my own living room. Not really my style. I'd rather go out, walk down to the beach, have dinner somewhere, hear some music. Unfortunately, that's not gonna happen after 10pm on a weeknight where I live.

Still, the positive side outweighs the negative. I'm getting a lot more done now that I've accepted that my best time to be productive is long after everyone else has ended their day. My creativity is coming back, and my analysis is deeper and better than it's been since grad school - when I kept a similar schedule, oddly enough. My brain makes different types of connections at 7pm than it does at 2pm, and this has consequences for my work. Accepting that fact has been liberating, and has improved my life significantly.

I'm feeling healthy and alert, staying spiritually grounded - and I've even lost weight! It's like my whole being has clicked into place now that I'm honoring my own circadian rhythm. Mind, body and spirit are working together again rather than against one another. I've even found ways to maintain a social life by setting aside whole days for fun with friends rather than trying to fit them into a few hours that aren't the right hours. This means that I'm spending less time with some friends, but I've also made some new ones and that's been wonderful too!

I don't know how long this will last. Eventually, I'll be doing fieldwork again rather than analysis and library research. Many of my clients are still in a different time zone, which will sometimes affect my routine. But for now, I'm embracing my true rhythm and enjoying this rare chance to be ME!

Are you a lark? An owl? Maybe a hyena?

Check out this article and find out! Then choose your career specialty wisely.

It's aimed at physicians, but much of it can apply to any career path. Thanks to Danielle of the Night Owl list for sharing this.

Enjoy!

One of Those Days!

One of those GOOD days, that is! :-)

I woke up at 9:00am sharp today feeling GREAT! It's not like I jumped out of bed singing, but I imagine that what I felt was, well, somewhat normal for a change. These are the days that are so rare that I can count them on one hand. And today was one of them!!!

I opened my eyes right away, looked at the clock, sat up and *gasp* got out of bed! My body worked. My brain worked. I was STARVING. I had energy. It was...strange.

While I waited for my Coffeebot to brew up a pot, I cleaned my kitchen. I mean really cleaned it. Did the dishes, cleaned the counters, scrubbed vegan stew splatters off the stove, swept the floor. All before 9:30am. Who knew???

I simultaneously love and loathe these rare mornings. I love feeling what "normal" is like, and getting things accomplished early in the morning. Okay, so 9:00am isn't exactly the crack of dawn. But for me? It's early. Even when I'm awake by then, I usually can't think straight, walk straight, or get anything of value done before noon. So this makes me happy. :-D

I loathe them because I know it's a rare and special treat. Tomorrow, it'll be back to my normal and waking up will be my biggest struggle of the day. It'll be an obstacle to overcome again rather than a joy. It's hard to actually know what I'm missing, to feel in every cell of my body what my mornings would be like if I didn't have DSPS. These wonderful, energetic mornings remind me of how screwed up I really am.

So I turn last night over and over in my mind. What was different? I come up flat. Nothing. I worked until 10:30pm, analyzing data, writing, and organizing photos from the field. I watched a couple hours of tv - Last Restaurant Standing, Food Network Challenge. Hmm...they're both food shows! Nah. Probably not relevant. I went to bed and read until about 2:15am. Started a new book, Guests of the Sheik. It's an ethnography of an Iraqi village. Bottom line? A pretty typical night for me. Not a thing out of the ordinary.

The last week was tough though. My circadian rhythm was thrown all over the map. I flew to Dallas, then to Chicago, and had to work bright and early in the morning. I only got 1 or 2 hours of sleep a night for much of that trip. When I got home, it took me about an equal number of days to catch up. I slept 10 or 11 hours a night on Friday and Saturday nights. I was almost late to a 3pm party on Sunday. On Monday, I slept about 8 hours. Then? On Tuesday? 6 hours and 45 minutes. And I felt refreshed and energetic!

Maybe I should skip sleep more often? Shift my sleep schedule to almost none some days and half the day on other days? Would my body somehow move back to a middle ground then?

I don't know. I don't understand it, but for today, I'll take it!

YES!!!!!!

Okay, maybe I'm a dork but I hang out at Disneyland sometimes. I find it creatively inspiring, a lot of fun and best of all they're open late. The only problem is that I end up going alone because everybody else seems to think they have to get there at the crack of dawn.

My sister? 6:30am

My friends? 10:00am

Online Disney groups? 8 or 9am

But today I found a Meetup group for annual passholders that meets no earlier than 1:00pm and often later!!!! Just learned that the organizer is a Night Person. He is one of My People. This is a rare thing in the world of organized get-togethers. Any other Night Owl Disneyland fans out there? Join us!

Disneyland DAPS Meetup

This simple thing makes my whole week! :-)

Sleep Debt

This last trip was a rough one. I had the worst sleep hangover one day, to the point where it was probably dangerous for me to be driving. I had fewer than four hours of sleep that night, and if I'd closed my eyes for a second during my two hour commute to an early appointment, I would have fallen asleep. I was also severely nauseated, couldn't eat or even drink coffee (!), and couldn't think straight for my first few awake hours. Changing time zones - although absolutely necessary for my work - does not agree with me. I have to find a solution.

When I can, I try to schedule a "catch up" day when I get home. That's what I'm doing today. Despite total exhaustion, I fell asleep at about 1:30am last night and woke up at 8:45am today. That's pretty normal, and even an earlier wake-up time than I expected. However, by 1:00pm I couldn't keep my eyes open again and I fell asleep on my couch for two more hours. It's almost 4:30 and I'm just starting to feel normal and focused and like maybe I can accomplish something today, although I'm not going to try anything more taxing than a blog post or some reading.

I'm curious to see what time I'll get tired tonight. I stopped taking the melatonin after my super-horrible sleep hangover day on the road because I'm afraid that it caused that awful morning. Getting fewer than four hours of sleep is one thing, feeling like I drank two bottles of tequila the night before is another. The only explanation I have is that it was the melatonin.

I'm debating whether or not to try it again, now that I'm home and have a relatively stable schedule for at least the next 10 days. I'm throwing some ideas around in my head...all I know is that something has to change. It just has to. I can't live like this or I will end up totally useless. I wonder how many homeless people have DSPS???

I Missed My Calling

I'm standing in the emergency room of a hospital surrounded by frantic people. There's a guy on a gurney in front of me, and he's a mess. Bloody, broken, unconscious. I realize that everyone is looking at me and finally a nurse standing to my right says, "Tell us what to do." I look down and I realize that I'm wearing a white coat. Panic rises in my gut and all I can think is, "Why do I have this coat on??? I'm not a doctor!" I'm frozen. The nurse looks up at me, pleading and yet incredibly calm and centered. "If you don't do something, he's going to die." Still, all I can think is, "I've been studying sociology for years! I don't know what to do!!! None of that education and experience is helping me here at all!!!"

Then suddenly, I snap into action. I start doing things and telling other people to do things. I don't know how I know what to do, but somehow it's just there and I do all the right things. As someone wheels the patient away, the nurse puts her hand on my right shoulder. She says, "He's going to be fine. You did it. I'll go tell his family that he's okay and that you'll be right out to talk to them."

My eyes snap open, my heart is pounding, and in a panic my first thought is, "I should have gone to medical school!!"

This is my longest-running Burgermare, recurring regularly for the past 8 or 9 years. It's always the same. If I met the nurse on the street, I would recognize her. She has short brown hair, is in her late 40s or early 50s, and is a little bit shorter than I am. Sometimes she's wearing glasses, sometimes not. Sometimes her scrubs are light green, other times they're light blue. But her words to me are always exactly the same. "Tell us what to do." "He's going to be fine. You did it."

Growing up, my adult role models were not physicians. They were police officers, mechanics, and stay-at-home moms. College wasn't even on my radar until I took a few classes at a community college more for fun than anything else. When the counselor saw my grades and SAT scores, he asked me why I was there instead of at a top university? I had no answer. I hadn't known that was an option for me.

So I went. Later, my professors guided me toward advanced degrees in sociology. I did well in the sciences, but my interest there leaned toward marine biology. I also considered marine bio for graduate school, but ultimately the bulk of my social support was in the field of sociology and so I ended up here.

A few years into grad school, I started working with a professor who specialized in doctor/patient communication. As a research assistant working on his studies, I spent a lot of time in doctors' offices - days, weeks, sometimes months collecting data in the same office. I began to think that I would have made a really good doctor. The more I saw the mundane reality of their working world, the more I was sure that it would have been an excellent choice for me. When I began to learn about eastern medicine, I knew that an integrated practice was my calling.

But I got sidetracked. By that time, I was so deep into a PhD program and so deep in student loan debt that making that leap was impossible. And there was another thing.

Sleep.

Medical school is notoriously a trial of sleep deprivation. I was terrifed that I wouldn't be able to do it. I didn't even know that DSPS as such existed yet, but I knew that I'd been trying to wake up early for my entire life - and I'd failed. Miserably. I'd struggled through the few required 8am classes in grad school, but we were on the quarter system and I always knew that it was only for 10 weeks, and only two days a week. I struggled through my own dissertation research, which involved meeting parole agents before dawn. I struggled through the work that I was doing to support myself, begging for afternoon meetings and shifts.

Could I have struggled through medical school? I don't know. I was afraid to try. The risk seemed too great, since I would be dealing with human lives.

Looking back, I think I could have done it. If I'd changed course the minute that I realized it was a better path for me, I could have made it work somehow. I still do a lot of medical sociology as part of my job, and I've seen doctors who wake up at the crack of dawn and work until 7 or 8pm. However, I've also seen doctors who start at noon, see patients in the evening, and work until after midnight. I'd like to think I could have been one of them. I'd like to think that if I had known them earlier in my life, I would have been able to make it through the Sleep Deprivation Marathon of medical school, knowing that it wouldn't last forever.

This week, a cardiologist told me that sleep deprivation is one of the risk factors he thinks other physicians miss. He believes that regardless of whether it's caused by apnea, insomnia, or a circadian rhythm disorder, it has serious consequences for our health that we don't take seriously enough. I yearned to be on his end of things, helping patients understand that sleep disorders are, in fact, to be taken seriously. From the end that I am on, I was surprised and thrilled that there are doctors out there who do take it very seriously, and who want to help change societal perceptions around sleep.

People still tell me that it's not too late to go to medical school. But it is. Unless I win the lottery, it's too late. I couldn't even really afford graduate school, so I definitely can't afford a second round, even if I could somehow struggle through the early mornings.

What I'm doing now isn't a bad career path either. It works for me, and I continue to learn a lot about the practice of medicine from a sociological standpoint. I'm coming to terms with the fact that DSPS is one of the major factors that shapes my path in life - and that despite my best efforts, it will continue to do so. It's a tough pill to swallow.

What's the Definition of Insanity?

Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result?

I'm insane. I had such high hopes that a different dosage/timing of melatonin would finally work. I am so disappointed.

Yesterday, my hopes were sky high! I took the .3mg dose at 5:30pm and could barely keep my eyes open by 8:30pm. Now, I wasn't entirely thrilled with this development. I was a little annoyed. I had things to do and I was so tired that I couldn't do them. However, I was also more than a bit excited. I'm leaving for Chicago tomorrow and NYC in a couple of weeks, and I thought maybe this was a chance to get on a more easterly schedule to make those trips easier.

So I sucked it up and went to bed. I was fast asleep by 9:00pm. The last time that happened was when I was climbing mountains all day. So far, so good.

In the morning, I opened my eyes. It was light, and I could hear my neighbors starting their day. The woman behind me was setting her kettle on the stove and Superman was bouncing a ball above my head. But it's Saturday...these are the noises that I usually hear around 9:00am on a Saturday. It should be much earlier than that!

I turn my head toward the clock - it's 8:50am. Instead of advancing my sleep cycle, I simply slept for 12 hours. I'm so frustrated that I just want to cry.

I give up. I'm at a loss. I don't know what else to do. I really don't.

Waking Up is not Getting Up

Nobody talks about this.

I'm starting to question what "awake" means, and I'm pretty sure it depends on who you are. Doctors define it one way. Our lark friends define it another. If you're like me, you find that it's virtually impossible to define, and it changes on a day-to-day basis.

So when someone asks me, "Is the melatonin therapy working?" I'm not quite sure how to answer. Waking up on melatonin is a very different experience from waking up naturally, or even from waking up to an alarm clock or to a screaming child upstairs.

Yeah, I'm getting to sleep a bit earlier and for the most part I've adjusted back to 1-9am - as long as I take the melatonin at the right time every single day. There's no room for error, no room for a late night out, no room for forgetting to take it while I'm out in the field or out on the town. I missed one day so far and that night it was right back to a 3:30am bedtime.

Other than that day, I've naturally been "awake" between 8:30 and 9am. Now you might think that's a good thing, that it's a "success." Well...think again.

What is "awake?" What does it feel like? I can't find words to describe it, and as I read through other people's thoughts and feelings about DSPS and listen to my interviews with fellow sufferers, I realize that I'm not the only one who can't quite express myself on this seemingly simple topic. We talk a lot about getting to sleep. We talk a lot about trying to wake up and not being able to wake up - but we don't talk about the process.

I long for those few days in my life that I wake up feeling rested and refreshed and ready to jump right out of bed. I know what that kind of awake feels like, but I can count those days on one hand. That's for my whole life. I think back on each one with awe and wonder and comb my brain for what made that morning different. I still don't have any answers.

When I wake up naturally, the sleep inertia is still pretty bad. Sometimes I wonder if that's a separate issue from DSPS entirely. I'm technically "awake." I know that I'm awake, although my brain is barely registering this fact. My actigraph showed increased tossing and turning movements during those times, sometimes more than an hour before I actually had the energy to get up and out of bed. Usually it's somewhere between half an hour and one hour, where I'm conscious - or more accurately, where I slip in and out of consciousness - but I can't actively tell my body to move in a focused way without a concerted effort. I have to concentrate hard on being awake because if I drop my attention for a second, I'm asleep again. When that happens, I'll sleep for about two more hours, way past my "natural" wake-up time. So I struggle hard in the morning to open my eyes and keep that from happening.

On melatonin, it's worse. Sleep hangovers every day. This morning, I was lying there struggling to get my eyes open. I felt like I was surrounded by a mist or a fog and as I actively focused my attention on becoming more conscious and aware I could actually feel it clearing around my face. I could feel the air hitting my skin, and a tingling feeling on my cheeks. I became aware of my breathing and of noises around me - but I still could not open my eyes. I could not move my arms. Was I "awake?"

As the "mist" cleared, I felt an accompanying sensation in my stomach - the morning nausea that so many of us experience. It felt intimately connected to the clearing - as I became aware of my own face and the fog clearing, I felt the nausea rising. Eventually, I was able to open my eyes and glance at the clock, where I saw it was 8:55am. I'd probably been "awake" in the sense of being able to have conscious thoughts for at least half an hour, but I was nowhere near "awake" in the sense of being able to move and get out of bed and function. I didn't get out of bed until 9:35. I wanted to, desperately, but I just...couldn't.

So is the melatonin really helping? Is it worth it? I downed a full pot of coffee before my 11:00am conference call and got through it just fine. Still, it was two and a half hours after I woke up and I was just beginning to feel something close to normal. Melatonin is a trade-off for me. Yes, I can technically wake up a couple of hours earlier with it than I can without it, but the fog still doesn't clear for those hours. Even after I drag myself out of bed, I'm sleepwalking in a sense, feeling sensations but not processing them, noticing things but not being truly aware of them.

Is that really "awake?" I just don't know.

My Friend Melatonin

Ugh. Desperation.

Winter is the worst time for me. Some people with DSPS say that long summer days cause them to drift, but for me it's the lack of sunlight in the winter that wreaks havoc on my life. My "normal" pattern of sleeping at 1:00 or 2:00 and waking at 9:00 or 10:00 drifts to sleeping at 3:30 or 4:00 and waking as late as 12 or 1:00. These days, I have to set an alarm clock in order to wake up in time for a lunch meeting.

Worse yet, I've been working on a project where morning fieldwork is an absolute necessity, so I've been getting up as early as 5:00 or 6:00 some days. In fact, one day I just didn't bother to sleep at all. By the time the clock hit 4:00, it didn't make any sense to set my alarm clock for 5:15. Why bother? I hoped it would bump my sleep time forward the next day, that I would be so exhausted that I'd crash early, but no such luck. I should know better by now. It's just not that simple.

My greatest fear is for my career. I work for myself now - my former company could no longer employ me full-time once I inconveniently got very sick at a time that was bad for them - so I struck out on my own. I'm sure that early hours for weeks on end had a big part to play in my immune system crashing, but no matter. It crashed, I crashed, and I've spent the last couple of months recovering with herbal therapy and a (mostly) macrobiotic diet. All better now! But I'm done relying on anyone else when it comes to my own health and wellness.

I worked full-time throughout the whole recovery process, and nobody even knew I was that sick until it was over. (Okay, so I slacked on posting here, but something had to give.) I have plenty of work, plenty of clients, and things are going very well. Still, I worry. In addition to early morning fieldwork, crossing time zones is a challenging part of my career and I have to do it regularly. Right now, there is no way around it. Imagine what it's like to have a body that won't fall asleep before 4:00am PST when you have to wake up at 6:00am EST. Do the math. Quite frankly, I don't ever see a viable situation where I can stay in one time zone, keep a stable sleep schedule, and sleep the way my body needs to sleep. That's just not what I do for a living. I travel. It's part of the deal.

And yet, I'm not quite ready to choose between my hard earned career and my health. I keep thinking that there must be a way to have both.

I've always been opposed to long-term melatonin therapy. I hate the thought of having to put something in my body every single day of my life to manipulate its natural processes in order to adjust to artifically constructed social processes. There isn't anything wrong with my sleep pattern. There isn't anything dangerous about it. There isn't anything that hurts me physically when I sleep the way that I am biologically designed to sleep.

But socially? It's devastating. If I don't artifically manipulate my sleep pattern, I could very well lose everything that I have. It doesn't seem right, but it IS. I probably should have become a bartender rather than an ethnographer, but it's too late now. I am what I am.

So it's back to the melatonin. I'm going to have to give it a try again, even though it hasn't worked for me in the past. I've read new information on dosage and timing and I have hope that this time will be different. I'm trying a slightly different dosing schedule. It's only one of a million theories about when you should take it, but hey, it's worth a shot.

I took my first .3mg dose at 7pm tonight, hoping to adjust my sleep pattern back to 1:00 or 2:00am. That's still a rough schedule for work, but I know that expecting an adjustment of more than a couple of hours is setting the bar too high. I'll be happy with what I can get for now. We'll see. If it does work, I will have to take it religiously every day. Circadian rhythm disorders are notoriously hard to manage, and slipping off any program that seems to be working - even for one day - tends to send you all the way back to the beginning. Your body wants to do what it's designed to do, and it will fight to get back to "normal."

I'm so tired of fighting it back. I really am. :-(

When CoffeeBots Turn Evil

Yes folks, it really is different when they're your own.

BBBRRRRWWWRRRRRGGGGRRRRR!!!!!!!!!

I know that sound. I know it well.

It's a coffee grinder. I know that sound. I love that sound! I am not expecting that sound right next to my head jolting me out of a deep sleep at 6:10 in the morning. When the confusion clears, I realize that it's my newest neighbor and my latest alarm clock, like it or not. Trumps the Superman alarm by a couple of hours.

I've mentioned before that I live in a strangely shaped vintage building that's been remodeled to make the back part of my unit into a separate studio apartment. My bedroom is shaped in a way that the only place to put a bed larger than a twin is with the head of it right up against the studio's tiny kitchen. Yes, there's technically a wall in between my head and her sink, but you wouldn't know it with your eyes closed. I sleep in a kitchen, basically. I can hear glasses clinking, microwaves beeping, water running, and cabinet drawers sliding.

And I can hear the Evil CoffeeBot grinding at the crack of dawn.

Now, I understand her dilemma. Grinder Woman is not a morning person either, and she has a "normal" job. She needs her CoffeeBot. I would too! She also understands my dilemma. Being jolted awake from deep sleep hours before my body is ready to wake up does not make me A Happy Neighbor.

What to do?

She gave it her best shot. The day after I banged on the wall with my heaviest wooden Steve Madden sandal, I woke up to a more muffled Grinding of the Beans. She took the CoffeeBot into the other room, put it on the carpet, and smothered it with a pillow. Valiant effort, for sure!

Honestly, I was happy with that effort even though it still woke me up. It wasn't so jarring that I couldn't fall back asleep. It was a decent compromise. But when she apologized and asked me if I could still hear it, I was honest. I hate to deprive anyone of freshly ground coffee at an hour that I don't believe anybody should have to be awake. But even though misery loves company, please don't take me down with you!

I think she's pre-grinding at a decent hour now. Which, by the way, is what I do if I have to get up early. If I forget to pre-set the coffeemaker, I just make it a point to stop at Mr. Coffee's Fine Gourmet Coffee Shop (aka: Polly's Coffee) and get my fix. It's stronger there, anyway.

I love my CoffeeBot. I hate yours. That's just the way it is.