Some people are morning people and others are not. If you’re listening to this at 7:35 a.m., and it’s making sense, chances are that you are a morning person. However, if you’re like me, nothing you hear before that mid-morning cup of coffee really registers.
Now we’re truly headed into winter, the days are getting shorter and I’m finding it harder and harder to get up in the morning. Born into a family where early rising is regarded as close to godliness, I always thought of lolling in bed when one might be up and accomplishing things as a vice. And my morning sluggishness seemed a sign of moral degeneracy. However, it turns out that, for some people at least, there may be a physiological basis for the inability to rise with the lark.
Many creatures, from algae to fruit flies, exhibit circadian rhythms, biological cycles with a period of roughly 24 hours. Mice and men are no different. We are all creatures adapted to respond to the cycles of light and dark that are our lot on earth. Humans’ internal clocks can be re-set, as we move from time zone to time zone, but as jet leg attests, this isn’t as painless as re-setting a wrist watch. Scientists studying circadian rhythms in humans suggest that, in some cases, there may be a genetic basis for people whose sleep patterns are out of whack with the norm. One Utah family falls asleep at around 7:30 in the evening and wakes up at 4:30 each morning and they have a distinctive genetic make up. So perhaps my morning heavy headedness is just how I’m built.
Genetics or no, most people find it harder to get up in the dark, as the Solstice approaches and the days get shorter. One eloquently miserable sufferer at this time of year was the (seventeenth-century English poet, John Donne, who mourns the earth’s deprivation of light on St. Lucia’s day, the shortest day of the year:
Tis the year’s midnight and it is the day’s, Lucy’s, who scarce seven hours herself unmasks; The sun is spent, and now his flasks send forth light squibs, no constant rays; The world’s whole sap is sunk;
What’s really troubling Donne is the loss of his beloved, without whom he feels deader than a winter landscape:
The general balm the hydroptic earth hath drunk, Whither, as to the bed’s-feet, life is shrunk, Dead and interred; yet all these seem to laugh, Compared to me who am their epitaph.
Modern science might respond to Donne’s complaint with a diagnosis of Seasonal Affective Disorder and prescribe daily baths under a sunlamp, or a sea voyage to Barbados. But that seems too reductionist. Though we help ourselves to the comforts and cures science provides us, we do not believe that science captures everything that is important about human life. Our energy may fluctuate with the changing seasons, but there is more to our emotional life than the response of a gene to sunlight. As Donne asserts:
Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clime, Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.