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What happened to that extra hour of sleep?

John Howell
Posted 11/4/14

Did you wake up wondering what time it was?

I did.

The hands on the electric clock read 4:30.

Was it really 3:30 or was it 5:30? I was sure I hadn’t changed the clock, but that’s where …

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This Side Up

What happened to that extra hour of sleep?

Posted

Did you wake up wondering what time it was?

I did.

The hands on the electric clock read 4:30.

Was it really 3:30 or was it 5:30? I was sure I hadn’t changed the clock, but that’s where my certainty ended. Besides, whether it was an hour earlier or an hour later, it was Sunday and I was going to stay in bed either way.

Instead of dozing off and tuning out, I found myself trying to remember that phrase my father used whenever we switched back to Eastern Standard Time. It was something to do with backward and forward. I played around with the words and quickly found it – “Spring forward, fall back.”

I looked at the clock again. So, it was really 3:32. I had just gained an hour to sleep, but what difference did that make now that I was wide-awake?

So, now I had a 25-hour day ahead, a gift of a whole extra hour. I should be grateful. Instead, I thought of “spring ahead,” remembering my annoyance at being robbed of an early morning hour of sunshine to have an extra hour at the end of the day.

It is said that we have internal clocks and that our bodies know when we should get up or go to sleep. Would I be waking up an hour later for the rest of next week until that inner clock was reset?

Some argue it’s simply mind over matter – setting a routine – like those who work the night shift; the reverse of everybody else’s day becomes the norm for them. It must make for difficult days off, not to mention for a family or social life.

When it comes to the change in time, what happens to those on the graveyard shift? Do firefighters and police get an hour of overtime in the fall and lose an hour of pay in the spring?

That’s the manmade schedule, what about the body; can it easily adjust to shifting times?

Jerry Charnley is up early every Tuesday and Thursday to greet the truck from our printer at the Attleboro Sun Chronicle and to start the process of delivering papers to the stores and our carriers. We cross paths later in the day and I’ll frequently get a report.

“It was a good thing I brought the bags,” he’ll say, informing me that it started raining before 4 a.m. Never do I hear, “It was tough to get up this morning” or that he overslept and the papers are late. There’s got to be an internal clock, if not an alarm, for that. Or is he super-conscientious? I imagine it’s the latter in his case.

How does the body know to wake up just minutes before the alarm set the night before? It’s happened to me so many times that I’ve been tempted not to set the alarm, even knowing I’ve got to be up early to catch a flight or get on the road. I still set the alarm, even if I get up before it goes off.

I remember the first time I sailed the Marion to Bermuda race as a crewmember on Leo Clavin’s boat. I couldn’t imagine how I would adjust to the schedule of watches. There were six of us, with two on each watch. The daylight hours from 6 to noon was one watch; from noon to 6 was another. At that point, we switched to four-hour watches. We kept rotating, so that if you did 10 p.m. to 2 a.m., you wouldn’t be back on until the 6 to 10 p.m. Of course, this all came apart when a squall came up and everybody was on deck.

Remarkably, I adjusted quickly. Days fractured by four-hour bites in the night didn’t leave me exhausted. When our watch was over, we’d unsnap our overboard harnesses, drop below to the warm bunks our replacements had just left. It wasn’t long before you were asleep.

I thought of that race Sunday morning and wondered if I could will myself back to sleep. I couldn’t.

Finally, I just gave in. The clock read 5:30, but it was really 4:30. It was time to get up. I had been robbed. I wonder if, had I changed the clock the night before and told myself I was getting an extra hour – the reverse of setting the alarm – I’d feel the same way.

I’ll let you know next year.

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