Strategies for surviving Daylight Not-Savings Time

The dark times (Daylight Not-Savings Time, and winter itself) are upon us. As someone who is deeply nonfunctional without enough sunlight, I have been struggling to wake up at a reasonable time for many weeks.

After nonstop experimentation and many severe occurrences of oversleep – sometimes bleeding into the afternoon – I have finally rigged up a horrifyingly elaborate combo of strategies that, when all used together, get me out of bed before 8am in winter, i.e. 9am in true circadian time. Sometimes I even get up before sunrise!

Sleep hygiene:

• sleep on increments of my natural REM cycle (which I figured out by trial, error, and intense pressure at MIT) for maximum refreshment
• all bright lights off by 8pm, transition to dim orange lights
• no electronic devices after 11pm (books/paper allowed)
• (also worth mentioning strategies I have used for many years, such as filtering blue light out of my screens at night with f.lux, and my many methods of breaking social media addiction and making my devices deeply unengaging)

Wakeup hygiene:

• 3 snoozes with the alarm kept on the other side of the room so I must get out of bed to snooze it again
• vow to forego many hours of soft morning kitty snuggles every morning 😭 (we still get to snuggle for the 3 snoozes)
• sun clock set to gradually brighten half an hour before wakeup time
• stand outside in the sunshine to charge up my sun juice tank as soon as possible after getting up, even before breakfast

My messed up circulation:

• preheat bed with electric blanket
• get fully dressed under the covers if it’s too freezing to get up
• have space heater running for 15-20 minutes just during wakeup time, so it’s not as painful to leave the warm blankets
• immediately put on all my thick winter clothes upon getting up so I don’t accidentally get frozen and lose track of time

Pretty wild how many of these are just compensatory mechanisms for living with technology inside a building without feng shui under capitalism instead of out in nature on a seasonal schedule like my biology intended.

Bonus: avoid losing morning momentum

• Eat a large hot breakfast ASAP
• Keep easy breakfast foods continuously stocked
• The night before, write down a few of the most important things to do the next day